Cut It Out!

Celebrating National Poetry month, guest blogger, Carol Guess

Back in the old days, when I wrote on a typewriter, my desk resembled a seamstress’s shop. Scissors, scraps of paper, white paint, black ribbon, and colored pencils littered the table supporting my noisy machine. Errors were errors; there was no going back, just the delicate process of daubing white smudges over the uncontrollable alphabet.

There was a physicality to writing back then that I miss today. My revision process began with my hands. I’d handwrite rough drafts, type them, then cut pages into lines and move them around on the floor.

I’m not a Luddite; I love my computer, and often find myself talking to it in the same tone of voice I use with my companion animals. (This is apparently not uncommon.) But once I owned a computer, I stopped cutting up my work, and began a different, more streamlined, process of computer cut-and-paste.

I hadn’t realized how much my revision process was indebted to quilting poems together until I was revising an unruly manuscript for the umpteenth time. This poetry manuscript had been circulating for two years, and rejected by dozens of publishers. I knew the individual poems were strong, but something was off about the manuscript as a whole.

After a particularly humiliating rejection, I printed out the manuscript, as well as rough drafts of failed projects: an unfinished novel, a stalled short story, fragments, poems I’d deleted from earlier drafts. Then I cut everything – hundreds of pages – into paragraphs and lines.

I spent three months puzzling these scraps of paper on the floor, slowly creating an entirely new manuscript. At some point I realized that the manuscript looked choppy, so I pushed everything into short prose blocks, taking out line breaks and white space. After a while even titles seemed distracting, so I took those out, too, using a few of my favorites as lines within individual poems.

Like most writers, I’m fond of particular images; I have recurring obsessions and a recurring muse. As I cut away excess words, these themes stood out, and the order of the manuscript began to feel inevitable. It now had a narrative arc and linked characters, fictitiously constructed through painstaking revision. Tinderbox Lawn is perhaps my favorite of my own books, but it only became a book when I had the courage to dismantle it.

Go get your scissors. Print out that unwieldy manuscript, poems that aren’t working or sound stale. While you’re at it, print out unfinished stories and essays cluttering your desk. Now cut up this material. Move the puzzle pieces around until you see and hear the hidden pages, pages of a manuscript buried underneath the burden of its own words.

Carol Guess is the author of seven books of poetry and prose, as well as three forthcoming collections: Doll Studies: Forensics (Black Lawrence Press), Darling Endangered (Brooklyn Arts Press), and Willful Machine (PS Publishing). Find out more: www.carolguess.blogspot.com.

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