#69: Write Cut Rewrite exhibition

 

Write Cut Rewrite exhibition
Photo: Ian Wallman

‘Kill your darlings,’ enjoined Stephen King, advising writers to cut words which may have taken hours to develop. This exhibition of writers’ editing processes at the Bodleian’s Weston Library gives evidence of such murder through manuscripts, jottings and notebooks.

So what ‘darlings’ do we see here? Opening the exhibition is a twelfth century manuscript, The Ormulum, commenting on the Bible in early English. This is a literal cut and paste – one page trimmed to a third of its size, overlying another with almost every line heavily scored through. ‘For a notebook which is almost a thousand years old it looks surprisingly modern because it features so many crossed-out passages,’ says the label.

Yet why do crossed out passages look more modern than the finished product? Because they show a common human impulse to revise, with its hesitancy and changes of mind, in a way that the fixed final text does not? Doodles in Shelley’s notebook, displayed here, also seem strangely modern. Perhaps it is use of the pen rather than fixed type which makes them seem more human?

Also included are three wonderful sheets of witty lines kept in reserve by Raymond Chandler for his detective novels, ticked off in pencil after being used. Unused was ‘I left her with her virtue intact, but it was a struggle. She nearly won.’ I can imagine that in The Big Sleep. Another aide memoire is Philip Pullman’s list of Oxford colleges and the names he called them in his children’s books, e.g. All Souls becomes St Scholastica.

A list of witty lines kept by Raymond Chandler

Editing materials are important. Unlined notebooks show poet’s Alice Oswald swirling coloured sketches which she then tries to translate into words. Le Carré‘s drafts are handwritten, then typed up, then the typescript is cut up again and stapled between further handwritten parts. Fans of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy can read a highly edited, handwritten opening in which Ricki Tarr tracks down fellow ex-spy Jim Prideaux to a school where he is teaching. But in the final book, they never meet. This is one ‘darling’ which was killed.

Sometimes little is edited – Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism has one A3 sized manuscript page with just one correction. Were his robust rhyming couplets a confident guide, so little revision was needed? One can also see him underlining words (which would be italicised in a modern addition), bringing out the oral qualities, like a musical score.

Pope's Essay on Criticism – left-hand page corrected, right hand page hardly at all

Pope's Essay on Criticism – left-hand page corrected, right hand page hardly at all

Electronic editing

And what of today’s untraceable electronic editing? This is covered by a digital display with ‘Cuttings’, a poem by Fanny Choi, where one can track the electronic editing process – ‘every keystroke, every pause, every typo, every half-developed idea later abandoned’.

Before going to the exhibition I had wondered whether a museum, which must preserve objects and halt time, could convey any of the fluency or even urgency of the editing process. It turns out that it can.

Corrections to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

‘Write Cut Rewrite’ is at the Weston Library, Oxford, until 5 January 2025.