Cutting is good, writing is better – 02/21/2024 – Sérgio Rodrigues

“Writing is cutting words.” Every now and then I come across the advice, which has become a huge cliché, attributed on the internet to Carlos Drummond de Andrade — an ancient legend. No, the greatest Brazilian poet did not say the phrase. If he said so, he came to regret echoing a banality in this way, as in a conversation with Armando Nogueira he denied being its author.

The undeniable cliché status does not mean that the advice is wrong in any way. Partial and overrated, without a doubt. Firstly, because it leaves out of the picture the fact —obvious, but not trivial—that before cutting words you need to… write them.

Furthermore, there are those more serious textual cases, unfortunately common on the desk of the best scribes, in which any attempt at salvation through vocabulary reduction would be equivalent to treating an open fracture with merthiolate and a band-aid.

I remember once seeing an interview with Milton Hatoum in which he put in its place, with class, the sentence made from cutting words as the essence of good writing.

Famous for the slowness with which he prepares his fiction books, which are of the few and good type, the author of “Dois Irmãos” was faced with the following question: was it true that he spent years on end polishing his texts before considering them ready for publication? the publication?

I’m going to paraphrase Hatoum’s answer from memory, as I couldn’t locate the video on the online market (was it cut?). Yes, it was true that he sometimes deleted words, but there were many occasions when he had to add new words as well.

A writer’s job, he explained, is to refine the text’s focus on the conflicts its characters struggle with. If there are cases in which you get there by subtraction, it is no less common that to obtain the same effect it is necessary to write more — another scene, another dialogue, another interior monologue.

In other words (these are mine and not from the Amazonian author): less is not always more; Sometimes, less is just less. Of course, this doesn’t mean that verbose vomiting is a good idea.

The emphasis on leanness is often more useful in the narrow scope of the sentence and paragraph than in the broad arc of the story. It is part of the writing routine to eliminate the fats, burrs, hiccups and automatisms that almost always accompany the first version of a text when it arrives on the page.

The most interesting thing is that not only what is evidently left over, due to redundancy, cacophony or insipidity, deserves to be cleaned up; There is something more mysterious about the discipline of downsizing.

I confess that I don’t remember a single text of mine that, considered finished and then needing to be cut —with great pain— in order to obey the tyranny of space in force in the paper press, didn’t end up being better. How is it possible?

It is important to make it clear that I am talking about journalistic texts. If it is clear that literature can also benefit from cuts, in this case rewriting, the soul of the business, requires more care.

Finally, “Drummond’s” clichéd advice has a problem that we could call intrinsic: it contradicts the law that it promulgates in the very act of promulgating it.

Who will deny that “Writing is cutting words” is a phrase that can be improved, becoming more essential and vibrant, without losing any information, with the simple cutting of a word? “Writing is cutting.” No further.

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