cut up method creative writing

A Brief Explanation of the Cut-up Technique

The Cut-Up technique is to writing what collage is to visual art. Its recent use was pioneered by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and later David Bowie used it during the 1970s. Nowadays writers like Jeff Noon use it.

The basic method is simple — write a piece of work, cut the paper up with scissors, and rearrange the pieces to form new phrases and new meanings.

The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit … had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors. William S. Burroughs, RE/SEARCH #4/5, 1982

Obviously, using this method can and will produce results which you’re not happy with, but the surprising thing is how many of the results are successful.

Sometimes all that is needed is a quick read through of the results, adding punctuation and deleting the occasional word to produce the finished results.

Purists might complain about editing the cut-up text, but this process is a tool which you can choose to use at any stage in the process of writing.

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Burroughs and Bowie- Using The Cut Up Technique. Part 2

The Cut-Up technique- in which words, or fragments of ideas are combined in random combinations- has a long artistic tradition. It is popularly associated with William Burroughs (although it can be traced to the Dadaist artistic movement, who used surprise, shock and absurdity to confront the audience in new and often frightening ways). The cut-up and the ‘fold-in’ are the two most famous techniques:

• ‘Cut-up’ is a technique in which the person uses a finished (and linear) text and cuts it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text.
• ‘Fold-in’ is the technique of taking two sheets of linear text, folding each sheet in half vertically and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page. This is the technique most associate with Burroughs.

‘(Hallo) Spaceboy, You’re sleepy now Your silhouette is so stationary You’re released but your custody calls’

As Bowie acknowledged, you don’t have to stick to the outcome that a random program offers. He talked of ‘imbuing’ the outcome with emotions to enhance it’ and added- ‘The key is there is something new and fresh and unexpected to respond to.’ I think these techniques have real merit, for finding hidden depths in our ideas. But they beg the question- who writes the story? Is it us, the author, or is it fate?

2 thoughts on “ Burroughs and Bowie- Using The Cut Up Technique. Part 2 ”

Are there any case studies about the cut-up method, or are there any writings by other academics who’ve discussed or examined this technique for academic purposes? I have the original and out of print book by Brion Gyson and William S. Burroughs ‘Here to Go’ in which they discuss it; I’ve now seen videos and heard recordings of Burroughs and David Bowie individually discussing it; but I’ve not seen much more beyond blog type posts and a few journalist give a description much like what is described on this page. Is there anyone citable who makes a living academically who has dealt with this technique through the consideration of some kind of academic filter/rubric?

AI can be the upmost tecnology of reazon. we need to understand better how to access the unconscious to make better use AI in em arts. Like cut-up or meditation.

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“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out,” William S. Burroughs stated about the cut-up technique. This method of writing poetry uses the cutting and layering of pieces of printed text to reveal meaningful insight. This week, take a printed work of writing and tear it apart. Then reassemble it in a fashion that communicates something deeper. With some clever rearranging, these cut-up words and phrases will reveal their own message.  

BluRoseMD replied on March 6, 2015 - 1:52pm Permalink

Newspaper Poetry

https://proudmommaofgirls.wordpress.com/2015/03/06/newspaper-poetry/

William S. Burroughs’ Guide to Absurd Writing

Words by Lauren Palmer

Published on November 25th, 2014

There’s just something about the way the type looks when it’s made using a typewriter. The edges of the characters are slightly fuzzy. Sometimes, they don’t quite line up as they should; a single letter can look like it’s resting on an invisible platform, peering out over the rest of the sentence. And you can tell how much effort was exerted from the amount of ink that’s deposited on the page. Allowances are made for these irregularities. You can see the human behind the machine.

As someone who can (almost) remember life before digital publishing, observing a typed letter or manuscript makes me more than a bit nostalgic. Using a typewriter was work : pages of paper to load, ribbons to change, components to oil. Whether it’s done by hand, computer, or typewriter, any kind of act of writing is manual, but the clanking of keys, pushing the platen (that’s the cylindrical roll) back into place—these steps make a user hyper-aware of a typewriter’s manual operation.

That American writer William S. Burroughs used a typewriter to compose his work isn’t surprising, but the fact that he then carved up the pages as part of his creative process is, and the results are so compelling that NYC art space Boo-Hooray (in collaboration with Emory University) has brought a selection of the writer’s radical letters, interviews, books, and records together in the new exhibition, “ Cut-Ups: William S. Burroughs 1914-2014 .”

Employing the method his friend Brion Gysin discovered while preparing mounts for paintings, Burroughs cut up his manuscripts and rearranged the sections to produce new work. These text collages built upon ideas of temporal and narrative disruption from the Dadaists, enacting different readings of a single text.

Burroughs’ wasn’t precious about his method. “Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-ups,” he said. “It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here, right now.”

He even included instructions: “Slice page into three columns, label them A, B, and C. Rearrange columns into assorted positions. The resultant prose reads like stream of consciousness, forcing the reader to let go of conventional ideas of proper literary form.”

After applying the method, Burroughs’ work takes on a nonsensical quality. The meaning becomes blurred—or is missing entirely. Yes, anyone can make cut-ups, but the challenge is letting go of the tendency to order what’s been written first and to simply revel in the absurdity. It’s also a sure-fire way for a writer to go beyond the bookstore and get their written work into a gallery—how many other authors can claim that?

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By CTS Ryan

The cut-up method is best-known as a literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text.

Pictured: William Burroughs rearranging text cut-ups, 1983

What is the cut up technique?

In the article ‘The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin’ (1961 / 1978), author William Burroughs explains how to cut-up a text:

“The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle.

“You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four.

“Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different—cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise—in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite.”

The “origin story”

It’s said that, in the 1950s, the artist Brion Gysin was using layers of newspapers as a mat to protect a tabletop from being scratched while he cut other papers with a razor blade.

Gysin: “… I had a number of sheets of newspaper, and I took a Stanley blade and cut through them, and little bits and pieces looked so amusing to me that I started jiggling them around as one would in a collage.” Gysin had accidentally rediscovered the cut-up method, a technique that can be traced back to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s.

Gysin then introduced his friend, the author William Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel.

History of the cut-up technique

Most histories of the cut-up technique tend to focus on its emergence from the arts. For example, William Burroughs mentions surrealism in the “The Cut Up Method” (1963):

“At a surrealist rally in the 1920’s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theatre. Andre Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut ups on the Freudian couch.”

Writer Austin Kleon tracked cut-up ideas back to 1883, and Lewis Carroll’s ““Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur” (a reversal of the Latin adage, poeta nascitur non fit, or, “a poet is born, not made”)”:

“For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits, and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes No difference at all.”

But: There is another history of the cut-up technique waiting to be written; one that explores how it also emerged from advances in information technology. Burroughs’ grandfather, William Seward Burroughs, famously perfected the adding machine – a machine for calculations that previously were completed manually.

Pictured: Burroughs adding and listing machine, 1912

The adding machine is one of the important late 19th Century information technology inventions, alongside the telephone and the filing cabinet.

Craig Robertson, associate professor of media and communication studies, argues that ordering paper at the document level and storing it in a filing cabinet changed our relationship to information, that people came to envision information itself as a discrete thing, “Information, grasped as individual pieces of paper, became malleable, both in its physical shape and its contents.”

Robertson locates the filing cabinet in the rise of scientific management, the logic of bureaucracy.

“…and what I have come to call granular certainty, or the drive to break more and more of life and its everyday routines into discrete, observable, and manageable parts.”

Joanna Grisinger, writing about Robertson’s ideas: “Robertson focuses on how the specific mechanics of the file storage process—office workers collecting loose documents in a file folder, securely storing the folder in a vertical cabinet, and later quickly finding that folder among dozens or hundreds of other ones—contributed not just to business efficiency but also to a conception of “information” as many discrete units rather than as a body of knowledge.”

In more recent history, it’s William Burroughs who’s now commonly associated with the cut-up technique. Burroughs used it to write a number of critically acclaimed novels, and talked about the process to the media.

Curator Laura Hoptman: “Burroughs tried his entire life to tell people that Gysin invented the cut-up, but because Burroughs ran with the idea, producing numerous novels, he is the one credited. It’s important to think of Gysin as an idea generator above all.”

When Burroughs encouraged Gysin to further develop the technique, Hoptman says Gysin dismissed his friend’s suggestions because he was more interested in his next venture, his Dream Machine kinetic sculpture.

Examples of cut ups

‘First Cut-Ups,’ ‘Minutes to Go,’ and ‘Cut Me Up Brion Gysin’ were among Gysin’s first experiments with the cut-up technique of writing.

Burroughs wrote in ‘The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin’: “In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose.”

Pictured: An extract from Minutes To Go

Burroughs went on to create a number of experimental novels that drew on text revealed by the cut-up method. His Nova Trilogy (or The Cut-up Trilogy) books are: The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964).

In 1977, Burroughs and Gysin published The Third Mind, a collection of cut-up writings and essays on the form.

Pictured: A page from The Third Mind book of cut ups

Pictured: Cut-Ups Self-Explained from The Third Mind book 1978

Cutting up the movies

As well as printed media, Gysin and Burroughs also applied the technique to audio and film recordings.

The short film, The Cut-Ups opened in London in 1967. It features cut up footage of Burroughs and Gysin. Cinematography by Antony Balch, screenplay by Burroughs.

When the film first premiered, reportedly, members of the audience said it made them feel ill.

The film is non-linear. But many would describe it as deranged. When narrative is absent, the viewer has to create their own structure. The power of Burroughs and Gysin’s cut up works are entangled with their cut-up lives, and the myths of their cut-up lives. It’s said they were using a lot of drugs. Cut-up people producing cut-up artefacts.

Why did Burroughs and Gysin use cut ups?

Reasons include:

• Insight.  In 1950s United States, the media industry, as now, often normalised consumerism and encouraged conformity. Cut ups offered a way in, a method Gysin and Burroughs could use to examine the mass media and the social norms it promoted.
• Innovation.  In “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin”, Burroughs explains: “The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit— all writing is in fact cut ups.”
• Spontaneity.  Burroughs: “You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.”
• Their belief in a magickal universe.
• Divination.  Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, “When you cut into the present the future leaks out.” “When you experiment with Cut-Ups over a period of time you find that some of the Cut-Ups in re-arranged texts seemed to refer to future events. I cut-up an article written by John-Paul Getty and got, “It’s a bad thing to sue your own father.” This was a re-arrangement and wasn’t in the original text, and a year later, one of his sons did sue him.”Another example. Some say William Burroughs predicted social media in his 1961 cut-up novel The Soft Machine:”Posted everywhere on street corners the idiot irresponsibles twitter supersonic approval, repeating slogans, giggling, dancing…”

Why are cut-ups still being talked about?

• Their history. The lure of the counter-culture.
• Celebrity connections. The cut-up method has been adopted by celebrated musicians such as David Bowie when creating lyrics. David Bowie: “What I’ve used it for more than anything else is igniting anything that might be in my imagination. And you can often come up with very interesting attitudes to look into.” Musician Iggy Pop, from the Burroughs 101 radio documentary: “How different is the cut up method really from what they used to call the magic eight ball? Do you know what that is? Or a Ouija board. It’s a Ouija board for art people, is what it is. Language is a virus. Language is a virus. Virus is a language human scummery control is a virus.”
• Acknowledgment by academia. The cut up is seen as worthy of study.
• Corporate endorsement. The cut-up has received some mainstream recognition as a brainstorming technique in the “creative industries”, although its history is often overlooked.
• They still resonate. They mean something, and / or still intrigue many people.

And… why do cut-ups still resonate?

• They’re entertaining.  The idea of hidden meaning being revealed appeals to many.
• The promise of epiphany.  Us humans love a moment of sudden revelation, to see the world anew.
• Prescience.  The cut up can be interpreted as a response to the early tremors of the digital media earthquake. When Burroughs and Gysin were cutting up the early ’60s, information technologist Ted Nelson was developing early models of hypertext systems that used links and nonsequential writing, reconfiguring traditional information formats.”Art as radar acts as an ‘early alarm system,’ as it were,” wrote Marshall McLuhan in ‘Understanding Media’, “enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them.”
• We recognise them in digital media.  They can be seen as a visualisation of the remixing and re-presentation of information that’s now common in digital media, especially the web.

Pictured: Brion Gysin “inventor” of the modern cut up, being cut-up by Twitter

• The method is easy to access, yet can route-around hierarchy and authority, rather like the Web. Gysin: “Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint… lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message. “Do it for yourself. Use any system which suggests itself to you. Take your own words or the words said to be “the very own words” of anyone else living or dead. You’ll soon see that words don’t belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody else can make them gush into action.”
• Because they’re all around us. On our screens and on the street, in our heads and at our feet. Burroughs talking to John Walters in 1982: “these juxtapositions between what you’re thinking if you’re walking down the street and what you see, that is exactly what I was introducing. ”You see, life is a cut up. Every time you walk down the street or look out of the window your consciousness is cut by random factors and then you begin to realise that they are not so random, that this is saying something to you.”

Cut up technique generators: try it for yourself

• Cut-Up Machine
• Text mixing desk
• A Cut-Up Generator

John Walters  interviews  William Burroughs. BBC Radio 1. Broadcast: 11 / 11 / 1982.

The Prophetic Legacy  of Brion Gysin

The Cut Up  Method

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How David Bowie Used William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unforgettable Lyrics

in Art , Music | May 7th, 2019 5 Comments

Why do David Bowie’s songs sounds like no one else’s, right down to the words that turn up in their lyrics? Nov­el­ist Rick Moody, who has been privy more than once to details of Bowie’s song­writ­ing process, wrote about it in his col­umn on Bowie’s 2013 album  The Next Day : “David Bowie mis­di­rects auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion, often, by lay­ing claim to reportage and fic­tion as song­writ­ing method­olo­gies, and he cloaks him­self, fur­ther, in the cut-up.” Any­one acquaint­ed with the work of William S. Bur­roughs will rec­og­nize that term, which refers to the process of lit­er­al­ly cut­ting up exist­ing texts in order to gen­er­ate new mean­ings with their rearranged pieces.

You can see how Bowie per­formed his cut-up com­po­si­tion in the 1970s in the clip above , in which he demon­strates and explains his ver­sion of the method. “What I’ve used it for, more than any­thing else, is ignit­ing any­thing that might be in my imag­i­na­tion,” he says. “It can often come up with very inter­est­ing atti­tudes to look into. I tried doing it with diaries and things, and I was find­ing out amaz­ing things about me and what I’d done and where I was going.”

As dra­mat­i­cal­ly as Bowie’s self-pre­sen­ta­tion and musi­cal style would change over the sub­se­quent decades, the cut-up method would only become more fruit­ful for him. When Moody inter­viewed Bowie in 1995, Bowie “observed that he worked some­where near to half the time as a lyri­cist in the cut-up tra­di­tion, and he even had, in those days, a com­put­er pro­gram that would eat the words and spit them back in some less ref­er­en­tial form.” Bowie describes how he uses that com­put­er pro­gram in the 1997 BBC clip above : “I’ll take arti­cles out of news­pa­pers, poems that I’ve writ­ten, pieces of oth­er peo­ple’s books, and put them all into this lit­tle ware­house, this con­tain­er of infor­ma­tion, and then hit the ran­dom but­ton and it will ran­dom­ize every­thing.”

Amid that ran­dom­ness, Bowie says, “if you put three or four dis­so­ci­at­ed ideas togeth­er and cre­ate awk­ward rela­tion­ships with them, the uncon­scious intel­li­gence that comes from those pair­ings is real­ly quite star­tling some­times, quite provoca­tive.” Six­teen years lat­er, Moody received a star­tling and provoca­tive set of seem­ing­ly dis­so­ci­at­ed words in response to a long-shot e‑mail he sent to Bowie in search of a deep­er under­stand­ing of  The Next Day . It ran as fol­lows, with no fur­ther com­ment from the artist:

Indul­gences

Intim­i­da­tion

Trans­fer­ence

Iso­la­tion

Dom­i­na­tion

Indif­fer­ence

Reset­tle­ment

Manip­u­late

Come­up­pance

Mys­ti­fi­ca­tion

“ Chthon­ic is a great word,” Moody writes, “and all art that is  chthon­ic  is excel­lent art.” He adds that “when Bowie says  chthon­ic,  it’s obvi­ous he’s not just aspir­ing to  chthon­ic,  the album has death in near­ly every song” — a theme that would wax on Bowie’s next and final album , though  The Next Day came after an emer­gency heart surgery end­ed his live-per­for­mance career. “ C hthon­ic  has per­son­al heft behind it, as does  iso­la­tion,  which is a word a lot like  Iso­lar,  the name of David Bowie’s man­age­ment enter­prise.” Moody scru­ti­nizes each and every one of the words on the list in his col­umn, find­ing mean­ings in them that, what­ev­er their involve­ment in the cre­ation of the album, very much enrich its lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence. By using tech­niques like the cut-up method, Bowie ensured that his songs can nev­er tru­ly be inter­pret­ed — not that it will keep gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of intrigued lis­ten­ers from try­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

How Jim Jar­musch Gets Cre­ative Ideas from William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method and Bri­an Eno’s Oblique Strate­gies

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums

Based in Seoul,  Col­in Mar­shall  writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book  The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les  and the video series  The City in Cin­e­ma . Fol­low him on Twit­ter at  @colinmarshall  or on  Face­boo k .

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (5) |

Related posts:

Comments (5), 5 comments so far.

FYI, you’re get­ting it half right- read Bur­roughs giv­ing prop­er cred­it to the orig­i­na­tors of “his” tech­nique: http://www.ubu.com/papers/burroughs_gysin.html

Thanks for this!

There is no ‘tech­nique. Any­one can do it or could do it before any­one pre­sent­ed it as such. It rarely pro­duces ‘mean­ing’. Occa­sion­al inter­est­ing jux­ta­po­si­tions are not mean­ing in any deep sense. Any­way Bowie used it rather dif­fer­ent­ly than Bur­roughs who gen­er­al­ly played around with columns of text rather than indi­vid­ual lines. It is real­ly hard­ly worth writ­ing about. Lots of pop lyrics are just ran­dom inco­her­ent ideas which might as well have been ‘cut up’ any­way.

Hey, your right and wrong, while the words may not make much sense or mean­ing the real skill or tech­nique is putting them togeth­er to make a mas­ter­piece like David Bowie did.

It’s very arguable that Bowie’s best lyrics were pro­duced using this tech­nique. He didn’t start using it until 1974, so Hunky Dory, Zig­gy Star­dust, Man Who Sold The World, and Alladin Sane were all writ­ten in the con­ven­tion­al song­writ­ing man­ner. For my mon­ey these albums over­all have more mem­o­rable lyrics than the mate­r­i­al from Young Amer­i­cans on.

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