Review by Rebecca Reynolds of "Write Cut Rewrite" Exhibition at the Weston Library

"Kill your darlings," enjoined Stephen King, talking of the need for 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, marked off in pencil after being used. Unused was "I left her with her virtue intact, but it was a struggle. She nearly won."

Editing materials are important. Unlined notebooks allow Alice Oswald to do the 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.

Sometimes little is edited – Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism has one large manuscript page with just one correction. Were the robust rhyming couplets a confident guide, so little revision was needed?

And what of today’s untraceable electronic editing? A digital display shows "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." This is a fascinating exhibition with an excellent mixture of writers.

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

Photo by Ian Wallman

About the reviewer
Rebecca Reynolds has worked as an English Language teacher and as a museum educator at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Reading University museums. She completed a Research Masters in Literature at Liverpool University in 2023 and is considering undertaking a PhD in either Literature or Creative Writing. She blogs here.