Title: Write Cut Rewrite

Author: Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon

Reviewer: Fabian Amuso

Audience: Stage 5 & 6

“Cutting and pasting often happens within a single work, moving a verse, a stanza, a sentence, a paragraph or even a chapter to another place.” (Page 151)

Authors Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon explore how writers not only have to write but also cut and rewrite their works before publication.

Featured are actual extracts from manuscripts held by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. The reader will explore and be guided through how and why changes were made to their works, whether by the writer or the publisher. Questions will be asked as one reads through - What if the change had not been made, and how would that have impacted the storyline or its meaning? Would sticking to a particular word, phrase, or sentence in an earlier draft have enhanced the work, or was the final product the perfect outcome?

Being a history teacher and a teacher librarian, along with my interest in literature and media, I applied a “never judge a book by its cover” approach to reading this book. The cover did appear exciting when initially seeing it, but once opened and began to read through Hulle and Nixon’s outline of the editing processes involved in literary and poetic works, along with its supporting extracts from manuscripts, I was left amazed at what great writers had done to master their written works, which would go onto make history themselves. By the end, I had taken a “behind the scenes” tour of the production of great literature.

In the classroom, this book is best suited to students undertaking Stage 5 and Stage 6 English as it provides useful insights into the writing process. For the leisure reader, it is recommended for those who wish to gain insight into the process of producing literary works, but also for those who would enjoy gaining an insight into how authors have composed their works in recent centuries.