Cut Up Technique: William Burroughs, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, and You

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.  The cut-up has received some mainstream recognition as a way of brainstorming in the “creative industries.” 
 
In the 1950s, Artist Brion Gysin had stacked newspapers on top of each other to protect a tabletop and noticed, upon cutting them with a razor, that the clippings interacted with each other in his head to produce interesting results. He accidentally rediscovered the cut-up method, a technique that can be traced back to at least the 1920s, even to this 1883 poem from Lewis Carroll (who wrote Alice in Wonderland):
 
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.
 
Gysin then introduced his friend, the author William Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel.  Burroughs went on to create a number of experimental novels that drew on text revealed by the cut-up method.

Try it for yourself!

• When you are in a state of not-knowing, awash in uncertainty; when ideas have dried up or just come to a halt, or when there is a blockage in your ability to imagine other possibilities, take out your scissors!  Write out your feelings, capture your dilemma, state your situation.  Then clip the sentences or words apart, toss them in the air or mix them around in a bowl to rearrange them.  Tape them where they land to create a new paragraph.  Read aloud.
• Do this to seek the possibility of an epiphany - a moment of sudden revelation, and to see the world anew.
• Change your perceptions.  The cutup is a way of exposing word and image controls and thus freeing oneself from them, an alteration of consciousness…
• Many new things have been discovered or created by accident.  We cannot produce accidents to order.  You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable, spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.  (Burroughs)
• Instead of cutting up pieces of paper, you may prefer one of these websites that offer text manipulation functionality:

Cut-Up Machine
Text mixing desk
A Cut-Up Generator
 
Sources:
https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/burroughs-cutup.html
https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques/william-s-burroughs-cut-ups.php
https://www.briongysin.com/cut-ups/
https://austinkleon.com/2018/09/18/the-surprisingly-long-history-of-the-cut-up-technique/
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