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Cara Benson on Cutting Dead Weight and Keeping Readers Turning the Page
by Writing Workshops Staff
An hour ago
Cara Benson does not kill her darlings. When a sentence she loves stops earning its keep, she tucks it into a separate document she calls "cuttings" and lets it nap, ready to be woken when the right piece comes along. It is a telling habit for a writer about to teach a seminar on cutting, because Benson's real subject is not deletion for its own sake. It is momentum: the craft of putting words on the page that make a reader hungry for the next ones.
That instinct shapes Leave Out the Part that Readers Tend to Skip, a one-day online seminar built around Elmore Leonard's most famous rule for writing. At WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, Benson guides writers of every level and genre through published examples of forward propulsion, then turns them loose on their own pages. You will leave with three concrete things: a sharper eye for the passages readers tend to skim, revision strategies for cutting that dead weight without losing your voice, and at least one new section of writing generated live during the session.
Benson is the author of the memoir An Armsfull of Birds, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and a winner of the bpNichol Award. Here is what she had to say about overexplaining, fly fishing, and the worst writing advice that sounds smart.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Cara:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Cara. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Cara Benson: Hello writers! I'm Cara. I have a literary memoir newly out that I've been told is also a page turner. I got my MFA in poetry from Goddard College and have been writing, teaching writing, and working one-on-one with writers for decades. I love it—my writer's life. I read, write, talk about both with other writers, and go hiking like my life depends on it (because it does).
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Cara Benson: Not to be redundant with the class title, but that Elmore Leonard advice is such a keeper. It is so liberating to realize that I can just cut the dead weight in my text! I have found that this leaves room for more lively writing to materialize. I can now typically feel when I'm overexplaining something to a reader and gently encourage myself to quit it.
I have spent a lot of time and energy justifying why a particular paragraph or passage should stay in a piece and being afraid of the gaping holes that removing it will leave behind. I still do it – get defensive with myself or with editors about cutting material – but I am much quicker to let it go now. I think practice and experience really do help in this regard.
"It is so liberating to realize that I can just cut the dead weight in my text! I have found that this leaves room for more lively writing to materialize."
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Cara Benson: Students will come away from this class with a strengthened sense of what weighs material down and how to get things moving again.
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.
Cara Benson: "Having turned a somersault round a twig and hung on to it upside down with one foot, swinging the other in the air, also vigorously pulled off leaves and chucked them down, he finally hammered the bark with a loud tattoo then flew off, never again taking the slightest interest in the fledglings or the nesting-hole." Len Howard, Birds As Individuals (pg 16)
Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?
Cara Benson: A story of mine was being workshopped at a prestigious writing institute, so of course I was nervous. There were twelve of us in the room, and I was supposed to remain silent while they discussed my work, with the exception of reading a snippet of the story aloud to kick off the conversation.
I read my portion and sat back in my chair, waiting to be told to get a day job. The room went silent, as it can, and then one woman read a short sentence from my story out loud: "No robe." I'd written it to describe how a judge had shown up unexpectedly to a personal matter for one of the characters who'd appeared in his courtroom. She was blown away. "You can just do that? Say it so simply?" I'll never forget her reaction, and this was decades ago! Clearly, that was a revelation for her. And it's something I still remind myself of when I'm about to get bogged down. "No robe," I'll say to myself.
I never did anything with that story – it needed work – but it proved useful for at least two writers.
Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.
Cara Benson: I'm always obsessed with the rhythm of sentences, the way our words can move across the page like a fly fishing line released from the rod then drawn back, only to be cast out across the water again. Or – plunk. Drop it like an anchor.
Cara can teach you to feel that rhythm in your own sentences: when to cast the line out, and when to let it drop like an anchor.
Enroll in Leave Out the Part →Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Cara Benson: The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender. Everyone should read this book. I think the title says it all, but writers especially will benefit from understanding how big tech is trying to make it seem that AI taking over our lives and vocations is inevitable, when that is not the case.
Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Cara Benson: "Kill your darlings." Which actually seems like I would love that, having written about cutting material as a liberatory practice. But my darlings? I don't kill them. I tuck them carefully into another document I call "cuttings" and leave them there for a nap. I may need to wake them up later, whether for the piece I took them from or for something else down the road.
(Full disclosure: I was just interviewed for a site called Dead Darlings. And I even used that phrase on some of the material that I cut from my memoir! Writing is also about becoming comfortable with contradictions, is it not?)
"But my darlings? I don't kill them. I tuck them carefully into another document I call "cuttings" and leave them there for a nap."
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Cara Benson: I don't know that other writing classes don't say this, but it can seem unpopular to say that there are zero guarantees of being satisfied with a writing life. Writing itself is a lot of work. It can be lonely and bring little reward. You can struggle to pay the bills from the money you might bring in from the actual writing. That said, there's nothing else I'd rather do with my life than be a writer.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Cara Benson: I was a guarded, crusty teenager when I read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. It wrecked me. A few years later when I moved to New York City to go to film school, I went on a huge Hemingway tear. I finished A Farewell to Arms in my tiny bathroom because that was the brightest light in the apartment and my eyes were failing from the strain of reading for hours straight, literally not able to put the book down. I know he's become problematic for a variety of good reasons. But having a partner who also died by suicide, I want to give Hem some grace. And the man sure could write.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?
Cara Benson: I'm a big fan of using the Robert Lowell line "Yet why not say what happened?" to encourage writers to let go of feeling like they need to be writerly, to be someone other than who they are.
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Cara Benson: I have no clue what would surprise them! We're all so unique.
That last line is the whole philosophy in miniature. Benson's approach comes down to trust: trust that your reader is smart, that your darlings can wait in their nap drawer, and that the strongest writing happens when you stop performing and simply say what happened. If you want to learn how to spot the parts readers skip and replace them with momentum, this is your seminar. Spend one evening with Cara Benson this July and walk away with sharper instincts, practical revision tools, and new pages of your own. Your reader is waiting. Do not make them skim.
One night, one Zoom room, and a working method for cutting the dead weight and keeping readers turning the page. Join Cara on Tuesday, July 21.
Save Your Seat in Leave Out the Part →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
