The Hardest Part of Fighting Shadows Is the Cut List

Everybody asks what is going in the book.

Nobody asks what is coming out. That is the part that takes the time.

I have written about why I am writing Fighting Shadows, and I have written about how, which is in order, from records, no jumping ahead to the good parts. Both of those are about what goes on the page. This one is about the other file. The one that has more words in it than the manuscript does.

The cut list.

Here is what is on it, and why.

One. If I cannot source it, it is out.

This is the rule that costs the most, so I will start there.

There are things I am confident happened. I remember them. I could describe the room. I could tell you how it felt. And if I cannot put a document, a date, or my own direct firsthand experience behind it, it does not go in the book.

Not softened. Not hedged with "I was told that." Out.

That hurts, because some of the strongest material I have is material I cannot prove, and I know exactly how good it would read. But the second I put one unprovable thing in there, every provable thing next to it gets dragged down with it. A record is only worth what its weakest line is worth. One person finds one claim I cannot back and the whole book becomes a story instead of a record.

I am not willing to trade the record for a better chapter.

Two. If it is not mine to tell, it is out.

I was not alone in any of this. There were men beside me with their own versions, their own families, their own damage.

I can tell you what I saw. I can tell you what it did to me. I cannot tell you what it did to them, and I am not going to try, because writing somebody else's interior life is just making things up with extra steps.

More than that, it is not mine to spend. A man's worst stretch belongs to him. If he wants to write it down, he can write it down. It is not my material because I happened to be standing there.

So there are whole scenes I lived through that will not appear, because the meaning of the scene belonged to somebody else.

Three. Private people stay private.

There are people in this story who never chose a public life. They were not officials. They were not out front. They got pulled into something because of proximity, and they have been quietly trying to get out from under it ever since.

They do not get named. Not in a good light, not in a bad one, not in a footnote.

I know how it feels to have your name typed by somebody who does not know you. I am not doing that to a person who has no platform to answer with.

Four. My children are not material.

They did not choose the last name. They did not choose the years.

They show up in the book the way weather shows up, as a fact of my life that shaped every decision I made. They do not show up as characters with dialogue and scenes and things to reveal. There is no chapter where I get sympathy by putting a kid on the page.

Five. Anger writes well and ages badly.

I write at odd hours. Some of those hours I am not fit to be trusted with a keyboard.

So there is a separate file. Everything that comes out hot goes straight into it, and I do not delete it, because the heat is usually pointing at something real. I just do not let it near the manuscript that night.

Then I read it in daylight, at least a week later. Almost none of it survives.

What survives is never the paragraph I was proud of. It is one plain sentence buried in the middle of it, and the plain sentence is stronger than the whole angry page ever was. The anger was the wrapper. The fact was the thing.

The test I run on anything I am not sure about

Would I still print this if it made me look worse?

If the answer is no, then I am not documenting, I am arguing. Arguing is fine. Arguing is just not what this book is for. There are plenty of places to argue and I use them.

The corollary matters just as much. If a thing makes me look bad and I can source it, it stays in. The times I was wrong. The times I was scared and did nothing. The decisions that made sense at two in the morning and look like nothing but ego in the daylight.

A record that only makes the author look good is not a record. It is a brochure.

Why the cut list is actually the book

Here is the thing I did not expect when I started.

Every rule above shrinks the manuscript. Cut the unsourceable, cut the borrowed, cut the private, cut the angry, cut anything that only exists to make me the hero, and what is left is a lot smaller than what I started with.

It is also the only part anybody should trust.

I would rather hand you two hundred pages you can check than five hundred you have to take on faith. Anybody can write the long version. The long version is easy. The long version is just everything you remember, arranged to your advantage.

The short version costs you something. That is how you know it is worth reading.

So the book is coming slower than anybody wants, including me.

Most of that time is not writing. It is deciding what I am not allowed to say.