I’m quite excited today to have Patricia McCormick, author of Cut, stopping by Galleysmith.  Celebrating it’s tenth year, Cut is a novel that provides insight into many of the difficulties teens often face when dealing with growing up and finding their place in the world.  Please join me in welcoming Patricia!

Cut was my first book, so I approached it like a “good student.” I read everything I could find on the topic of self-injury, interviewed experts, and read up on statistics and theories. Part way through the writing process, my creative writing teacher said, “This is fine, but it sounds like you’re writing about a disease, not a person.”

I was disappointed, of course, but he was right. I’d turned the book into a giant term paper about self-injury—instead of a portrait of one girl, one specific individual, who was struggling with self-injury.

I’d also tried to put everything I’d found into the book. I found that many people who self-injure have experienced some kind of sexual abuse. I wrote a scene where the main character is attacked by a schoolmate.  I read that some people have chronically ill siblings who command all the parental attention available. I gave the main character a pair of mean, checked-out parents. I read that some people who self-injure also have substance abuse issues. I gave my main character a drinking problem. And I ended up with an overloaded stew that sounded like an ad for Problem of the Month.

I think the other reason I’d done SO much research was that I’d been a journalist before turning to fiction writing. But another good piece of advice I got—from a different teacher—was to put all my research aside and to write from my imagination, from my heart. Otherwise, she said, the book would end up like a giant magazine article—not fiction. So I put away all my research. In fact, I put it in a suitcase, gave it to a friend in my neighborhood and told her not to give it back to me no matter how much I begged.  I felt incredibly vulnerable and lost without all my books and notebooks—something that threw me off balance and caused me to dig much more deeply into Callie’s character and mine.

I stepped back and thought simply about THIS girl—not ALL girls who self-injure. And little by little I took out all the extraneous material I’d collected. And I brought the drama factor down by about 50 percent. I decided that Callie wasn’t the poster child for a new mental health issue; she was a person. From a nice, well-meaning family who’d had more than its fair share of trouble lately. Someone who basically loves and is loved by her family but was so super-sensitive to the tensions at home that she was overwhelmed. Someone who was lost, angry, bewildered—but also funny, strong, and likely to get better.

I also—without realizing it—put a lot of myself into the story. Without my research to rely on, I drew on my own feelings as teenager, as someone who was confused and hurt, someone who didn’t have a voice to express those feelings. As a result, the book become much more of a father-daughter story than a story about an issue.

As soon as I started to think of her as Callie—a real person, from a real family—I started to like her a lot more, too. I realized I’d been standing apart from her, not really getting into her shoes. A very specific set of shoes, not the “generic” shoes I’d created. I’d also overloaded her character with too many problems to be believable.

As part of my cold-turkey research withdrawal, I also decided not to interview girls who self-injured until after I’d written a good solid draft of the book. But once I was finished, I took the manuscript to an inpatient facility for self-injurers. I was terrified that the girls would see that I was a fraud, that I had no idea what they were really going through.

To my surprise and relief, they said the book was quite accurate. In fact, they thought that I was a cutter—which was actually a compliment. It was the reassurance I needed to believe in the book—and to trust that I had done the right thing by walking away from my research and by leaving out all that extraneous drama.

It was hard to part with all that research. It was hard to throw away the scenes I’d written. And it was hard not to try to tell everyone everything I learned about self-injury. But getting that reassurance from the girls whose story I’d set out to tell was all I really needed.

Thank you for visiting Patricia!  I enjoyed reading Cut and knowing what has gone into it’s accuracy only makes me love it all the more.  If you missed my review please visit and please think of grabbing a copy for yourself.  You won’t be disappointed.