The inner crit­ic cre­ates writer’s block and sti­fles adven­tur­ous writ­ing, hems it in with safe clichés and over­think­ing. Every writer has to find his or her own way to get free of that sour­puss ratio­nal­ist who insists on stran­gling each thought with log­i­cal analy­sis and fit­ting each idea into an oppres­sive pre­de­ter­mined scheme or ide­ol­o­gy. William S. Bur­roughs, one of the most adven­tur­ous writ­ers to emerge from the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, famous­ly employed what he called the cut-up method. Devel­oped by Bur­roughs and painter Brion Gysin, this lit­er­ary take on the col­lage tech­nique used by avant-garde artists like Georges Braque orig­i­nat­ed with Sur­re­al­ist Tris­tan Tzara, who “pro­posed to cre­ate a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat.” The sug­ges­tion was so provoca­tive, Bur­roughs claims in his essay “The Cut-Up Method,” that cut-ups were there­after “ground­ed… on the Freudi­an couch.” Since Bur­roughs and Gysin’s lit­er­ary rede­ploy­ment of the method in 1959, it has proved use­ful not only for poets and nov­el­ists, but for song­writ­ers like David Bowie and Kurt Cobain. And any frus­trat­ed nov­el­ist, poet, …