High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The cut- up technique (also called fishbowling or découpage) is an aleatory literary technique or genre in which a text (or multiple texts) is cut up into smaller portions at random, and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing. The concept can be traced to at least the surrealists in the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts. Cut-up is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text (printed on paper) and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text. The rearranging of work often results in surprisingly innovative new phrases. A common way is to cut a sheet in four rectangular sections, rearranging them and then typing down the mingled prose while compensating for the haphazard word breaks by improvising and innovating along the way.