on editing

In less than a month, I will defend my master’s thesis – a sprawling document written on the flimsy idea of authenticity in the twenty-first century. It’s taken me about a year to write this. This time last year, I was in the research stages of my thesis and now, I am preparing to defend it. It is around one hundred and sixty pages, fifty thousand words. It is the longest piece of writing that I have ever written in my years of academia.

But not in general – no. That title would go to something that I wrote in the spring semester of my first year of my master’s degree. It was a semester where I considered my workload to be lighter than usual and so I decided to finally write the novel that had been brewing in my mind for about two years. In that twelve-week semester, I wrote just under eighty thousand words. 

Some of those words were some that I had been long familiar with. They were fragments of things that I had written before, passages that I had worked into short stories and essays. Others were some that I had never written down but resonated just as strongly. Things that I had thought over and over again to the point that no amount of time would erase those words from my mind. I wrote all of those down in one grand document and called it a novel.

I am in the process of editing my novel now. It’s not without encouragement – I have a mentor who seems to believe my book is publishable and I was awarded two separate provincial grants for my writing. I was even reached out to by a literary agency who encouraged me to send them something long-form, whenever I was ready to. But the task of editing is one that I’m finding to be extremely difficult.

I know how to edit. I’ve taken time away from this novel – months, where I don’t open the document and try not to think about it at all. But nothing can keep me from feeling incredibly close to it. We, this novel and I, are far too intimate for me to be able to look at it as anything but an entity which has, at different points in my life, consumed me entirely.

I don’t feel like I can send this off somewhere without making it the best that I possibly can. I’m thinking of seeking out a writer to help with the task of editing. I have someone in mind that I believe can help me. I want to see my novel as a novel. It’s difficult when it feels like nothing more than myself.