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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Tuesday, September 08, 2009

entry arrow6:33 PM | Reminder to Self

Zadie Smith said this about editing one's novel:

When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second -– put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year of more is ideal -– but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go on stage and read from them. It’s an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your novel is two years after it’s published, ten minutes before you go on stage at a literary festival. At that moment every redundant phrase, each show-off, pointless metaphor, all of the pieces of dead wood, stupidity, vanity, and tedium are distressingly obvious to you.

Well, it has been more than ten months since I "finished" and placed Sugar Land in a drawer. Do you think it's time to take it out and blue-pencil it everywhere? (An excerpt, by the way, is forthcoming in Ideya, De La Salle's journal for literature and the arts.)

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