One aspect of editing that Thomas really struggles with,
besides spelling it, is reading the words that make up the sentence he’s
trying to edit—and I use the word sentence in its loosest possible connotation.
“What really annoys me,” said Thomas, after we caught up
with him outside a cafe he was evicted from moments earlier, “is that my
editing doesn’t seem to improve what I’ve written. Take this bit, for example—”
He holds up a piece of coffee-stained paper.
“See this?” he says, pointing at some scribbles. “This was
originally a word. Not a good one, you understand, but a word, nonetheless. It
was originally part of a sentence I wrote about three months ago. But reading
back over it now, I had no idea what I was on about. I mean, what the hell
letter is that?”
The key aim of writing is to conveying an idea or thought
to another person, with the added advantage that once written, it is able to endure
the erosion of time, that is, a well-written thought will exist long after the
mind that conjured it doesn’t. In Thomas’ case, however, the opposite is true.
His thoughts become more convoluted after
they’re written down. Moreover, they become even more distorted after his
attempts at editing them.
He still points at the paper.
“I mean, I can’t read any of it,” he says. “None of it
makes sense. Admittedly, it didn’t make much sense when I originally wrote it, but
that’s where I expected editing to help. What’s the point of having something
edited if it’s just going to end up devoid of even more meaning than when it
was written in the first place?” He folds the paper into something resembling
an aeroplane and throws it. “I hate editing. It shits me.”
A prerequisite to editing is having something editable to edit, and this is, we feel, where Thomas comes unstuck.
Nevertheless, we give him full points for trying, and even more points for his almost
pathological levels of delusion.
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