How do we edit novels?

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Author's name: Alaa Farghali

Here, we will attempt to decipher this complex process, perhaps offering valuable content for writers and editors to revisit their novels with a comprehensive, analytical perspective capable of identifying weaknesses, awkwardness, shortcomings, ambiguities, and contradictions. We also hope to provide useful insights for those working as reviewers in publishing houses or serving on judging panels, offering them a dissection of well-known Arabic texts, followed at the end of the book by a suggested evaluation method. This is because the award judge, by virtue of their selection of texts, becomes a shaper of literary taste. Furthermore, we hope to benefit those who produce critical content in written and visual reviews, particularly those who employ closed-ended critical phrases such as: "brilliant language," "amazing plot," "captivating characters," and "stunning style," without providing any evidence or examples to support the claims of this supposed brilliance in language, plot, or character development.

This is merely an attempt to lay the first brick in a new edifice for our Arab culture, which is currently witnessing steady growth in the book industry and even greater growth in novel publications. We hope that this brick will be completed with more significant and substantial additions by specialists with real experience from which we can all benefit.

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Alaa Farghali is a novelist whose works include "Khair Allah Al-Jabal" (2016), which won the Sawiris Award for Fiction; "Wadi Al-Doum" (2019), which won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Fiction from the Supreme Council of Culture; and "Mamar Behler," which was shortlisted for the Katara Prize for Fiction. He has also written documentary films, and his film "Al-Tajalli" won an award at the Agiola Film Festival in the Philippines. He works as a literary editor and lecturer in creative writing, and has participated in numerous creative writing and literary editing workshops in the Arab world. He holds a bachelor's degree in Hebrew and a postgraduate diploma in comparative literature from Cairo University.

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