Dissecting my IPP one piece at a time

The time to begin editing my book has finally arrived. I have been waiting for this moment for five months, and thank God it's finally here. Reaching the editing stage means I have finished the writing stage, and can now focus on finalizing sentences and correcting grammar.

The downside to the editing stage is that I must begin the long and painful process of deciding what won't be included in my final draft. After meeting with my advisor, it was decided that the first thing to go will be the prologue. It is unnecessary (in my case), and provides information to the reader that really isn't needed.

So, my prologue got the axe. Oh well. Life goes on. But, of course, I've posted it here for anyone who is dying to know what I wrote...

Prologue: The woman behind the story

I sat quietly on the floor and mentally willed my great-aunt Rose to continue speaking.

A moment earlier, we had been looking through a pile of old, black-and-white photographs from her childhood. She hadn’t taken them out in a long time, but sensed my eagerness to handle relics from the past. Even though she considered the pictures to be boring and uneventful, she flipped through the stack slowly while pointing to the faces of people she remembered.It wasn’t long before Rose started taking about her life. This was the moment I had been waiting for, and I nonchalantly slipped the notebook out of its hiding place under the rug and onto my lap.

It was August of 2007, and Rose was 91 years old. Her husband was long gone, she never had children, and her one remaining sibling died six months previously. She considered my family to be her closest relatives, which was one of the reasons why my mother and I decided to leave Manitoba and visit her in Armstrong, BC, that summer.

I also had an ulterior motive, and Rose quickly learned what it was. As the historian of the family, I have always made it my business to know as much about everything as humanly possible. Nothing was off limits, especially the lives of relatives. Initially, Rose only intended to tell me one, simple story. She ended up talking for hours, over three days, and I hung onto every word.

It was last spring, in 2010, that I decided to turn my notes into a story. Rose lived a long, interesting life that was – unfortunately – filled with more unhappiness than she deserved. For some reason, I felt that it was my duty to take her words and turn them into something she would be proud of. I fell in love with Rose during my visit. There were parts of her that I could see in myself, and for the first time I began to understand where I had inherited certain personality traits, such as my stubbornness, outspokenness, and sarcastic sense of humour.

The book is a collection of stories. I didn’t want to create a biography, so I’ve focused on the important aspects that I feel an audience can relate to. My goal was to re-create Rose as she was, and not censor or sugar-coat the things that happened to her. Her story is beautiful, it’s heart-breaking, but above all, it’s real. It’s the story of a woman who lived a hard life and came out victorious at the end.

With that being said, this is a work of fiction. It’s as historically accurate as it can be, but naturally there are things that I couldn’t possibly know. The dialogue has been loosely reconstructed from my notes, and I had to take liberties on more than one occasion. The story is set in Winnipeg, but in reality, Rose and her family grew up in British Columbia. This switch was intentional, and it allowed me to create a specific setting for the backdrop of my story. I have changed the name of a few characters – because I couldn’t find them to ask for permission – and have invented others. Rose didn’t have enough time to tell me about every single person in her life, so my imagination has served me well.

But even though the book is fiction, Rose is real. Her thoughts, her feelings, her actions, and her struggles are presented in as honest and straightforward a manner as possible. Writing an account of her life wasn’t easy, and I never imagined it would be so heartbreaking to relive the struggles of her life through her eyes. I hope you fall in love with Rose just as I did, because I have never met a braver woman in my entire life.