What faculty meetings don't know about me

I teach classical Arabic literature at Cairo University and I have published eleven academic papers, which is a fine number, and I have been working on a novel in my own time for four years, which I mention to almost no one in the department. The academic writing and the fiction writing feel like entirely different kinds of thinking. The papers want argument, structure, the controlled admission of evidence. The novel wants permission to not know yet, to follow a character into a room and see what happens. I am better trained for the former and I find the latter more necessary. The novel is about a translator in 1940s Cairo, a generation before my speciality, which means the research is genuinely new for me. I've been reading Egyptian press archives from that period, which are extraordinary, and the detail is almost too rich. My problem is restraint. I want to use everything. A good friend and fellow academic who writes poetry told me last year that my prose is 'generous to the point of difficulty', and I've been thinking about that criticism ever since. He's probably right. The current draft is about 120,000 words. Something will have to go.