Read My Novel and Tell Me Why It Sucks (Parts 1-3)

I feelz special!

Anywho. What's with the footnotes?

Originally Posted by rong

I feelz special!

Anywho. What's with the footnotes?

I'll finally answer this question, since it's something a lot of people have asked about. So many of the most important suggestions I received on my previous draft had to do with 1) the sentence-by-sentence readability and 2) the excessive detractions from the plot with some of the ruminations on probability and physics and religion and all that fun stuff. The original draft, for example, included an insane amount of parenthetical asides that made for a much more consistent tone of spoony being a ranting but somewhat disorganized thinker.

This was a problem that was kinda hard to solve because my narrator is an obsessive, sometimes ranting thinker, so getting rid of a lot of the material altogether is fundamentally changing the character in a way that I did not at all want to change. Also, I liked a lot of the material that were used as examples of getting too far off course, and many of them were auxiliary to effectively pulling off some of the themes I develop.

Anyway, I cleaned up a lot of the sentences by putting a lot of the parenthetical asides into footnotes, and I tried to fix the problem of the plot being slowed by too many explanatory detractions by using the tl;dr parts. I was especially interested by (note: interested by, not married to) the tl;dr idea because of my attempt to appeal to the internet-age generation and because I've for a long time been toying with ways to write a normal-sized novel (60,000+ words, 200+ pages) while giving my reader the option of fast-tracking their way through it so that it can be as short as 45,000 words (150 pages). I already have supplementary chapters outlined for if there were ever a digital version where their can be hidden content.

Anyway, this clearly isn't working in its current state for a lot of people. I suspect that it CAN work (Junot Diaz is someone who's gained a lot of critical acclaim for his use of footnotes in novels that have reputation for being very modern and hip), though maybe the fact that there is a conceit of this being a very personal journal makes it so that using any pseudo-academic techniques stick out much more than they do in a Junot Diaz book where it's a third-person narration. There is also the possibility that I'm just not using it well, including too much material that's superfluous regardless of whether or not it's in the main text, am using it excessively, am using it inconsistently, etc.

So I'll open the floor for you guys to discuss this issue and the best way of navigating it.