By Gurney Poe
I insist I am a newly-minted best-selling author. Nonetheless, I have received feedback.
Specifically, I have received feedback that my writing is “circuitous,”¹ “exhausting to follow,”² and, in one memorable letter, “organized like a yard sale where someone also put the yard in the sale.”³
I have considered this feedback carefully. I have concluded that the correct response is footnotes.
What footnotes are and why mine will work
A footnote is a digression that has been sent to its room. You put it at the bottom of the page.⁴ The main text stays clean, while the wandering around in search of a valid point stays bucketed. Everyone knows where they stand. This is, architecturally, how you turn a personality attribute into a functional system.⁵
I have used footnotes before in my other work. I feel good about this.⁶
The Benefits
There are three main benefits to the footnote approach.⁷
The first is clarity. When I have a thought that branches, I will branch it downward, into footnote space, rather than letting it run forward into the sentence. The sentence will then end. Normally.⁸ Moving on.
The second is it puts the reader in control. You can choose to read the footnotes. You can choose not to.⁹
The third benefit will be covered in Part 2.
¹ This is an interesting word choice. Circuitous implies unnecessary length, which I’d push back on. All of my length is calculated and load-bearing, it’s just that the load is sometimes forty feet above where most readers are standing, and they don’t see the ceiling until several pages later. It’s a vaulted ceiling, like in a church. I’ve been in the original ones. They do not photograph well. Fifth-dimensional spaces also don’t photograph well, for related but non-obvious reasons, and I should write a post about that. I won’t, but I should.
² Fair.
³ This image deserves respect. It was an interesting yard.
⁴ In a physical book. In a blog post like this one the implementation gets more interpretive, which I’ll address. I will, in fact, address this in a footnote.¹⁰
⁵ This is genuinely the insight. The wandering mind is an unhoused mind. You give it a footnote and it has somewhere to go. Grover Cleveland understood this. He had an extraordinary footnote sensibility. He made a revolutionary toasted cheese sandwich, but he did not use footnotes. He should have. His letters read like someone trying to describe a building by listing all the doors in the order he remembered them.
⁶ I feel less good about this the longer I look at it.¹¹
⁷ There are more than three. I’m demonstrating restraint. You’re welcome.
⁸ I want to note that I wrote that sentence and then sat with it for a moment. It ended. I felt something. Moving on.
⁹ The correct choice is to read them. I am saying this here, in a footnote, where only the correct people will encounter it.
¹⁰ In a blog post, the “bottom of the page” has no fixed location because web pages scroll. This means the footnote system is technically incoherent from a structural standpoint, unless you use inline superscripts that link to anchored footnotes below the body text, which is what most blog platforms do, which also means readers have to travel the full length of the post to read the note and then travel back to where they were, which is a round trip they did not budget for, and I want to acknowledge that. If you are reading this footnote having scrolled here from somewhere in the middle of the post: I see you. I honor the complexity of your journey. The main text will be there when you get back. It has not moved. Mostly. Anyway, I see you.¹²
¹¹ Here is the thing about footnotes in my prior work. They were good. They remain good. What I am discovering, now, in real time, drafting this post, is that footnotes are a container and I am, in some sense, a weather event, and there is a nontrivial possibility that the container has not solved the problem but simply given the problem a more organized-looking address. Like a very nice mailbox on a tire fire. You’d still have to watch your step.¹³
¹² This footnote is too long. I know. Moving on.¹⁴
¹³ I want to be clear: I stand by the system. This is iteration one. All systems require iteration. The Wright Brothers did not land their first flight and immediately file for a connecting flight to Cincinnati. They assessed. They adjusted. I am assessing. This footnote is my Kitty Hawk.
¹⁴ I said this in footnote twelve. That footnote was also too long.
¹⁵ I have now written more words in the footnotes than in the main text. I checked. I am choosing to interpret this as evidence that the system is working. The digressions have been successfully routed away from the main body, which remains, technically, clean. The content is clean. The sentence structure is direct. The prose is controlled. Whatever else is happening down here is happening down here, in the footnotes, which is where it belongs, and I stand by that, and I will continue to stand by it in the next post, which will also use footnotes, and will go better.
¹⁶ The third benefit is genuinely good. It reframes everything. Part Two will open with it. It will be clean, direct, no preamble, the benefit stated in the first sentence. Part Two will have a clear structure and a reasonable footnote-to-body-text ratio and will demonstrate, conclusively, that the system works. More or less.
