In Defense of the Humble Footnote

Yesterday, after a several week long push, I finished a draft manuscript I've been working on for the last several years.  It's bubbled along beneath the surface of other projects, going through one unreadable iteration after another, and I've scrapped and reworked it at least twice. 

Fear Not, Little Flock is a book of encouragement and exhortation, meant to offer up a little bit of steel for the spines of small congregations.  There are plenty of Jesus MegaCenters out there, and having an alternative where life together functions on a human scale is a blessing.  It's due to my publisher in a month, so it'll be there well ahead of schedule, which is how I prefer to treat my editors.

I'll be writing more on the topic over the next little bit, I'm sure.  But what was on my mind, as I finished up, wasn't small churches.  

It was the humble footnote.  The manuscript has footnotes, and I don't know if they'll make it through the process of editing.  It seems unlikely.

This is a bummer, because I love footnotes.  

Footnotes...those little superscriptural markers that lead you to explanatory text or bibliographic information at the bottom of a page...are entirely out of style in the contemporary publishing industry.  The editorial herd has moved on.  First, it was endnotes, where that little number or an in-text citation had you flipping to the back of the book and futzing around to find the deets.  

Then, as was the case with my last two books, the new "style " was to not provide any superscriptural marker in the text at all, and to instead slap a chapter by chapter list of bibliographic references on the hindquarters of the book, with only page numbers to connect you to the actual reference.

I have no idea why this happened, but it's two steps backwards.  Endnotes are an inferior UI.  The "Tramp Stamp," or whatever the heck it's called when endnotes have no direct marker in the text?  That feels like it's just there for liability purposes, as it offers no meaningful opportunity for reader engagement at all.

Footnotes, particularly when coupled with a complete bibliography, immediately connect the reader with an informational metanarrative.  As you encounter resources or other writing that has informed your author, it's right there in front of you.  It's not "distraction."  It's openness of process, and immediately raises reader awareness of the textual foundations of a work.  It is, for author and reader alike, a superior way to convey information, by an order of magnitude.

But it can be more than that.  Footnotes are also a lovely place for an authorial aside.  You can share a related story or reflection.  You can snicker sotto voce in the wings at something in the main text, like you're Statler and your reader is Waldorf and the main text is Gonzo's latest failed routine.  Those marginalia add delight.

So why was this change made?  Why the shift in style?

Is it that we've lost the technical prowess in printing to manage doing footnotes?  Of course not.  Best I can tell, the change was made to save the costs of more complicated typesetting as the publishing industry has withered and retrenched and withered and retrenched again.  Mucking about with footnotes really does make the process of changing physical type more time consuming, and the additional labor required costs money.  It's collateral damage from industry decline, an inelegant adaptation rather than a step forward.

But with most publishing now fully digital, that logic no longer holds.  Physical typesetting has been supplanted, once again for cost saving purposes, yet still the style remains. 

It has become yet another way fad trumps function, an "advance" that makes life harder, and whose industry-driven logics have nothing to do with the author-reader connection, reader engagement and education, or the reason books exist.

Other than that, I have no problem with it.

The One Who Writes with Fire

It came in a moment of reflection.  It was a brief meditation over a concept, or rather, a meditation over the interplay between two ways of conceptualizing the divine.

On the one hand, the concept--often troubling--of God as a consuming fire.  Generally, we do not want to be burned.  Burning is bad.  Burning hurts, a bunch if it's you encountering a hot pan, rather more so if you're Servetus after a particularly contentious Presbytery meeting.   Despite all the emo-Jesus Christian Contemporary Music that tries to make it seem romantic, fire-language still feels more than a little bit too reminiscent of Tomas de Toquemada.

Plus, there's a strong negative theology of burning.  Burning is what happens to bad people.  Lakes of fire!  Hot coals!  Sinners get the weeping and gnashing, plus, did we mention you'll be on fire?

Mysticism, of course, has always embraced the divine fire.  It is that light that is kindled in us.  It is the light that awaits, and that we will embrace as it consumes us.

This is the mystic vision, in both Christianity and every other human religion.  It's what Jesus brought and lived out, and what Paul affirmed and spread.

But America is not a very mystic place, and the idea that we will be subsumed into anything annoys us.  That'll destroy our individuality, we grump.  America has always been fiercely self-oriented, but now, it's reached a fever pitch.  Our consumer culture needs us to be distinct and separate and conveniently trackable, more than any culture in human history.

Consumed by the Numinous?  Really?  How will Netflix know our preferences in heaven if it can't pigeonhole our demographic profile?  Think what being indistinctly suffused into the nature of the Holy would do to Amazon Divines business model!  And the Google AfterLifeAds?  They'd be completely random!

The horror.

To my reflections on this idea came another image of the divine, that of God as Author.  I like this image, for reasons that are very slightly transparent.  Yeah, I like to write.  So sure, I see God as an author.  And yes, there's a wee bit of projection involved.  I get that.  But I'm aware of the limits, and aware that it's metaphor.

It just happens to be an excellent metaphor.  The very best.  Ahem.

God is the storyteller, the one who spins out the narratives of our existence and of time and space.  He tells not just our story, but ourselves, writing us into being.  He has authorship over us, and authority, and yet allows us to participate in the telling of the tale, like a master DM spinning out an elegantly complex D&D campaign for a circle of dear friends.

Two different images.  There's the One who Writes.  And the One who Burns.

When I was a little child, those would have been very different metaphors.

But what struck me, in my reflection, was that "burning" and "writing" are now interchangeable words.  They have become synonyms, in this digital age.  Burning is how we write, how we set data into a physical medium.

The two wove up in a reflection, of a God who writes us out with fire, burning the truth of our life into creation.

All this before my second cup of coffee.  What a productive morning.

My Mission to Mars

The first edits are back on the Believer's Guide to the Multiverse, and I'm psyched.  First, my editor seems to like it, which is a significant bonus.  And second, well, it's a small step closer to that place where I can for the first time in my life move past saying "I'm a writer" to saying, legitimately, "I'm an author."

But mixed in there is a bit of angst.    What I'm dreading is the reality that in order for a book to be read, it has to be marketed.

While I love writing, I wrestle mightily with marketing.  I hate the feel of it, the taste of it, the way that approaching another person with a pitch can dehumanize the soul you're encountering.   They can become an object, an implement, something you're seeking to manipulate rather than someone you're standing in relation to.

I'm going to have to get over that, or at least reconceptualize the effort that goes into marketing.  Ditching the word itself seems a good start.   To get the word out about something, you have to believe in that something.   It has to matter to you, not in a manipulative way, but in a genuine way.  I'm not selling you something.  I'm offering you something.  I'm not pitching you something.  I'm opening up a conversation.  It's not scripted prosthelytizing, it's real evangelism.  

But really, that effort to really connect has to begin as you write.  Whatever you're trying to convey, you also have to speak it in such a way that people can hear what you're saying.   If you're a writer, that has to happen on the front end.  Are you articulating what you care about in such a way that other human beings...literate ones, at least...will be able to receive it?

One lament I'll hear occasionally amongst progressive Christian writers is that, well, no-one seems to buy books anymore.  "Why does no-one read," we lament.  "They are all so stupid!  Stupid stupidheads!"  This is fundamentally not true.  Christian books still sell like hotcakes.

Take, for instance, the books of Stormie Omartian.

Though I try to be aware of all things Jesusy, I'd never even heard of Stormie Omartian before I went onto Twitter.  There, amidst the churning thickets of tweet-quotes, I saw the name...and needless to say, it piqued my curiosity.   I discovered that beyond having a name that is beyond epic, she's an amazingly successful Christian author by almost any metric of success.

If my wee book sells more than a couple thousand copies, I'll be quite pleased.  That doesn't even begin to hit the 30,000 copy metric I used to hear pitched for entry into the "successful" author club back in the print era.   But Stormie? Stormie's in a totally different league.

Her books, which she writes from the perspective of a nondenominational layperson, have sold millions upon millions of copies.  Her Power of Prayer books have sold so well that her publisher has copyrighted those words.    "The Power of Prayer (R)."   I'll have to remember that the next time I consider using those words in a sermon, I guess.

So after finishing up my time with philosopher/mathematician/theist Blaise Pascal, I went to the library. There, in the spirituality section, Dewey Decimal Code 248.32, right next to a Brian Mclaren book, was a pastel-hued hardback, which I dutifully checked out.  I could tell by the cover that this was going to be...different.

Time to take a trip to Mars.