Further Notes on Author’s Notes

Editing Long Notes

Complex subjects often need longer Author’s Notes to support them. As an OEDILF editor, I often see ways of trimming such ANs down to their essentials, but making such suggestions takes time, which I don’t always have. One of our challenges as writers is to write limericks so tempting to our editors that they’ll workshop ours rather than spend the time writing one of their own.

Other ANs have different issues, around how essential they are to explaining the relatively straightforward verses to which they’re attached. Some writers have a broader view of “essential” than many of us, and so are more resistant to trimming them. That’s okay, as long as they don’t mind the relatively lower levels of editorial attention that can result, although having a particular author’s limericks stuck in the New queue for months does create a practical problem for how most editors use it.

These different kinds of long ANs need different handling in workshopping, but their long ANs have the same effect of scaring some editors off. But if authors are okay with their tentatives taking longer to get approved, why should we feel that we’re in trouble? It’s only really a problem for AEs who feel a compulsion to attend to every limerick that comes our way; but we can tell them we think an AN is unnecessarily long and then confirm it anyway.

Who Needs It?

It’s always possible to delve deeper into any subject, but if you do that, you’re lecturing people, which readers of OEDILF limericks, including workshop editors, might not appreciate. We turn up to each new limerick expecting around 25 words of verse, with perhaps 100 of explanation where necessary. Beyond that, reading them starts to feel like work. When you include too much that isn’t essential to the limericks at hand, but supplementary, some readers might feel that you’re telling them for their own good, and could resent you for it.

But that aside, and thinking of those who appreciate the extra detail—is this the best way to get it to them? Imagine a reader who wants to know more about Iraq. If they actively want to, will they be coming here to look up relevant words? OEDILF limerick ANs are going to have a tough time beating the LA Times and other journals of record as first port of call for the curious.

If they’re curious on some level but not actively looking, your randomly encountered limerick and AN might keep them reading, it’s true. But that’s true of just about any OEDILF limerick on a potentially complicated subject. I write biographical limericks about artists, but work hard to keep their ANs down to 100 words. That’s barely enough room to list a few of their key works, let alone give their whole life story—but so what? To tell a person’s life story takes whole books.

If every third limerick in the OEDILF came with a 367-word AN, would you read them? Even as a casual reader who didn’t have to edit them? Even if they were on subjects you were interested in? If I write five lines about the Mona Lisa, I don’t have to tell you everything about Leonardo’s life in an AN, with quotations from all the leading authorities. And if I were to say, “I don’t have to, but I want to,” should my readers just grin and bear it?

It’s easy to go on and on at length about a complicated subject. It’s hard to get it down to its essence. It’s more challenging, and I would argue rewarding, to choose the harder path.

Overexplaining the Joke

I can’t see what’s wrong with having an obscure hidden joke in a limerick, assuming that the limerick has other things going for it. Do people feel personally offended when there’s a joke that they didn’t get because they didn’t have those particular points of cultural reference? “What!? You’re suggesting that I don’t know absolutely everything? The very idea is an outrage! You must spell it out in an Author’s Note, so I can pretend that I did know it.”

Hidden jokes are little gifts to those who share the point of reference concerned, and are more amusing for being obscure. Comedians know that audiences prefer to make the final connections in a joke themselves—spelling it out kills it. Insisting that we spell out obscure jokes for those who don’t share our point of reference is like saying, “I don’t understand this, so I want to spoil it for those who do. If the laugh can’t be mine, it can’t be anybody’s!”

The notion of always having to help future generations doesn’t convince me, either. Shakespeare’s plays are full of references and jokes that mean nothing to modern readers, but would they have been improved if he’d explained them within the texts themselves? Let future academics come along with editorial annotations if they must, but don’t spoil 2009’s joke for the sake of a 2109 that might not even care.

For those who do want every limerick to end up like The Annotated Alice, can’t we at least keep the explanations of hidden jokes in the workshops? They often serve as extended Author’s Notes anyway, but at least it means that the core text can be read without distractions. I know they’re only visible to members, but it takes only moments to join the site, and if some future limerick scholar is that keen they’ll think nothing of it.

Sources of Inspiration

One of our authors has talked about providing information in his ANs that the reader “needs” in order to understand a particular limerick, and his editors have argued that readers (who are us, in the first instance) don’t actually need it, that the limerick works fine on its own, even if a more general reading might not precisely match the source of its inspiration. It’s occurred to me that what he has been feeling we “need” to understand is his source of inspiration for writing a particular limerick, which isn’t the same as the limerick itself. Limericks, poems, creative works of any kind all have sources of inspiration, but they aren’t usually presented with those sources indelibly attached. Nineteen Eighty-Four would have had less impact over the years if its specific 1930s and 1940s sources of inspiration had been described in a lengthy appendix at the time of its first publication. We wouldn’t have enjoyed wandering among the daffodils with Wordsworth as much if he’d attached an AN showing that his inspiration was the gardening column of the Grasmere Gazette. William Carlos Williams’s plums in the icebox wouldn’t have been as sweet if his shopping list was underneath.

Those details may be of interest to academics; they may even be of interest to the wider public one day. But even when they are, they’re kept in their own place: in academic books, the review columns of newspapers, interviews with authors, and so on. When we watch a movie on DVD, nobody forces us to watch the Making Of documentary in the extras. But our OEDILF ANs are much harder to avoid: they’re like the annoying copyright screen you can’t navigate away from at the end of the DVD. If they’re not handled sensitively, they can overwhelm the poor 25-word limerick to which they’re attached. That’s why we have to consider their impact on the work as a whole.

If you want to share your sources of inspiration, no problem, but the workshop comments seem a much better place for it. Readers who want to understand your limerick don’t need to know them, and readers who want to understand your inspirations can come looking for them—as anyone does when they want to know more about George Orwell, or Wordsworth, or William Carlos Williams. It’s not as if we charge people to join the site if they want to read the workshops.

Reworked from forum and workshopping comments from April 2008–June 2009.