Sources and Sensibility: Those Pesky Notes

It's my pleasure to share this space with Karen Blumenthal. Her guest post adds to recent discussions about the documentation that accompanies a published work of nonfiction.




Shortly before my first book was published, I attended a
presentation by two very distinguished nonfiction writers.



“Here’s how you must do source notes,” I remember one of
them saying. “You list the beginning of every quote and then the source where
it came from.”





Her words sent my stomach churning and my hands shaking. My pre-publication
copy of Six Days in October was
tucked carefully in my bag--and it was all wrong. I had listed my primary sources
chapter by chapter as they appeared. But I had not specifically detailed the
source of each quotation, or even included specific page numbers. How could I
have made such a horrible mistake?




I recently had a flashback to that painful moment reading
some blogosphere discussions about nonfiction source notes
and Jan Greenberg’s recent post on back matter. A decade later, the “right” way
to do source notes still isn’t clear.




Sourcing nonfiction for a general audience, young or old, is
a difficult and tricky business. While I don’t want to footnote every burp and
grunt and dot pages with microscopic numbers, like the academics do, I do want
readers to know the source, since there can be so many differing views on some
subjects. But compiling them is tedious and unpleasant, and sometimes it’s
tough to pin down exactly where a conclusion came from.

Some publishers leave the decision to the writer and some
dictate a style, like the quotation method cited by the distinguished writer
above.  Forced to use that quotation-only
style once, I found it completely misrepresented where the information came
from. In some cases, one sentence may draw on four different sources; other
times, a paragraph reflects dozens of pages of reading. Quotations typically
are a small part of a narrative.




Sometimes, ego gets involved.  In my most recent book, Steve Jobs, I wanted to share my research to avoid any perception
that I had merely rewritten the best-selling adult biography.  Sometimes the process is messy, with notes
getting jumbled up as sections are rewritten or cut and pages are designed.
Sorting and correcting them can take days.




And sometimes publishers push back. Lots of detail takes lots
of pages, which costs money.  More than
once, I’ve been asked to trim the bibliography or notes.




For my second book, LetMe Play, a history of Title IX, I studied the notes of the masters—Russell
Freedman, Jim Murphy, Susan Campbell Bartoletti and Candace Fleming, among
others. From reviewing their work, I came to appreciate a short bibliographic
essay giving an overview of the process for someone who might be new to formal
research.  Besides, where else could you
share the little gem that before C-SPAN televised Congress, legislators regularly
rewrote their remarks for the Congressional Record?

That book involved an unusual number of interviews and
primary sources, and the notes are detailed.  It felt, at times, that I might be showing
off.




But then came the calls. Every year, I hear from a college
student writing a senior paper or girls from junior high through high school working
on a History Day projects. Over Skype and on the phone, they quiz me.  Occasionally, I have to go back to the notes
to jog my memory.




The most ambitious of them surprise me. They have studied
the sources and from them, found new trails for their own explorations. Their
excitement and curiosity is invigorating—and enough to make
those notes feel completely worth the effort.




Karen Blumenthal is
the author of five nonfiction books for young people, most recently Steve Jobs:
The Man Who Thought Different (Feiwel and Friends, 2012), which was a finalist
for the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults award.