Giving credit where credit is due

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A question, in a work of fiction, where does one give credit to works used in the production of the work. Footnotes, Appendix, does one use superscript numbers to tie various true sections of unusual work to the source. Some insight would be appreciated.

Comments

Well...

I can't recall ever seeing 'foot notes' or 'appendixes' in works of fiction.

There is usually a foreward or preface where the sources are thanked and appologised to.

This happens when a fiction writer borrows the 'universe' and characters from another author.

There is usually a disclaimer about 'fan fiction' and an explanation that some parts of this universe were 'borrowed' from another source.

Nobody

Sea Changes

Angharad's picture

by Liorah, has footnotes and an appendix.

I've mentioned several works in episodes of my stories, although none have been derived from them other than my Gaby fanfics, to which I gave a foreword.

Angharad

Angharad

Dave Eggers and DFW

rebecca.a's picture

Dave Eggers, in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and the late David Foster Wallace, in Octet, used footnotes extensively. In Infinite Jest there are a boggling number of endnotes - you really need a bookmark in the endnotes section while reading it.

Meh. You can do whatever you like in a novel. That's the whole idea.


not as think as i smart i am

Giving Credit

In a published work of fiction, it is generally given after the dedication page or at the very end of the story.

Generally, there are no footnotes in works of Fiction.

Nancy Cole

Nancy_Cole__Red_Background_.png


~ ~ ~

"You may be what you resolve to be."

T.J. Jackson

Quite a number...

of authors of "alternate history" or "historical fiction" seem to write afterwords - where they describe the sources of the material they used. I kind of like it here - as it doesn't let me "predict" the story as easily. :-)

I've seen SOME use of footnotes in published books. Some authors here use them as well. No major consistency though.

Annette

It depends.

Many authors will mention the references in either the foreword or afterword. But sometimes this is not enough, and you need to get more specific, and that's what footnotes are for. I have seen endnotes too, sometimes disguised as a glossary -- in particular, I remember reading a series of sci-fi books when I was about twelve which had a glossary at the end explaining most of the technobabble and clearing up what was real science and what wasn't. But the first use of the words was highlighted in the book, so you *knew* there as a glossary enter for it -- which kinda turns it into an endnote.

Footnotes aren't common in fiction because they kinda break the flow of the narrative, but a few authors use them for effect. Terry Pratchett, for instance. "The Man who Calculated" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Calculated) also used footnotes extensively, both to clear up the meaning of some Arabic words and to enlarge on the math explanations. And if you get an annotated edition of a classic, it will have lots of footnotes -- I wouldn't have got even half of the jokes in "Gulliver's Travels" without the annotations. Can't remember now, but I'm pretty sure that Jonathan Swift had already put in a few of them, so the publisher had to make clear which notes were Swift's and which were the annotator's...