I’ve just had my story evaluated by a developmental editor. Several things about it, she loves. Here’s what she doesn’t love: She tells me that I have written a piece that is part Metafiction, also Picaresque, also a bit of Literary Collage. My understanding of her remarks is this is not good, that I need to be more consistent in form. She does not object to my intrusiveness, she likes it, for the most part. She only wishes it were organized differently.

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The metafiction interruptions follow the behaviors that I am commenting on, they are not in a separate chapter, as she advises. Some are in footnotes. She says, then put them all in footnotes, keep the method consistent. But the wisecracks/miscellaneous remarks in the footnotes are less specific, more tangential than those woven into the text. I feel that it works, but what do I know? Can anyone comment, in general, about an off-putting mish-mash (apparently) of approaches?

--edited by Mimi Speike on 5/6/2014, 12:22 AM--

Sounds interesting. Certainly worth discussing. Post a few examples.

And to our moderators: It's getting harder and harder to ignore the crap that the site's software package dumps into posts, adds to copied text, etc.

Thank you Jay. I will.

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 That stuff following my post is the result of my Chrome being damaged. I forgot all about it. If I use Safari it does not happen.

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I have been doing research on multiple approaches in the same book, and have a list of books that are supposedly both Metafiction and Picaresque. One of them (I believe I recall) is Confederacy of Dunces, which I have but have not yet read. Another is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, which I have started and gotten sidetracked away from. I have a lot of reading to do.