Digression

Confession: A daily confession would be a lot more interesting if I had done more.

Reading:

• "L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story," by Lauren Groff
  
• The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
  

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Hitches a Ride" - 1,455 words (Estimated completion 14%)
• "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold" - Outline 100%
  

Revising:

• "The Revenant"
• "Cora and the Sea" - Third draft 50%

I was thinking about Don Quixote today--the novel, not the character--and something struck me about the structure that I had never really considered before.

By today's standards, it's a terribly constructed novel. Every so often, a character within the main narrative will stop and take several chapters to tell a different story, with completely unrelated characters. This story will only occasionally have any bearing on the main narrative, and where it does, the same could have been accomplished much more succinctly.

And it's not just 400 year old stories that have that feature. Look at Moby Dick, which takes a break mid-novel to discuss the minutiae of daily whaling life. (And gets it wrong, an irony I love.) Oh, sure, some would say that the digressions are an exploration of Romantic themes that couldn't be explored in the context of the main novel. I call it sloppy writing.

I can think of one modern author who has done the same thing and gotten away with it. That's Stephen King, whose Dark Tower series is a great and vast masterpiece, but has lots of pointless digressions of just the sort I'm talking about, especially in the later books. He was attempting to tie his entire oeuvre together with the series, and may even have succeeded, but the result is a series which cannot really be appreciated in isolation either.

So, here's my question--is digression a bad thing? There's no clear cut answer, of course, but I'm going to weight my answer about 75% to the yes side. I really think it is a sign of sloppy writing, because the careful writer can explore whatever themes he wants within the main narrative, or within a relevant subplot. If it doesn't fit, then for the love of all that is holy, cut it out! Give it its own book, or short story, where the exploration of that theme can feature prominently. By leaving the main plot, all you're accomplishing is making the reader resent the departure from the elements that attracted them in the first place. What's the point of that?

Publication Status:

• Submitted: 5
  
• Accepted: 1
• Rejected: 2
• Pending: 2