How to Digress Without Losing the Plot (Or Your Reader)

John McPhee* has a sign posted over his desk:?Have the courage to digress.

Academics and students and teachers of the written word frequently criticise writers for their digressions:?Stick to the point! This is irrelevant! Unnecessary! Tangential!

But digress is what confident writers do all the time.?David Foster Wallace was famous for his digressions, Dickens loved them, Cicero mastered them, Montaigne created the essay form out of them…

Ray Bradbury called digression “the soul of wit”. “Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton, or Hamlet’s father’s ghost,” he wrote in?Fahrenheit 451,?“and what stays is dry bones.”

The Iliad?and?The Odyssey?are full of digressive plots,?Beowulf?has its fair share,?Les Misérables?packs them in. Laurence Sterne wrote that?“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; — they are the life, the soul of reading.”

So good writers love digressions. But why?

Why digress?

Digressions aren’t just a fun little game that writers play. There’s a whole lot they can bring to your writing, if you know how to write them. They can:

• Enrich what you know about the current situation, whether it’s character backstory, a place’s history, or interesting background information and anecdotes
• Add suspense and keep readers reading by 1) delaying the action and 2) foreshadowing what might come
• Bring personality and narrative voice to the page, which is helpful if you’re trying to develop your “style” or crafting a unique narrator character

More than that, readers?love?and can get very passionate about digressions, when they’re done well.?Digressive, tangential and associative thought patterns are how our brains think and our conversations unfold. If it’s interesting, and well-constructed, digressions are some of the most powerful adventures you can take your readers on.

But if digressions are so great, then why do people hate on them?

Why are digressions so frequently criticised?

The problem with digressions is that they’re?hard?to do well.?In fact, in Imperial Rome, knowing how to take a talk off-topic and bring it back in again was considered a rare skill — one that meant you were truly an eloquent speaker.

And because they’re so difficult to master, many amateur writers end up writing digressions that:

• Are self-indulgent or appear to be showing off, to the point where the writer loses sight of what interests the reader
• Become too long, tiresome and confusing
• Are poorly crafted/signposted, which confuses the reader about where they are in time and space
• Don’t make the link between the main narrative clear enough, leading the reader to feel like their time has been wasted and the writer doesn’t have a proper grasp of the topic

“Of which imagination, because it hath so great a stroke in producing this malady, and is so powerful of itself, it will not be improper to my?discourse , to make a brief digression, and speak of the force of it, and how it causeth this alteration. Which manner of digression, howsoever some dislike, as frivolous and impertinent, yet I am of Beroaldus’s opinion,?‘Such digressions do mightily delight and refresh a weary reader, they are like sauce to a bad stomach, and I do therefore most willingly use them.’”

(Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621)

Digressions are not the enemy, but done without intention, they can easily lose a reader. Here are four ways to work digressions into your nonfiction writing:

1—Open the door for longer digressions

How do you open the door? By slipping a hint into a preceding sentence.?They don’t have to be obvious, but subtle references or allusions to the topic of your digression, worked in before you make the leap, help to orient your reader and illuminate the link between your digression and the main narrative.

Michael Noll wrote a great?case study on how to do this . He uses an extract from Matthew Gavin Frank’s?Preparing the Ghost?to illustrate the hint in action:

The fog that the early sailors believed to be the last remnants of Noah’s flood began to shroud the vessel…

…the full sentence of which reads:

The fog that the early sailors believed to be the last remnants of Noah’s flood?began to shroud the vessel, the vapors pumped from the interior’s forests, commingling with the sea.

…together with the digression that follows, which reads:

The fog that the early sailors believed to be the last remnants of Noah’s flood?began to shroud the vessel, the vapors pumped from the interior’s forests, commingling with the sea.?The early sailors believed that this fog?housed ghosts of fishermen and fish, mermaids that they’d either have to love or decapitate, that the only way to eradicate this terrible fog would be to set a great fire to the forests. At the sea-bed beneath them, the skeletons of two-hundred ships lay unidentified in the soupy mass grave, lifeboats and their corpses embalmed in the deep freeze. The Labrador Current threw at them more and more ice.

This neat little pre-digression hint prepares us for thinking of the fog as something with a story behind it, which makes us both accepting of and excited for the actual story when it appears, rather than feeling confused and annoyed.

2—Splice digression between action or dialogue

Visible action and well-paced conversations provide a natural hook for keeping readers reading, so it’s the perfect place to splice in digression. It’s also a perfect place to splice in non-digressive information and exposition, rather than lumping it all at the beginning.

Digression also offers the reader a break, which can provide temporary relief from drama and action.

A simple little digression from?The Catcher in The Rye?that falls between the action:

Then he really let one go at me, and the next thing I knew I was on the goddam floor again. I don’t remember if he knocked me out or not, but I don’t think so.?It’s pretty hard to knock a guy out, except in the goddamn movies.?But my nose was bleeding all over the place.?When I looked up, old Stradlater was standing practically right on top of me. He had his goddam toilet kit under his arm.

…which then offers more digressions couched in dialogue:

‘Why the hell dont’cha shut up when I tellya to?’ he said. He sounded pretty nervous.?He probably was scared he’d fractured my skull or something when I hit the floor. It’s too bad I didn’t.?‘You asked for it, God damn it,’ he said.

These short, relevant digressions work because they slot in neatly between action and dialogue, and give us more insight into the narrator.

Rather than sticking an entire paragraph of digression into your piece, see if there are places you can work it in within existing narratives, whether to provide relief from the action, bring in more context or backstory, or give an insight to what your narrator is thinking.

3—Punctuate shorter digressions

Sometimes, the most powerful digressions are the short ones — the ones you can fit right inside a sentence.?Within a sentence, digressions become less interruptive. They can add colour, drama and intrigue?to a sentence without completely throwing you off the main line of action.

You have three options for punctuating digressions within sentences: parentheses, commas, and dashes. (Actually, parentheses can work for full-sentence digressions too — see?)

Parentheses?downplay the importance of your digression, which works very well for funny remarks, snarky comments, and?interesting-but-not-entirely-relevant?details.?It’s like a whisper, or a quiet comment out of the side of your mouth. When you use parentheses, you signal to your reader that they can skip over this if they’d prefer. If your sentence couldn’t live without the information inside your parentheses, that information shouldn’t be in parentheses.

On the other hand,?dashes?emphasise?the words they set off, adding drama and drawing the reader’s attention to the digression.

And somewhere in the middle of parentheses and dashes is the trusty old?comma.?Commas frame mid-sentence interruptions in a calm, moderate fashion. They don’t make your digressions seem trivial (as parentheses can), or of life-changing importance — like dashes do. They’re just there to separate one thought from another, and can be helpful if you’re not sure which tone to strike.

And you have one option for punctuating/formatting short digressions that lie outside of your sentences: footnotes. A personal favourite of David Foster Wallace, footnotes are a funny thing: some readers don’t like them, and don’t read them. Others delight in them — sometimes more than the main content.

The disadvantage of using footnotes is the way it interrupts the physical flow of the reading experience. The advantage, though, is you’re less likely to alienate readers who aren’t fans of footnotes (or digression in general), because footnotes are easy to skip over. You’re telling the reader:?this is interesting, but not important, so skip it if you like.

For now, I’ll leave you with this very long but very funny extract from a David Foster Wallace essay,?Tense Present. (You don’t have to read it?all.)?Here you’ll find digressions in almost every sentence — parenthetical, dashed, and comma-separated, that exist within a larger digression, which contemplates the merits of skirts and pants (in an essay about language).?Pulled together, you get a pretty strong sense of DFW on the page.

Take, for example, the Descriptivist claim that so-called correct English usages such as brought rather than brung and felt rather than feeled are arbitrary and restrictive and unfair and are supported only by custom and are (like irregular verbs in general) archaic and incommodious and an all-around pain in the ass. Let us concede for the moment that these objections are 100 percent reasonable. Then let’s talk about pants. Trousers, slacks. I suggest to you that having the “correct” subthoracic clothing for U.S. males be pants instead of skirts is arbitrary (lots of other cultures let men wear skirts), restrictive and unfair (U.S. females get to wear pants), based solely on archaic custom (I think it’s got something to do with certain traditions about gender and leg position, the same reasons girls’ bikes don’t have a cross-bar), and in certain ways not only incommodious but illogical (skirts are more comfortable than pants; pants ride up; pants are hot; pants can squish the genitals and reduce fertility; over time pants chafe and erode irregular sections of men’s leg hair and give older men hideous half-denuded legs, etc. etc.). Let us grant-as a thought experiment if nothing else-that these are all reasonable and compelling objections to pants as an androsartorial norm. Let us in fact in our minds and hearts say yes-shout yes-to the skirt, the kilt, the toga, the sarong, the jupe.?Let us dream of or even in our spare time work toward an America where nobody lays any arbitrary sumptuary prescriptions on anyone else and we can all go around as comfortable and aerated and unchafed and unsquished and motile as we want.

4—Make sure your digressions add up

The hardest part of writing digressions is demonstrating relevance, but the best digressions are the ones that seem to go completely off-topic, only to turn out to be highly relevant by the time the main narrative winds back in.

Cicero, the Roman statesman, was revered for his ability to jump from the small picture to the big picture, and back again. And however bizarre it seemed at first, Cicero’s digressions were always revealed to be highly relevant to the topic at hand.

Digressions are never non sequiturs; in one way or another, they build on what’s happening, bringing new information to change the way we view the events, the characters, the stakes, the settings, the human experience of it all. However obscure, the subject of your digression must link logically to your main narrative.

Even better if it also links thematically. The fog digression above is effective particularly because the particular background information chosen adds to the mood and suspense of the current action and storyline. It’s spooky, mystical, and it gives you a hint of what’s coming next.

I’m not telling you to hammer home the relevance of your digression in the style of an academic paper. If you tell your digression’s story right, the link will be?obvious,?without needing to be stated. If you find yourself needing to?explain?the link, you need to tell your story better. Readers enjoy digressions far more when their own brains make the connection, so set them up to succeed by crafting it right.

Even if it at first appears unrelated or irrelevant, the digression must eventually make sense. Your digressions should bring?more?to your piece (through the way they enrich a reader’s understanding and delight their aesthetic sensibilities), than they take away, through disruption.

The reason we so often get annoyed at digressions is because a writer hasn’t taken the time to make the relevance clear enough, and the reader feels like their time was wasted.

So, to digress, or not to digress? I say,?do it —?but if you’re going to do it, do it well.

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*Pulitzer-prize-winning nonfiction writer known for his signature style of spellbinding action and fascinating tangents.