I wrote posts recently On the joys of a long sentence and On a long sentence of my own, and in tandem with gearing up to write my second novel O.C. — (pen will be put to paper a week on Monday!) — I’ve got to thinking more about a technique which I’ve used more often than any other in all of my writing. It’s the thing which even helped to give this blog its title. I’m talking about my great love of digression.
Anyone who has ever had the (mis)fortune of listening to me talk for more than a minute will already know what an inexhaustible digresser I am. I waffle. I rarely use one word when six or seven will do. I speak in long sentences crammed full of commas, colons and subordinate clauses. No-one ever knows when I’ve finished a sentence because I often pause in the middle of one — and just when it seems like my thought has run out of steam, I’ll slip in something new, drift off on some tangent or other — and eventually, maybe, get to a point, or at least to a full stop, or more likely, to one of my portentous uses of “so…” or “but…” which shows that, even though my brain has run out of immediate words, the thinking cogs are still grinding away on the inside of my head.
Was that whole paragraph a digression? Maybe it was. But already, you’re seeing what I mean. People’s patience with me and my tendency to speak like this is probably the hallmark of how well (or not) my relationships with them endure. I imagine many people have got the point where they impose their own discreet full stop on contact with me for the sake of their own sanity.
Inexhaustible digresser I may be — but Reader, know this — I’m also an unrepentant one. And more than that, I’m a joyous sub-digresser — a sub-sub-digresser, and beyond. There really is no point at which I’d feel I’d pushed a digressive sentence, paragraph or chapter too far. At least, if there is such a limit, I haven’t reached it yet. (Test readers of my first novel R.C. or audiences at some of my theatre projects of the past might disagree with me there.)
Digression is a tool that a writer needs to use with confidence. Perhaps that should even be with arrogance. It certainly runs contrary to received wisdom about keeping things simple, but it also flies in the face of growing condescension about the diminishing attention span of readers, and the presumption that readers aren’t willing to put in any work for themselves when they’re reading. I’m definitely writing for readers who are still willing to do that, few and far between as I’m told they are nowadays.
You have to be able to believe in the value and dignity of your own digressions, otherwise your own syntax will trip you up and expose your nerves for all to see. A tremulous digression just reinforces all the tired claims about the cult of TLDR — which itself needs to be abbreviated to four letters for those people who think even the words “Too Long; Didn’t Read” are themselves too long to read.
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My most recent favourite discovery amongst digressive writers is Georges Perec, whose 1978 novel La Vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) I read in David Bellos’s wonderful 1987 English translation (because my French wouldn’t have been up to the subtleties of this amazing book.) Its 99 chapters dip in and out of the lives of the inhabitants of a Parisian apartment building, frozen in time just before 8pm on 23rd June 1975. It takes in around 2,000 characters and spans more than 140 years. You might be forgiven for thinking this means the novel is only able to paint with broad brushstrokes, but you’d be mistaken: quite the opposite is the case. The level of detail and precision in Perec’s writing is incredible. Sustained across a work of this size, it’s almost breathtaking.
I said earlier that writers need confidence to make digression work, and Perec is the most confident writer in this respect that I’ve ever come across. The novel is a whole nested structure of digressions, on a sentence level, a paragraph level, a chapter level and on a whole-book level. It makes frequent use of brackets to enable a new thought (sometimes fleeting, sometimes extensive) to interrupt the ostensible focus of a line; often, the digression between the parentheses is revealed to be the true beating heart of the sentence. Lists are a key tool to Perec’s digressive style, but so too are quotations from other texts, such as letters, diaries or literary works, which may themselves quote other texts, sending us deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.
My favourite digression of all in Life: A User’s Manual consists of six pages of storytelling which are so good, they could comprise an entire novel of their own. (Maybe one day I’ll approach the Perec Estate for permission to do exactly that.) I won’t spoil anything for you now, in the hope that one day you will find and enjoy this precious book — but I have to tell you that the tale of the (fictional) Austrian ethnologist Marcel Appenzell and his ill-fated expedition to Sumatra is probably one of the best things I’ll ever read. Ever.
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Sometimes my own projects are a whole exercise in digression. Back in 2013, Little Earthquake created a production based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart. In the beginning, my writing task was to retain Poe’s original text in its entirety and to weave new text of my own in between, copying Poe’s style to flesh out the narrative. Poe’s unnamed narrator became Simon, an angel-of-death nurse whose instinct to care and whose instinct to kill had been intertwined his whole life. The paragraphs where I thought about Simon’s murderous backstory facilitated one of my favourite digressions, early on in the script, which sadly did not survive beyond Draft 3. The cue line from Poe ends at the first full stop after “story”; everything beyond that point was my own digressive invention.
SIMON: How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
Ever since I was a child, it has been my destiny to care for others as they drew near the end of their lives.
When I was three, I found a hedgehog curled up in a ball, warm but quite still, in the garden of our home. I placed him into a box and dug a hole to bury him in. I sat out until teatime so that he would not be alone. Later, when my father was planting winter bulbs, he found the box and, upon opening it, saw that the inside was covered in scratches — caused by the creature’s prickles, I presume.
As a mere child of seven — when my father would not, when my mother could not — it was I alone who accompanied my grandfather as he was dying. Dressed in the Spiderman outfit which I perpetually wore at that age, I lay upon his chest throughout the night and, when his breathing became shallower, I gave him one last big squeezy cuddle as he went on his final journey into death.
My adolescent years were marked by the simultaneous loss of both my father and mother while we were on holiday in the Mediterranean. At my insistence, we had taken a trip aboard a glass-bottomed boat, even though my parents were nervous sailors. To reassure them, I helped them to put on their lifejackets, fastening the knots myself with my capable hands.
As I was putting safety questions to the captain on their behalf, by some mischance we struck an outcrop of rock. The boat capsized with terrifying rapidity, whereupon we discovered that the strings of my parents’ lifejackets had become inextricably bound to the handrail.
As everyone else made their escape, the warm sea enveloped them and drew them beneath the waves. Diving down to them — for I was a confident swimmer — we pressed our hands together against the glass — I above, they below — as the boat sank into the depths. During those few minutes, I do believe I was a comfort to them, until the limits of my breath forced me to strike for the surface.
With all of this rich experience behind me, and with my burning need to ease yet more people through the last moments of their lives, the obvious career path for me was to become a nurse in our city hospital — where, for many years, I was indeed privileged to be present at the passing of many hundreds of patients.
We’d decided by Draft 4 that the show would be far too long if we used all the material we’d got, so we elected to start cutting — Poe’s text as well as mine. By Draft 8, the final touring version, the section was much reduced:
SIMON: How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
Since my childhood, I have lost everyone whom I loved most in the world.
The family cat. My sister, when she was still a baby. My aged grandfather. Both my parents, at the same time. I was actually there to comfort each and every one of them when they died.
As I grew older, I came to feel it was my destiny to attend to others as they drew near the end of their lives, and so the obvious career path for me was to become a nurse in our city hospital — where, for years, I was indeed privileged to be present at the passing of many hundreds of patients.
The text was by then much more economical, and advanced the story much more briskly, meaning that Simon’s dark past flashed by in a few allusive hints rather than in sumptuous detail. Both versions have their merits, but while I mourned (and fought) the cuts to this section, especially the particular detail of seven-year-old Simon’s Spiderman costume, the ultimate decision to let these episodes go was dictated by the need to put the audience’s experience first. I liked these details, but the audience did not need them. The literary writer in me has learned over time to know when he must defer to the theatre maker.
But now I’m in prose mode, rather than theatre mode, that spirit of deference is no longer so necessary. The reader of a book receives and interacts with the flow of words very differently to someone sitting in a theatre seat. So as far as my novels are concerned, digression is very much in again. Confidently, maybe a touch arrogantly, but also with a trust and hope that my work will one day find its way in front of readers who don’t think it’s TLDR, but who, instead, think it’s just right.
