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?