Digging Digression

"But you digress....."

Of course I do. I'm a digressionist not a novelist. I'm not about plot or characterization or decision making or conflict. I'm not even about pages, middles or endings. Everything is a beginning to me, I just capture those beginnings in the middle or at the end of a digression.

When people ask me "what's the point?", I answer "everything I just said or wrote is the point of me saying what I just said or wrote.

It's simple rilly.

I'm not a novelist which to some people means I'm not a writer.

Yet, I'm doing THIS right now whatever you want to call it.

I take the particular and present the universal. I can get away with being self-referential because I'm average enough to think that my struggles have a metaphoric quality and I'm wounded enough to recall them with a certain degree of vividity. I'm smart enough to know that if I don't understand something then pretty sure a lot of other people also do not understand that something. That's when I raise my hand and ask a question or write an essay which is, let's face it, a digression trying to capture my thought process on a subject that I don't understand which is almost everything.

I am as comfortable with misunderstanding as our planet is with entropy and chaos which we keep trying to explain to ourselves in order to avoid that sixth extinction; one minute away from midnight.

Ya know, the usual unusual which leads me to Stephen King.

King is a master plotmaker, characterizer, digressionist, conflict stirrer who always has a great beginning. He's a novelist as well as an essay guy. He's got it all but perhaps too much.

Here's where he goes wrong with me.

He has too much digression when he's plotting and characterizing as well as to much plotting when he's digressing and the results are disturbingly evident in much of his work. The dreams within dreams. The flashbacks in dream within dreams. The dream within a flashback within a dream even for minor characters who seem to exist only to flashback and backstory before they dream of their flashback and are then slaughtered.

No big loss

There's always another minor character to add and that character will have conflicts, decisions and usually childhood trauma to explain ad nauseum before he/she is slaughtered.

Y'all know what I'm sayn'.

Y'all read King.

I get tired of it. That's why I'm always happy to discover a new author who hasn't written a billion words in a thousand novels.

Frank Bailargeon, I'm looking at you and your book "Ambitions" which has taken a lifetime to complete. I wouldn't have known about it were it not for word of mouth. The word in this case coming from one of his nieces who was a student in one of my senior English classes.

Ambitions  doesn't mess around with digression. It's the first book in a planned trilogy that deals with the rise of protagonist John Morrisey from the desperation of steerage to success and love. I kept waiting for digression but instead got plotting with lots of conflicts, action, decision making and continual forward progress. Coherent...check. Rigorous....check. Authentic...check. Valid....check. Engaging...check.

Yeah I liked Ambitions and look forward to the next book.

It stayed on point and didn't bother to overmix digression and plot which King always does.

Let me digress about the relationship beween plot and digression.

Remember New York, New York directed by Scorcese and starring DeNiro and Minelli.

DeNiro cool.

Hawaiian shirts cool.

Saxophone cool.

DeNiro as an Hawaiian shirt wearing saxophone player.....somehow very uncool.

Scorcese cool.

Minelli cool.

Scorcese directing Minelli while shacking up with her.

Not cool.

The movie is a mess but somehow in that mess a fabulous title song emerged which makes the movie seem better than it is. 

Be careful with your Hawaiian shirts, saxophones and affairs.

Don't overmix digression with either characterization or plot.

Ambitiitions doesn't.

King does a little too often for my liking, most irritatingly in It and The Tommyknockers and at least half a dozen others whose titles I've already thrown out of my working memory. GTFO.

Of course all of this is just a digression as well as an example of premature publication. I had no idea this was going to exist until I started writing it an hour ago. That I guess was  the beginning.

Everything else was the middle.

This, I guess is the ending and the whole thing is in danger of having a pointwhich is what I've been essaying about all along etc.