Michael Griffith

Plot is a petty tyrant, almost always the part of novels that seems to me most false and dull. Lots of lives are full of incident, but whose has a plot? Digression gets a bad rap. Even the word itself implies that there’s a proper gress from which one has strayed, that every life is a line. But surely linearity is a myth, is something we impose only afterward, when it’s time to make a narrative. We are poor, forked animals who live most of our lives in a state of ungress. I like fiction that accommodates as much of the mess of consciousness as possible, and it struck me that this was a chance to put up or shut up. Digress plus egress equals progress. It’s not Archimedes, but it’s what I had to go on.

- Michael Griffith interviewed by Steve Almond at The Nervous Breakdown (6/11)