I Love Inefficient Books

the pleasures of stories that break writing rules

I’m rereading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and what’s striking me as fun about the text is its episodic structure. Yes, the novel has an overarching plot, but that plot is often interrupted with comical vignettes, not all of which are short. It often seems clear that Twain simply had a good joke or a good idea for a scene, so he found a way to shoe-horn that scene into the novel. This wandering structure is part of what makes the novel both so entertaining and so rich—it’s consistently funny, and the jokes give the reader little bursts of pleasure that motivate them to keep reading, but the vignette structure also allows the novel to offer a wide-ranging, sometimes wandering comic panorama of rural 1830s America.

The novel is, in other words, inefficient. There are so many delightful moments in the book that are unnecessary for the plot. For example, Twain makes Huck overhear a few ghost stories, which are retold at length, that have no connection to anything that happens before or after. If they were deleted—and I am sure that a modern editor would suggest their deletion—readers would understand Huck and Jim’s journey just as thoroughly. (For a fun thought exercise, imagine how contemporary editors would absolutely mangle so many great books from the past.)

Contemporary writers are taught to see this sort of inefficiency as a flaw. Fiction writers are often  taught about a trick called “Chekhov’s gun.” As the story goes, Chekhov once said: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.” The rule suggests a minimalist aesthetic: “unnecessary” is bad; cut everything that does not serve a purpose, that does not play out by the end of the plot (and here, the end of the plot is imagined as the telos of storytelling). The Chekhov’s gun rule is particularly legendary in the world of playwriting and screenwriting, where beginner dramatists are told to cut everything that does not move the plot along in a logical manner.

Beginner dramatists are told to do lots of other things, too; the world of screenwriting instruction is unbelievably prescriptive. Screenwriting technique—I am thinking here of books like Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, which provides, and I quote, “ironclad laws” for producing mass-marketable screenplays—have exerted a large influence on what readers and audiences these days expect from storytelling. We expect details to “matter” (i.e. be relevant to the plot’s conclusion) because generations of film and television writers have had the Chekhov’s gun principle drilled into their heads. They have had other principles drilled into their heads, too: there must always be conflict, and that conflict must have stakes and simultaneously reveal something about character while moving the plot forward in a logical manner. Exposition must be done subtly, through dialogue, but not in a way that seems like exposition to the audience. All characters must change throughout a story.

the gun is staying on the wall.

I’m not going to pretend that these screenwriting principles do not result in fun entertainment that is, in its own way, satisfying. I am not too cool to get sucked into perfectly-written TV shows. A show like Seinfeld achieves a certain kind of structural perfection: everything ties into everything else, every detail “matters” (i.e. contributes to the ultimate resolution of the plot or subplot), and so on. This sort of writing produces an almost addictive craving for more. When I finish an episode of a show like Seinfeld, I want to watch another one, much like when I eat a Dorito, I am almost compelled by some force larger than me to reach for another one.

But there is a certain expansiveness that is lost when writers adhere too perfectly to these rules. We might call a show like Seinfeld “tightly written” as a compliment, but this tightness can also feel restrictive, airless. There is only so much you can do when you are clad in the iron of “technique.” This is one reason why I so enjoy reading novels from the nineteenth century—this logic of efficiency is not at their core, and in fact the novels often seem to revel in this looseness. Why is there a detailed recounting of the hunting and capture of a wolf in War and Peace? Because the scene is poetic and tragic, that’s why! Why does Twain spend a few pages describing the tacky décor of a middle-class family? Because it’s hilarious, that’s why! Why does George Washington Cable spend thousands of words describing New Orleans architecture? Because it’s interesting, that’s why! These scenes allow for the pleasure of storytelling that isn’t focused on building toward some payoff. They assumed that their reader was not impatient to finish their book but that readers wanted to spend some time in their fictive worlds, to get their money’s worth. The scenes can be appreciated as independent vignettes, not steps toward a conclusion. The audience does not need to be frogmarched to a happy ending. The writers I love most were skilled, but they weren’t technicians in this sense. They didn’t write plot-machines. That is where so much of their character, their charm, their experimentation, their best sentences, came from.

It’s strange to me that nineteenth-century literature is so much more inefficient because all of the writers I have listed wrote their drafts by hand. And they didn’t use ballpoint pens, either! They had every reason to write as efficiently as possible! I imagine that, as Twain’s hand cramped in the middle of a lengthy ghost-story told in dialect, he might have wondered why he was bothering to include the story in his draft. But I’m glad he did: the inefficient writing method offers a sense of life, a depth and color, a pleasurable looseness, that is so often absent from film and television, and from those books that borrow the story-machine techniques of film and television. Of course, this isn’t to say that writers should be self-indulgent or boring. The vignettes, episodes, or descriptions have to be good. I don’t want to revel in plot-level inefficiency alone. But I also love the times when reading feels, not like being driven to a denouement on a high-speed train, but, as Huck would put it, lazying along as I watch the lonesomeness of the river.