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What Novelists Can (& Should) Learn from Poets

I used to say that short stories and poems have more in common than stories and novels, and to a certain degree I still believe this to be true. Both the story and the poem live and die by compression, by their ability to maximize meaning by finding precisely the right way of saying a thing so that extensions of meaning open up for a reader off the page, whereas novelists are wont to expand rather than compress, to put extensions of meaning right on the page, even to digress—-one of the defining features of the novel, after all, a gift from Mr. Gutenberg and his marvelous contraption.

But the reason I say used to say is that I wouldn’t want to encourage novelists to buy into the idea that their work is, or should be, any less focused or precise than the shorter form. I occasionally hear even writers I admire--who should know better--claim that novel-writing allows them to be less concerned with the word-by-word than stories because of the novel’s space to digress. Which sounds to me not just misguided but lazy; a novel’s digression must be as purposeful as anything else in the book, must have a reason to exist, must have an energy and forward movement and focus that propel the story and keep the reader’s attention, no matter how quiet or seemingly ancillary the moment to the overall arc of the book.

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