🌀The Art of Rambling: Why Storytelling Needs to Wander
😊Go On A Ramble With Makitia
Let’s start with a confession: I love to ramble. Not in the “grandma telling you about 1974 when all you asked about was the soup” kind of way (though honestly, grandma might be onto something). I mean the kind of rambling that stories need to feel alive. The kind of meandering that makes characters less like chess pieces and more like people you could accidentally get stuck behind in line at the grocery store, half-annoyed, half-fascinated, wondering if they’ll keep talking about the price of grapes or reveal something that cracks the universe in half.
Writers are often told: stick to the plot, cut the fluff, be concise. And sure, that’s good advice when you’re trying to assemble Ikea furniture or file your taxes. But stories aren’t Ikea furniture, and God help us if they ever start to resemble taxes. Stories are messy, contradictory, emotional, wandering little beasts. They need to breathe. And sometimes, they need to run off chasing a squirrel, because that detour is the part that makes the whole thing worth experiencing.
That’s where the art of rambling comes in.
🎨Rambling Isn’t Pointless - It’s Pulse
The word rambling often gets slapped with a bad reputation. It conjures up images of someone talking in circles, wasting time, forgetting their point. But in fiction? Rambling is a pulse. It’s the heartbeat of a character asserting: I exist beyond this plotline.
Because the truth is, no real person lives life like a story outline. No one speaks in purely functional dialogue:
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“We must leave now before the villain arrives.”
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“Yes, I will grab the map and the sword.”
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“Excellent teamwork, now on to chapter eight.”
That’s not how people work. People interrupt themselves. They start telling you about one thing, then remember another, then forget what they were saying, then somehow circle back in a way that, if you’re listening closely, makes them more human than anything else they’ve said.
Rambling in a story, when done right, gives a character a soul. It’s the crack in the glass that proves it’s not plastic.
😂The Secret of Real Characters: They Talk Too Much
Want to know what makes a character feel real? It’s not just clever dialogue or a tragic backstory. It’s their ability to talk about absolutely nothing and make you care.
Think about it: when you meet someone in real life, you don’t instantly know their darkest secret or their five-year plan. What you do know is how they get carried away talking about their favorite band from high school, or their weird obsession with ceramic frogs, or why they hate one brand of peanut butter with the fire of a thousand suns.
That’s the stuff that makes them stick in your memory. The unnecessary details. The “off-topic” moments.
In a story, when a character starts rambling, when they digress about their childhood fear of swing sets in the middle of a high-stakes heist-it feels alive. It reminds the reader that this isn’t just a pawn of the plot. It’s someone who, if they stepped off the page, might actually argue with you about which breakfast cereal is the most philosophical.
🔍Rambling Is Where Themes Hide
Here’s the sneaky thing: a ramble is rarely just a ramble.
On the surface, it might look like nonsense. But underneath, it’s usually bleeding into the heart of the story. A character complaining about the weather might really be telling you about their inability to control anything in their life. A tangent about pickles might be a metaphor for bitterness they haven’t admitted out loud yet.
The art of rambling is the art of disguise. It’s taking a truth too raw to state directly and letting it peek out sideways, through humor, through nonsense, through detours that feel unimportant until they suddenly aren’t.
Think about your favorite books or films: how many of their most memorable lines were completely “off-topic”? How many felt like the character was just riffing, only for you to realize later that the ramble was the point?
🗣️Rambling Makes the Plot Feel Less Like a Plot
Here’s the dirty little secret of storytelling: plots are artificial. They’re neat little constructions we use to cage chaos into something digestible. Real life, meanwhile, is messy, inconvenient, full of interruptions.
Rambling is what smuggles that mess into the neat box of story.
When a character veers off-topic, when they waste half a page talking about the texture of bread crusts or the exact shade of blue the sky never quite achieves, it’s an act of rebellion against the rigid structure of “beginning, middle, end.” It’s life leaking through the cracks.
And that’s what keeps readers from feeling like they’re being spoon-fed fiction. It makes the world breathe, reminding them: you’re not reading an outline. You’re eavesdropping on lives.
🖋️The Risk and Reward of Letting Go
Of course, rambling can go wrong. It can drag. It can feel self-indulgent. It can turn into an author showing off rather than a character existing. That’s why it’s an art, not just an accident.
The trick is balance. A ramble works when it’s true to the character, when it reveals something (even if subtle), and when it carries the rhythm of real thought. A ramble fails when it’s just filler or when it hijacks the story with no tether back.
But here’s the thing: the risk is worth it. Because the alternative is sterile storytelling. The kind where everything is neat and efficient but hollow.
If the choice is between a too-long tangent that makes someone laugh, or a perfectly polished scene that leaves them cold, I’ll choose the tangent every time.
Rambling as Connection
At its core, storytelling is about connection. And what connects us more than a ramble?
Think about late-night conversations where you and a friend start talking about one thing, then end up in a completely different universe. Those are the moments you remember, not because they were efficient, but because they were alive.
Characters who ramble recreate that feeling. They don’t just tell a story; they invite the reader to sit on the floor with them at 2 a.m. and follow their train of thought wherever it goes. That’s intimacy. That’s vulnerability. That’s what makes a story stick.
📚The Nonsense That Matters
In the end, the art of rambling is the art of trusting nonsense. It’s about knowing that not every word has to drive the plot forward at 60 mph. Some words can take the scenic route. Some can stop at the gas station to argue about chips. Some can wander into the woods, get lost, and come back with a pocket full of twigs.
Because nonsense, when handled with care, stops being nonsense. It becomes the part of the story that feels most like life.
And isn’t that the whole point? To make the reader believe, even for a second, that these words on a page are alive, and messy, and real.
✨Final Thought
So, the next time someone tells you to cut the ramble, to trim the nonsense, to stick to the plot-ignore them. Or don’t. Or do, but only half-heartedly, while writing a three-page digression about why their advice reminds you of a badly made sandwich.
Because the art of rambling is this: turning detours into destinations. And if you can master that? Your story will never just be read. It will be lived.
- Makitia Thompson
✨ Writer. Creator. Plot Twister.
✍️ Minds In Design
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