If you look up “tangent” in the dictionary, it takes a while to get to a definition like this one from Webster’s Universal College Dictionary: “digressing suddenly from one course of action or thought and turning to another.”
Tangents share a characteristic with excessive backstory and flashbacks: they start from the current story moment and then shift in time, place, point of view, or topic. As with a flashback, the author may mean to provide some kind of amplifying information, but then he forgets to stop after providing it and wanders not only off the beaten path, but off any path at all.
Sometimes that can be intentional, for example if she’s trying to produce a piece of stream-of-consciousness writing...
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