Narrative Structure Question

[loki-scribe.livejournal.com]

Has anyone here written a nonlinear narrative?

One of my stories this year seems to be structurally demanding a nonlinear narrative, since so much of the past, and how it shaped the present, plays a major role in the story. I haven't experimented with nonlinear narrative very often, though, and I'm wondering if anyone has any tips or advice on dealing with that extra chronological dimension. I'd especially like to know about pulling the like off without flashing back in any particular order, as I doubt I'll be able to work the flashback in in any kind of chronological order. (The two writers that come to mind when I think of nonlinear are Ursula K. Le Guin and Steven Brust, both of whom entwined two different, mostly linear timelines in the nonlinear work I've read, so it is difficult to extrapolate from them and apply it to my plot.)

Anyway, any help/tips/suggestions anyone's willing to offer would be wonderful.

Cheers!

Comments

[kittydesade.livejournal.com]

Since I'm watching it at the moment, it's not a book but the graphic novel Watchmen does pretty good with non-linear narrative. Faulkner, too, to some extent and depending on how much you can stand of him. Also the Wild Cards series do some good as a braided novel, although most of them are linear.

Right now I'm sort of sketching an outline for a non-linear Nanonovel, and what I'm doing is grouping them by themes and bookending them with parts of one day in the present. The rest deals with the past, and I'm grouping them by [learning language to speak the first time; learning a foreign language; learning how to behave socially], a short transition piece, [fighting a war; fighting a war; almost dying in a war], short transition piece, etc. I don't know how well it's going to turn out but that was the first thing I thought of?

Hope this helps!

[arrows4pens.livejournal.com]

Looks like I'm going to be doing this too... because I have a time-travel plot. And a narrative frame, as my characters informed me this morning. And not a frame based in the protagonist's time of origin, no, it's based in the past he visits, years and years after the events of the story. If that's not complicated enough.

That's probably not what you meant by nonlinear, though. I read Iain Banks' "Use of Weapons" a while ago, that was a mind-blowing example of simultaneous stories from the character's past and future coming together to become.. just wow. But yeah, those flashbacks were very chronological.

Good luck!

[drownedinlight7.livejournal.com]

one thing I would suggest is writing it linearly, and then maybe mixing it up in a way that makes since. That way, you know what happens chronologically, so you don't get confused, but still have the opportunity to present your fiction in an alternative fashion.

[hilandmum.livejournal.com]

I once wrote a story with a lot of flashbacks. I used two methods to differentiate the time periods, although not always successfully.

For the current time period I used present tense and regular font, and for the things that happened in the past, I used past tense and italics. You could also use different fonts or colors.

Mum

Edit to fix hilarious typo!

[imaginepageant.livejournal.com]

Jodi Picoult, one of my favorite authors, became one of my favorite authors because of her penchance for non-linear narratives. I've seen it done before, but nobody does it as successfully as she does, in my opinion.

A perfect example is The Pact, which centers around a teenage boyfriend and girlfriend who supposedly had a suicide pact... but only the girlfriend, Emily, dies, and the boyfriend, Chris, is suspected of murder. The story goes back and forth between the present, with Chris in prison and facing a murder trial and both families struggling to deal with the tragedy, and the past, starting with Chris and Emily's childhood and slowly leading up to why and how she died. The story could have been told strictly in the present, but watching everything unfold in the past was far more interesting than being told about it in the present. It added a whole other dimension to the story.

For a more unorthodox example, her novels Salem Falls and Songs of the Hunchback Humpback Whale are also both non-linear, but one timeline is moving forward while the other moves backward. They didn't build up as much suspense as books like The Pact did, as there was no big twist at the end (or, more accurately, the beginning) of the past timeline, but they were interesting nonetheless, and very unique.

Inspired by her signature style, I purposely chose a plot for my 2008 Nano that could be written in two timelines. It was a lot of fun to write, and I didn't find it difficult to switch back and forth between the timelines at all. In fact, it might've been easier to write than a linear narrative, because every time I felt stuck I could skip to the next chapter and start writing what was virtually a whole other story! It was also challenging, in a good way, in character development, because the actions of my main character in the past needed to be justified through his development in his past, and developing him in his past continually gave me new ideas for what he could do in the present.

If you're worried it'll be difficult to keep things straight, I'd suggest plotting out each timeline separately—it can be as simple as point-form lists of the important scenes that need to happen—and referring it as you're writing. It might help to look at each storyline as a whole, instead of both of them twisted up in each other.

[wayzgoose.livejournal.com]

I've done a book with a first person narrative in which about every fourth or fifth chapter is a remembrance of a significant event from each decade of his life, working backward from the present (age late-50s) to the time when he was six. The book I'm working on this year has narrative from different centuries interspersed throughout a linear storyline - not necessarily in chronological order.

In both instances, I've found that the important thing is to give the audience a clue regarding where they are. Recently read a manuscript that started "today," then skipped back four days, then I discovered that the "today" that was referred to in the first chapter was actually three years ago. It was so confusing I ultimately gave up.

My interweaving of a non-linear story into a linear story keys off of the chapter titles. In the first book (For Blood or Money (http://www.longtalepress.com/store/books/2), I titled every chapter and the ones that were flashbacks were titled consistently with things like "My midlife crisis hit the day I realized 33 was half-way through my life expectancy." I ultimately changed that and used narrative to indicate the timeline instead of depending so heavily on the chapter title.

In keeping the new book straight, I'm just numbering the chapters 1-n. But when I've got a historical chapter I extend the title to something like "7. Alexandria 385 B.C." It might not stay that way, but at least it's helping me define the differences while I plan and write.