Nonlinear Storytelling

My approach to storytelling is not the most imaginative.  The stories themselves are imaginative, I like to think, or at least elements of them are, like the magic systems, the worlds, or the scientific extrapolations, but the way in which I tell the story tends to be straightforward and linear.  Oh, I enjoy playing with language, using techniques like alliteration, allusion, metaphor, and so forth to help make scenes and descriptions more evocative, but my approach to the story itself tends to be a simple sequence of events, one after the next, cause and effect, stepping from one scene to the next.  This sometimes works – I think it is ideal for Impressions, which is supposed to have a somewhat biographical, memoirish atmosphere – but it is lacking in creativity, and it can hamper the telling of more complicated stories.  It is a sign of how my brain functions that I did not realize the limits this approach imposes until recently.

Non-linear storytelling is a broad term to refer to any kind of story that does not follow a plain, sequential path.  Arguably, any story that includes multiple viewpoints is inevitably a nonlinear story, although the extent to which they are nonlinear can vary greatly.  Some stories will interweave viewpoints and plots so elements of each that are supposed to be happening at roughly the same time will be read in close proximity, while others will advance a single perspective up to some point before returning to another perspective and advancing that one all at once.  Those are basic examples of nonlinear storytelling; they can be far more imaginative.  Flashbacks, retrospectives, indirect storytelling techniques: all are forms of nonlinear storytelling, and there are more that do not lend themselves to simple identification and description.

Despite my extensive experience with Stormlight Archive, which might be the most famous recent example in speculative fiction of nonlinear storytelling – with its extended flashback sequences interwoven with the contemporaneous plot, so that the flashback sequence in each book will reach its climax around the time of the main plot climax, but the flashback climax coincides roughly with where the main plot started – it was my Wheel of Time reread that prompted me to finally think about these ideas of nonlinear storytelling more deliberately.  Specifically, books 9 and 10.  Crossroads of Twilight essentially jumps back in time from the conclusion of Winter’s Heart to provide the perspectives of numerous other characters on the events that occurred at the end of the latter.  By the time we reach the end of book 10, we’ve basically only managed to catch up to the end of book 9.

If Jordan’s epic demonstrates one technique for handling the nonlinearity often inherent to managing multiple viewpoints and plots, Tolkien provides us with another.  The Lord of the Rings is certainly the most famous example of providing viewpoints in chunks, rather than interleaving them throughout the course of the book.  The technique used to be more popular, though it has fallen out of favor for some decades now.  As an author, I can understand the temptation to present each viewpoint as a block, especially in the case of something like The Lord of the Rings, where the different viewpoints can be conceived of as different stories happening in parallel.  Since it can be conceived of as a single story, it may be better read as a single story, so that the tension is not spoiled by being broken up with scenes from other viewpoints, and so that the reader does not lose track trying to juggle between the different storylines.  It takes a supremely confident and capable author to pull this technique off, however, because, inevitably, readers will have favored viewpoints, characters, and storylines.  Interleaving them means that the reader won’t be subject to more than a chapter or two at a time from a perspective they don’t like before they can return to the perspective they do.  If the story is presented in chunks, then it’s easier for the reader to skip the viewpoints they don’t like, or to fall out of the book entirely from being subjected to it for an extended period.  It’s not even that they will necessarily dislike the viewpoint, but they will like it less than another, and in this case, as in so many things, it’s all relative.

In my previous, unpublished experiments with multiple viewpoint stories, I’ve been prone to do the engineer thing.  Basically, I rotate sequentially through a series of viewpoints.  If I have six viewpoints, I will write a chapter from each before returning to the top of the sequence and repeating it for the duration of the book.  That’s pretty much what I did with my first-ever novel draft, Fo’Fonas.  It’s…not a good technique.  Switching somewhat regularly is good, but being so regimented about it will make the plot feel stilted and can actually confuse the reader if events are not happening contemporaneously.  I’d like to think I’m doing better in my current efforts on Golems and Kings, which is not splitting up the chapters by viewpoint.  Instead, multiple viewpoints/storylines (storylines is probably the better word, since the whole text is written in third person omniscient) are all presented within a single chapter.

Most of the time, for most stories, these considerations are sufficient.  Balancing a timeline across multiple viewpoints and storylines, and deciding how the viewpoints will be sequenced and presented is all the nonlinearity most stories will necessitate or support.  Aside from minor deviations, smaller versions of the Wheel of Time example discussed above, most stories don’t ask for anything more imaginative, and, indeed, most would suffer from trying to impose something else.  Even flashbacks, probably the most common nonlinear writing device, are best deployed sparingly.  Sanderson pulls it off masterfully in Stormlight Archive, but in many other cases, no matter how well-executed the flashback itself is, the effect on the story is jarring and counterproductive.  As always, though, there are exceptions, stories where it is, in fact, appropriate to think a little harder about the sequence of the storytelling and do something more creative and imaginative.

If you’re expecting me to bring up All of an Instant, that book, for all its time-agnostic nature, is actually told in a fairly linear fashion, insofar as the term can be applied.  Time may not exactly have meaning in the book, but causality still has some sway, enough to provide a more or less standard directionality to the narrative.  Frankly, I don’t read a lot of deeply nonlinear books.  They tend to feature more prominently on the literary end of the spectrum, and that’s not somewhere I draw from very often.  This is How You Lose the Time War is probably a decent example, although I haven’t read it, and, like All of an Instant, my understanding is that the letters of which it is composed are sequential, even if the external timelines are not.

Going truly nonlinear is…difficult.  It means effect won’t necessarily follow cause, and that tends to be dissatisfying to read, not to mention confusing.  Memoir or retrospective type works, whether fictional or semi-nonfictional, might be the best example.  You already know the conclusion, so the rest of the book can be read like a kind of extended flashback, but it doesn’t need to be a sequential flashback.  It might tell multiple stories that weave together, all starting at different times and building to different times, but ultimately compiling into the person, fictional or otherwise, who is doing the reminiscing.  Like a framing story.  Indeed, framing stories often induce a certain nonlinearity to a story, since we get at least a hint of the outcome before we go into a recollection of what transpired, like in Frankenstein.

I almost wonder if “nonlinear” is not the best term to use – “nonsequential” or “asynchronous” might be more useful.  Since causality will almost always be preserved, what is usually called “nonlinear” storytelling most often consists of, for instance, having a historic plot weaving in with a plot happening in the present.  However we choose to refer to this family of named and unnamed techniques, they aren’t appropriate for all stories, or even necessarily for most, but it’s worth keeping in mind, at least for the engineer in me, that a simple chain of events is not the only way, and definitely not always the best way, to tell a story.