How to Approach Unusual Structures

Nonlinear structures require attentive construction in service to the reader.

As you craft you structure, embrace the space for a little mystery. Give yourself permission to resist impulse to explain something as it happens in the narrative. This comes from the right place — helping the reader to understand importance, its weight or depth. But consider our actual lives, in which we sense something before we understand it. Allow that sense to happen without diminishing the reader's imagination through unnecessary or too-soon explanation.

It's ok for the not-quite-sure-what-this-means experience to be a little unsettling, especially when it raises the good kind of questions for a reader — the ones in which they are invested in the narrative.

When the clear explanation will matter most, reveal the full picture and context then.

Obviously (I hope) this doesn't mean being coy with your readers or trying to trick them. That's not what holding back means here, to lead up to some kind of twist or jump scare.

Particularly in nonlinear structures, immediate clarity of the fact-based variety is not necessarily the right approach. Instead, build to that through sensory images that clearly evoke specific emotions.

An attentive writer/self-editor can achieve having two scenes from wildly different times or places exist chronologically next to each other without explanation: here, the emotional cadence is either the same in both scenes, or the scene that comes first is on a lower rung of the same ladder than the scene that comes second. Readers are really much better at making connections, even subconsciously, than we often give them credit for.

I often say to trust your reader, and I say it again here. But the burden is on you to provide emotional consistency and clarity within the non-linear structure you adopt instead of a neat sequence of chronological events.

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