¶ Intro / Opening
This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon dot com slash writing excuses. Season twenty one, EPISOD twenty two This is writing excuses.
The order of the telling.
Tools not rules.
For writers, by writers.
I'm Mary Robinette.
Cảm ơn các bạn đã theo dõi và hẹn gặp lại
I'm Aaron.
And I'm Howard, and we are joined again by special guest and occasional house guest of mine, Margaret Dunlap.
Hello, you had me back. Ha ha
¶ The Art of Nonlinear Storytelling
Well, this week we are talking about the order in which we present information to the reader. As contrasted with the order in which events chronologically actually progress.
in the universe of this story and why those things might be completely different. Um one of my favorite examples of this is the standard police procedural where the order of the telling is we discover a body, we start investigating uh and we slowly begin revealing what happened, but in so doing, we begin telling the story chronologically of what led up to
that body appearing at the beginning of the telling of the story. But there are plenty of other ways in which this white w in which this might happen, and plenty of other reasons to do it.
So in addition to things like that, th I really started thinking about this when we were talking about this episode as um thinking about like nonlinear storytelling. Because I read V. E. Schwab and she uses this nonlinear structure all the time, where we're jumping back and forth in a timeline, which which will happen sometimes in the structure that you're talking about, where we'll we'll get a flashback.
Sometimes it's the the sh the book that starts with something and then it jumps and it's like twenty two hours earlier.
The record scratch.
Yeah. A classic TV and film device.
So sometimes it it's those sometimes it's just there's a piece of backstory as in the example that Howard was giving us that we don't get until later. Like when I talk about the mice quotient, I say It's not about the timeline, the order in which things happen. It's the order in which we present it to the reader. So I I too am am interested in why we do this, why we do these nonlinear things. I think it's about using time to play w to create tension for the reader. Does that
I mean I think there's a bunch of reasons. I think that's a big one. I mean one reason is the order in which things happen is often very boring. Yeah. Right. A to B to C, like if you think about your daily life, you went to work, stuff happened at work, you had lunch, you did more work. Right. Like that's not an interesting way to tell that. What's a more interesting way to tell it is
This awful thing happened with Frank, and then, you know, but that was also due to the thing that my boss did that morning. You know what I mean? And then like, you tell it the you give the information in the order in which you need it to set stakes, to establish tension, and then fill in information when it's necessary, right? I talk about this a lot when I talk about world building and info dumping.
about the idea that you can tell anyone anything so long as it's relevant to what's happening in the moment, right? And so I think people get very rigid about timeline and what the character knows and when they know it. And this is one of the the the
real limitations of having a specific POV that you're locked into is that often locks you into a linear timeline and without the ability to jump to future knowledge, past knowledge, things like that. So When you start layering in more timelines, it gives you so much more opportunity to build drama, to build tension, and then also just to give the reader exposition in chunks that feel relevant to the story rather than. the remodelling the reality of the situation.
One way I think about this a lot is actually in when I write interactive fiction, uh, which is a lot of which is often nonlinear, and there's a concept of interactive fiction which is storyless. And it's basically taking a story and kind of breaking it down into individual chunks that I've often seen describe as like a hand, like a card in a hand of cards.
And so what this the uh program does behind the scenes is it looks to see if you've met the conditions to get a specific card. And it will then offer you maybe like one of three cards. So like If you fought with your boss and you saved the cat and you, you know, went to the grocery store, this card is relevant. This one is relevant anytime you went to the grocery store, no matter what else happened, and it offers things to you.
That is something that you can't really replicate in prose, but what I like about it is it actually does make you think about what are the conditions for having this piece of information in front of the reader? And those conditions may not be just that we are later in the day, but that this other relevant thing has happened that makes this piece of content the best one for you to experience at this moment.
Yeah. I was sort of when I was thinking about this topic and I think like Mary Robinette, the first place my mind goes is on the sort of like I was saying on the TV side of things, you know, the the action show where like, you know. The the start might be a little slow. So what do we do? We start in the middle and then go back to the start. And now we have introduced this sort of suspense of.
I think the alias pilot does this fantastically. Yeah. Where you start out with Sydney Bristow being drowned by who knows who, who knows where, who knows why. And then we go back and she's like at UCLA taking classes. And we're like, this. This is interesting. I would like to know more about this. You know, when we were talking about the Act One setup, it's a way to keep it from being slow is by saying, No, no, there's stuff coming up. And so it increases tension and stakes, but you know
¶ Emotional Resonance Through Disordered Time
Trying to reflect on other ways that we can use nonlinear storytelling. I was thinking about a movie that came out in uh, I believe this was 2024, We Live in Time. Which is uh Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh uh playing a couple. And it is, if it were told in order.
This is a
very melodramatic story. It is it is a bug standard in some ways romance of like boy meet girl, they have a very weird meet cute, but they meet, they get together, you know, she had and I'm Going I'm spoiling something that comes out in the first minute
of the film is that she has cancer and they're trying to have a baby and will they have a baby? And so like if this were told in order, our two questions hanging over the entire film are is she gonna get pregnant and is the cancer gonna come back? But because they tell it and there's there's no chirons telling you where we are in the story, you're just going from moment to moment to moment throughout it. A minute into the movie you know that she has a baby and that the cancer comes back.
Yeah.
And in a weird way, like it deflates that tension, but because of that. it allowed me as an audience member to just sort of relax. It's like, okay, I don't have to worry about whether or not the cancer's gonna come back. I don't have to worry whether she's gonna have a baby. I know that happens. And so now I can just sort of watch the moments happening.
And that deliberate deflation of the kind of classical dramatic suspense is only possible because they t are telling it in this sort of out of time order.
It it changes it from the question of what if to okay, what do we do in the face of inevitability, right? Yeah. Which sort of leads me to think about one of my other favorite structures when it comes to um playing with time, which is the use of parallelism. Right. Um so a book I worked on, which is Sarah Gailey's Just Like Home, has two timelines in it.
One is the character as an adult as she goes home to care for her alien mother, and the other is the timeline of her as a child and her relationship to her father, who in the present timeline we know has gone to prison for doing terrible things, right? And so the parallelism of both of those plot lines developing about her relationship with these two parental figures.
Is part of the engine that drives that book, right? Um, or uh there was a movie from several years ago that, you know, you talking about uh uh we lived in time. sort of reminded me of called After Sun, which is about a woman going back as an adult to a resort that she went to with her father as a child and trying to understand her relationship with her dad. And you get these sort of parallel timeline structures.
of her as an adult and her as a child as we understand more about who she is in in both timelines reveals more information that contextually cross pollinates in really exciting ways.
What I like about that that is that it's in both examples This nonlinear thing causes you to recontextualize scenes that would otherwise feel fairly ordinary because it you bring dramatic weight from from the other timeline to it.
There's a classic application of the uh the repeated flashback structure where the current story that we are telling we will flash back to a prior experience that was formative or similar, and we are running that story and the current story forward at the same time.
in order to mirror it not not just in order to provide context, although it certainly does that, but also to uh to mirror and to echo uh voice, tone, emotional content, you know, the emotion of the flashback event is ramping up to its own climax. as we are ramping up the main story. Um and the flashback may have had a tragic ending, which set up
uh the beginning of the current story, which may have a triumphant ending, which provides a wonderful contrast. And at the end of the story you sit back and you look at it and say, Oh, well that was a perfect use of flashback because Uh if you'd told me the tragedy up front, I would have been miserable, and wouldn't have wanted to read the rest of your book. Um let's go to a break, and after the break, I want to quote William Faulkner.
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¶ Character Development and Scene Connections
In Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner famously wrote, The past is not dead. It isn't even past. I love that line because what it says to us, and it's the theme kind of the whole work there, uh, what it says to us is that uh everything that's happened to us. Is kind of still happening because it's in our memory. It colors who we are, it shapes what we do. it's formative, it's contextualizing, and it exists.
when we talk about nonlinear storytelling For the writer, it exists as a tool for shaping the story, giving context later on.
Yeah. I think what's really interesting about that is I know for me when I think about timeline and linearity, it's very the default my default mindset is this is something that relates to plot, right? It is the order that events happen, events happening, it relates to plot. But what I think you're really underlining
is that the order of telling is also a mechanism of characterization. And it allows you to show contrast between who were people in the past or before they knew something or after they knew something. because we are all shaped by those experiences and fictional characters included.
This goes to one of my favorite examples of a way in which you can play with time on a micro level, right? A lot of what we've talked about are macro structures. But in shonen anime, for example, you will have a fight scene that takes like six episodes to resolve, like 10 seconds of action that takes six episodes.
And one thing that you'll the one thing that's extending that is the sort of micro flashbacks or playing with the length of time as these characters have monologues or conversations or moments. that reveal deep things about character, right? Shonen anime is all about the melodrama of the action of of violent conflict as illustrating character growth and development, right?
Like the recent anime free run is incredible at this. It's not really shown in, but still does this very, very well. And it's a way to play with time to sort of do the thing that Howard you're talking about in terms of past is not even past, and sort of what you're talking about in terms of using it for character.
Yeah, I think one of the things to think about when you are doing something nonlinear is what is your connection? Like what is the thing that is connecting one thing to the next if it's not time? And sometimes it's character development, sometimes it's emotion, sometimes it's theme, but it is something to think about because.
I think where nonlinearity can get a little like tricky and something I think about a lot in interactive fiction is smoothing through transition points. Yeah. Because we have a lot of language to go linearly from one point to the next.
So you can say like
three hours later, you know what I mean, there's like a thing that exists that we know about, but if it's like three emotional revelations later, it doesn't feel like it has exactly the same ring to it. So like how do we move through? And part of that is knowing what is the connective tissue from one scene to the next.
if it isn't time and it's character development, how do you end your scene in a way that there is something that the character is about to learn or is about to know about themselves or the world that you can then pick up in the next scene so that even though it happened sixteen years before, it feels like you're actually still on some sort of through line.
Linear time is not always the most interesting way to to get from point A to B, right? So
Yeah. cheap tricks you can do is to um to have a visual link. Yeah. Eve even in prose, you know, if someone picks up a coffee cup in one scene, then in the next scene someone is setting down a coffee cup. even though they are separated by a giant span of time.
In film and TV that's called a match cut.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think another kind of very prosy way to explore that is, you know, if you're thinking about a writer like Virginia Wolf in that very stream of consciousness style and you know, Orlando.
Centuries pass in a paragraph, but you always do have you have that action that carries us through, you have the theme that carries us through. Um And I was thinking that this actually sort of dovetails with what we were talking several weeks ago about the uh the perils of act two in a three act structure.
of nonlinearity can be a way to sort of force yourself and your reader to be thinking in those process sorts of terms, like if the outcome is known or the outcome is maybe already happened, it forces us back into that space of progress of process.
¶ Practical Tools for Managing Timelines
I now have the the rubber meeting the road question. Um what are some what are some technical tools that you use? In order to keep things straight in your own head when you are running the telling in a different order than the world building, the actual events, what do you use? How do you do it?
One thing I want to flag is people will love to put at the start of each individual chapter the date or the time or something like that. That doesn't work. People don't read those and people don't remember those. I mean, there there's some percentage of readers who do, but the a lot of readers, enough readers will be very confused because You're relying on just that to communicate the order in which things happen. And boy, howdy, me personally, never works.
I I can tell you the the number of times that I've had people say, When does this story take place? And at the top it says nineteen fifty two. Yeah. Like, yeah.
Yeah, no, it it's like the slug lines, even as a screenwriter submitting this to other people who read screenplays, nobody's reading the slug lines.
Like they're useful when you wanna go back and clarify. But for me, the the thing that I try to do is grounding the the reader with some sort of sensory detail that is thematically linked to the story, but also tells you something about the time and place. preferably something that the character is interacting with.
So if I want to indicate that one story was in springtime, then I'm gonna be having them cutting tulips. And if I wanna indicate that another story uh you know, another part of the story is in winter, they're putting a a scarf on.
uh for my own head, I'm, you know, it's like keeping track for the reader and then also just for me as a writer and as tempted as I am, it's like I'm a screenwriter. My solution to all things is index cards, which is Sometimes true. But actually if I'm just working on something for myself, I tend to leave myself a lot of like notes and you know, what whatever program you're in, there's some ability to leave yourself that sort of
marginal note. And so it'll go through it's like, hey, remember to set this up in the earlier scene. Or, you know, it's like, This shouldn't get mentioned in the next scene because to them it hasn't happened yet. And so I always leave those flags for myself if I can see the pitfall of. I might be messing up my continuity. I will try to just leave those flags and then do a read through later of making sure that my plants are where I want them to be so that I can pay them off the way.
Extremely relevant question because as we are recording episodes, we're often recording them out of order and we need to remember not to refer to episodes that we've previously recorded but that you haven't heard yet.
I don't know what you're talking about. I love risotto. Love it.
I will say one way that I do this that is totally unhelpful to anyone who's not me, but we'll share anyway, is that I actually sometimes, uh in terms of figuring out what order I want to. If I'm like, I want this to be nonlinear, but I'm actually not a hundred percent sure which nonlinear order I want to go by. What is my connecting thread? Do I want to follow a character, a timeline, the violin that's in every scene in like the
which we haven't talked about, like the non-linear where there's not much connection from one to the next. The connection is all thematic and like the characters change completely. Is I will put it in twine, which is a program people use for interactive fiction. And I'll basically create index cards in there that give a summary of like what the scene is. And then I will connect them with each other and play it like a game and be like, okay, if I go from scene one to scene five.
Here is the order of things people will get. One, five, three, two. That works that way. Okay, no. What happens if I went one, two, four, eight? Okay, that's gonna be this different story. Which of those is the story that actually I want to tell? Because with enough craft, theoretically I can make any of them work, but it's like, what am I trying to have the reader walk away with?
Which is something I always think about when I'm telling a story. What is the end thing that I want them to like take away?
I I will say that there is one edge case where it can be useful or interesting to deliberately confuse your reader for them to not know when things are happening. One is that can be misdirection of they think something happens in the present timeline and you later realize it was happening before. And the other is maybe just an aesthetic one, right? You mentioned Virginia Wolf. A lot of times in her books, it's very unclear when something is happening. Is this a memory or is this happening now?
Or is this something that's going to happen? I don't think it's ever going to happen. Anyways, whatever. It's often very interesting and there's She does ne clearly signal to the reader, don't worry about this. It doesn't matter when this happened. What matters is the character feels this and the emotional quotient of it. And you can use that as a writer in specific circumstances. Obviously, don't overuse it because confusing your reader on purpose is often a very unpleasant experience.
I'm gonna flag one other version of the nonlinear timeline, which is the nonlinear timeline between work. So when you're doing prequels, when you're doing uh interstitial materials where you the writer are writing it nonlinearly, but you know that someone at some point is going to stack them up linearly. Um, Aeon timeline is a really useful thing for tracking exactly when something happened. Um, the Lady Astronaut book.
wrote those nonlinearly. So if you read them in the sequence that they came out, you start like at the end of the story and then you go back. It's like I it is all over the place. Um, and so I use A-line Aon timeline now, but I did not originally, which is why if you actually try to stack them, the times don't line up.
And fortunately, most people don't actually notice. Um, the other thing that I'm gonna say is going back to something that Aaron talks about, which is the idea of the information art. that tracking the information that you need when you're when you're moving things around, um is really extremely helpful thinking about when does my reader need to know this information. And sometimes when you are moving things around, you'll think, oh, I can't move it.
because they need this information that they haven't gotten. But you can also look at it and go, okay, well what happens if they don't have that information yet? And that can be kind of a a fun thing to play with.
I have a just talking about the tools and multiple works. I have a spreadsheet of the chronology of the Schlack mercenary universe. which I created in order to create the 70 Maxims annotated book, because there's this in-universe artifact that got passed around to people and As the people as it was passed around to people chronologically, they made notes.
in the maxims that pertained to their to their life. So as you're flipping through, you will have a page that's got four notes on it. And those notes may have been written fifty years apart. And I had a spreadsheet. to keep track of that. And once I built the spreadsheet, F first I looked at it and realized, oh my goodness, there's a story here that I need to tell because these two people were on different sides of the same war.
Um, wow, that's interesting. And the second thing was I need to expand this spreadsheet to cover the entire chronology of my story because I appear to have lost track of some things. I need to stop doing that.
Were were you I'm curious, as you were doing that, were you also tracking, cause some of the characters who were annotating are characters in the Schlock Mercenary stories, were you also tracking like when in the timeline of the other comics, they would have been in possession of this book making that note. Yes.
Yes, I was.
Choices were made.
Right. Choices were made. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun doing that. But the big value of it for me, beside the fact that I sold a lot of those books, the big value the big value for me was that I learned how important it is. to track chronology even if you think it's gonna be linear.
Yeah.
Just tracking it and a a spreadsheet is a great tool to start with.
¶ History, Process, and Homework
So we've been talking a lot about this nonlinear things and and there's this one other piece that I wanna talk about. because it's the experience of writing something nonlinearly. When you know that you wanna write something nonlinearly, um, one of the hard things is the transition from one scene to the next. And that's hard anytime.
But I want to give you permission, if you're doing something nonlinear, that when you've accomplished everything in that scene, that you can just stop writing the scene and not worry about the transition until the entire thing is done and then come back and do the transitions. Because those transitions exist to move you from one scene to another, regardless of whether you're doing something in a linear timeline or not.
And so it can be very, very hard to figure out, well, how do I get out of the scene when you don't actually know what scene is going to follow it? So you do have permission to just stop writing it and do the transitions later.
And then one thing I wanted to say as we head towards the end of this particular timeline of this episode is Um, if this is all sounding very newfangled and complicated to you, a very contemporary technique, I just want to point out that nonlinear writing has been in fiction since the origins of the novel. The first novels.
were using epistolary as a frame or throughout the book. And epistolary is one of the classic forms of nonlinear storytelling because they were presenting them as found journals or found letters or all of these different framing techniques. So the when we think of the novel from the very start, it was always nonlinear and actually
strict linearity linearity is a very modern construction. And so when you think about playing with time and playing with perspective, I encourage you to think broadly and explore and have fun with it.
I think that brings us to homework. Margaret?
Well, if we're count taking things in a linear order, I believe that does come next. So For your homework this week, what I'd like to encourage you to do is find a story, a TV episode, a movie, some contained story that is using experimenting with some form of nonlinear storytelling. and enjoy it, go through it, and then go back through and track the gap.
where is the where are character knowledge things changing and where are we seeing characterization because of where knowledge bases have changed and where is audience information changing and how does that affect where where and how we are reading or experiencing what's happening next. Dive yourself a little kind of reverse outline, unpack it there.
Great. So it's time now to pause for our book of the week. since we're in the middle of the episode. And that book is um The World Wasn't Ready For You by Justin C. Keys. He's got this great story with the same title, which is a nonlinear story, and it totally recontextualizes. And I want you to be thinking about it as you're listening to this entire episode.
This is, has been, will have been, writing excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information visit writingexcuses.com.