Hi, WriteByNighters,
Until recently, the novel I'm working on opened in 2016, then took the reader back to 1987, then 1982, then back to 2016, then back to 1987, and so on. Just thinking about it gave me temporal whiplash.
Something I read online made me pump the brakes and ask why I was taking this non-linear approach. Then I started to wonder what it might look like if I ordered my story chronologically. Then I started writing it that way.
Turns out, it's the right approach. For this book, that is.
As I write about in this week's post, "On Annoying Trends in Linearity and POV," the writer Denis Johnson found non-linear narratives and multiple POVs "annoying." That's fine; to each his or her own.
But that comment is what caused me to take a step back and explore why I was taking that approach, and why I thought it made the book better.
Turns out, I was resorting to trickery, in part to cover up a lack of confidence in the story itself. Which is a bad reason for playing with chronology and/or POV and/or anything else.
What I want to know from you this week is, how do you determine your approach to linearity and perspective when writing fiction?
Have you ever written a non-linear story or novel, and/or fiction with multiple points of view, and/or shifts between first- and third-person perspective? What are the potential benefits, and what are the potential pitfalls?
As a reader, do you enjoy fiction that plays with form in that manner, or do you, like Johnson, find it annoying?
