The benefits of a linear narrative are pretty obvious, which is that we’re comfortable with linear time, life moves forward, it makes the reader comfortable, it’s easy to write, etc. etc. etc. I find that in general, I default to a linear narrative unless the story shape calls for something else. I suspect this is the case for most writers in English, because we tend to think linearly and English is a linear language (and this is where I briefly deviate to mention Arrival, which I love so much and really made me think a lot about how English is constructed and how sentences are constructed in my writing).
But, look, non-linear narratives are so fun, and you can convey so much through non-linear narration.
Some of the benefits of non-linear narration is being able to maintain a high level of tension, because you don’t have to explain/narrate past events until you need to (flashbacks are examples of non-linear narration!) I used this fairly extensively in Build These Walls Anew so I could establish the motivating drive of the story (Blaine goes to find Sebastian after he disappears) without having to write an entire year’s worth of Seblaine interaction. Non-linear narration also lets you do a lot of tricks with unreliable narration or establishing subtext, because you can group events that are not necessarily next to each other in terms of time. I did this also in Walls, where flashbacks (not ones that Blaine necessarily experiences, but told through his limited 3rd person POV) show Blaine as an unreliable narrator because his summary of events in the past are very different from what actually happened.
Flashbacks are the pretty obvious example of non-linear narration, but there are a ton of other non-linear narratives that are really really fun. For example
- parallel stories – technically, every single time you write two narrators that narrate the same event one after another, or narrate the same day through different POVs, you are actually writing a non-linear story. I am doing this in my original novel, and it means that you can build emotions like futility (you know that the other narrator has already sidestepped the trap that the current narrator is now trying to implement), etc.
- converging stories – I did this in Like Crystal, where the scenes alternate between two storylines. One storyline starts in the most future point and works backwards. The other storyline starts in the most past point and works forwards. The last scene is when both stories converge. It was a story about a pop idol taking drugs, the drugs no longer having effect, the side-effects impacting his life–and the climax was the moment he first took the methamphetamine. Because of the side-effects of withdrawal and the drugs themselves, ending with the last scene linearly would mean that instead of building up to the ending, the last quarter of the story would be a downward spiral in terms of tone and mood (and I rearranged all the scenes linearly in Life Like Crystal, so you can actually contrast it and see the way the story builds better non-linearly).
- past-present-future stories – I did this a few times, either past-present or, in one case, past-present-future. It’s three parallel stories that move forward in tandem, and again, there are a lot of ways to build contradictions or tension using this method.
In the same way that choosing the POV is defined by the subtext that I want to build into the story, linearity is the same. Flashbacks in Walls let me build in the subtext of the unreliability of memory. The non-linear narrative let me show both the despair that drove the idol to drugs, and then the despair that the drugs led him to, to reflect the futility of the pop idol life. In my original novel, the parallel stories let me establish conflict across a vast expanse of space, to build tension and subliminally establish an antagonizing force without explicitly naming my antagonist.
So, the answer is both! But I think more importantly, to not be limited by whether or not the story is linear or non-linear. Subtext will direct the shape of the story.
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