The Muse & The Marketplace 2024

Moving directly from point A to point B isn’t always the best way to tell a story. Sometimes we find ourselves beginning at the end, hopping back and forth in time, or circling around the same events until our understanding of them changes. Non-linear narratives can make for fascinating and thrilling reading, but writing them poses particular challenges. How do we maintain continuity, clarity, and suspense when our stories don't follow a straight line? How do we decide which episodes of a timeline we want to visit? How do we make forays into the past illuminate, rather than bog down, the present? How do we keep the reader oriented in where and when they are in the story?

Looking at works as disparate as Homer’s The Odyssey, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and more, we will discuss how authors time-hop successfully and why a non-linear structure serves the stories they tell. We will also dive into how we, as writers, can craft our own “disorderly” narratives. Expect to come away with ideas for finding the right “shape” for your plot, for building suspense when the reader already knows how your story ends, and for keeping the reader oriented in a narrative that doesn’t follow a straight line.