How is time organized in a novel? We were discussing the organizing principle(s) for a novel recently in one of my writing groups. Today I thought about a few books that I read recently and how they were organized.

I just finished reading Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, a Soviet-era science fiction novel that was organized as four short stories with an overlapping cast of characters. Time moved in a linear fashion in each story, but jumped over years from one story to the next. Each story was somewhat self-contained, but together they made a longer, coherent narrative.

Another recent read was Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy, a novel about reintroducing wolves into the wild in which the humans were more dangerous than the wolves. (See? Wolves aren’t that dangerous…) This narrative had two stories that ran simultaneously, each told linearly. One story was the wolf story and the other story was the childhood of the protagonist of the wolf story. The two stories were braided together, the narratives alternating until both stories concluded at the end.

I read a very long historical fantasy saga (The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu) that took place in a fictional, medieval China. There were many, many characters and lots of unfamiliar locations. The main narrative proceeded in linear time, but in places, the author would stop the main story and devote a whole chapter to the backstory of one of the major characters. At first, I thought this would be clunky and intrusive, but it had the effect of cementing those characters in my mind. In the end, I thought it was a clever way to allow the reader to keep track of so many characters over the 600+ page novel.

These three books are fairly conventional in organization. A couple of other books with less conventional organization stand out in my mind.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell has been called a “Russian-doll” novel with six interconnected stories that run from the 19^th century to the far future. It has mirror symmetry in which five of the stories move forward on their own timelines, nested like Russian dolls or the petals of a rose, until the middle of the book, in which there is a sixth central story, then the five stories move backward in time. It sounds weird, but he made it work.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan is a mosaic of 13 interlinked vignettes that move erratically through time. The protagonists, points of view, and writing styles change with each vignette, though there are many common characters. Some people have said that the structure is like a music album with an A side and a B side. The main themes are the effects of time’s passage and aging. But time is definitely not linear.

My conclusion is that nonlinear structures can be done, but should be thought out carefully, in service of the themes of the story.