Use a Nonlinear Format to Grab Your Reader by the Eyeballs

I was fortunate enough to guest blog at Writeitsideways.com, one of my favorite blogs. Here’s how my post begins… and please check out the site…

 

Reviewers and editors have commended the nonlinear format of Cold Quiet Country—a novel set in a single day, but with shards of backstory scattered across almost every page. Two dueling first-person narrators vie to control the story, each slipping into escalating past-tense flashbacks. A fifth viewpoint—of the missing girl who is the focal point of the war between narrators—is told in third person, forcing the reader to suspect the worst regarding her fate.

The only view on flashbacks that I recall having read is by Stephen King, and his advice was to avoid them. Instead I found that flashbacks are an integral component of a nonlinear story, and provide authors an entirely different toolbox of tension inducing wrenches.

Read the article at http://writeitsideways.com/use-a-nonlinear-format-to-grab-your-reader-by-the-eyeballs/