The beginning is not always the optimal place to start a story. Many authors have found that nonlinear storytelling, with its shifts across time and perspective, can deepen reader engagement and create a more layered narrative experience.
Nonlinear novels do not follow events chronologically. Instead, authors may move forward and backward in time or develop parallel timelines that unfold in conversation with each other. Veteran publisher, editor, and bestselling author Lou Aronica has written and edited many such works and believes the approach can succeed across genres.
“I’ve seen great examples in literary fiction, romance, science fiction and fantasy, mysteries, women’s fiction, and even thrillers,” he said. “The key is making sure that each timeline maintains the feel of the primary genre.” A thriller that suddenly adopts a pastoral tone in a secondary timeline, he noted, risks frustrating its core readership.
Aronica points to The Notebook as a novel that sustains a consistent romantic tone in both timelines, and The Hours as one that maintains “a sense of longing and desperation across three timelines while following three different women.”
The attraction of the nonlinear timeline
Authors choose nonlinear structures for many reasons. Shana Abé, a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction, values the way nonlinear approaches sustain tension and allow for controlled revelation.
She describes the structure as “the irresistible lure of making your readers want to find out what happens next, even if they think they already know. It can be an elegant, intriguing way to create suspense. But it has to be done delicately.”
Her novel The Second Mrs. Astor opens with Madeleine Astor, survivor of the Titanic, writing a letter to her newborn son. The fragments of the letter set the tone for a narrative that moves between past and present.
“There was no point in trying to foreshadow the fate of the Titanic,” Abé noted. “Instead, I used the letter device to open each chapter, with each fragment revealing a little more about both her past and her future.” The chapters that follow enact those revelations in vivid present-day scenes.
Hannah Byron, a historical fiction author and researcher, focuses her work specifically on dual timelines, a form of nonlinear storytelling. She writes what she calls “heroine journey fiction” and uses dual timelines in her Timeless Spies series to explore emotional continuity across generations.
“Human emotions such as sacrifice, courage, love, and redemption are universal and forever return in new forms,” she said. “Writing in two eras allows me to dissolve the distance between ‘then’ and ‘now.’”
Byron writes about World War II resistance women and aims to offer them, through fiction, the emotional closure history often denied. The modern timeline in her books allows readers to feel how resilience, defiance, and love echo forward into contemporary life.
Planning and momentum
While nonlinear novels can be immersive, they also present structural risks. Shifting between timelines too frequently can disorient readers, while staying too long in one era may undercut the energy of the other.
Aronica sees two primary challenges in crafting nonlinear fiction: maintaining forward momentum and ensuring that readers always know when they are.
“Well-developed internal arcs are essential in each timeline,” he said. “This guarantees that the story always feels as though it is pointing forward even if it is going back and forth in time.” Distinctive voices or tones can also help anchor each timeline.
Abé prefers a clean structure to keep readers oriented. She includes dates and locations at the beginning of chapters and seldom introduces major leaps in time. When she does, the choice is intentional. She noted that a single, strategically placed chapter can heighten a key revelation and deepen empathy for a character—a strategy she utilized when revealing a secret about her heroine in An American Beauty.
She used clearer structural distinctions in Starcaster, which features a time-skipping spaceship and follows a young woman in the near future and a young man a thousand years ahead who has visions of her. “The heroine’s chapters are told in first person, and the hero’s are told in third,” she said. “Each chapter had their names at the top, just for extra clarity. By the end of the book, both the heroine and hero are in the same timeline.”
Echoes across timelines
Byron approaches nonlinear structure through emotional architecture rather than mechanical alternation. She does not view her timelines as separate stories but as reflections of each other.
“The overall story arc lives in the connection; neither timeline can be read in isolation,” she said. Each shift between timelines responds to the preceding one, creating what she describes as an emotional call and response that propels both narratives forward.
She does not change her writing style between eras. Instead, atmosphere provides the distinction.
“The past glows with the grit, glamour, and devastation of the 1940s, while the present breathes in a sharper, modern-woman light,” she said.
Engaging and grounding the reader
To recap, navigating nonlinear structures requires deliberate strategies to maintain clarity and reader immersion, including:
- Using clear markers such as dates, locations, or a character name at the start of chapters to signal which timeline the reader is entering.
- Maintaining distinct voices or atmospheres so each timeline has a recognizable identity.
- Building internal arcs within each timeline to sustain momentum and avoid stagnation.
- Balancing revelation and withholding to create suspense without confusing the reader.
- Ensuring that emotions and themes tie the timelines together, so the story feels cohesive.
“No matter how you utilize nonlinear writing, you don’t want to lose the interest of your reader by muddying the timeline to the point of confusion or annoyance,” Abé said. “If you tread carefully, mindfully, a nonlinear structure can be a powerful tool to help create a powerful story.”
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Lindsay Randall writes web content by day and historical romance by night. She is currently finishing a nonlinear World War II novel that spans the mountains and coasts of the former Yugoslavia and her native Northwest Pennsylvania. She is a lover of old churches, poetry, and rainbow trout.