If you listen to the way that people relate the things that happen to them, some interesting differences emerge.  Even in this most basic form of storytelling, about a visit to the doctor, or what happened when you ran into someone you weren’t expecting to see, there are distinct ways of doing so.

Some people tell what’s happened in a linear way, going through events in sequence, and reporting conversations in the form ‘I told her…She says to me…’ and so on.  Others are less involved in recounting the particulars of what happened and will tell a story such that it relates to a particular theme.  Quite often, these will be consistent, and point to matters of character, eg the friend who tells you about their bad luck in love, the colleague who boasts about how he stitches people up, etc.

It’s easy to assume that people telling things in a more linear way are ‘telling it like it is’, but even then you’ve got to take into account that they’re not telling you everything that happened in their day.  Instead, they relate matters of personal and hopefully mutual interest, and that editing process itself can be a revelation. 

I’m very much a non-linear storyteller, who talks in an associational fashion that darts about here and there, through personal experience to things I’ve heard or read, leading to tentative conclusions and models-in-progress.  The same applies to my writing: I’m much more comfortable connecting apparently disparate themes and concepts through a narrative than following a relentlessly linear way forward.  And that approach has its advantages, and a downside.

Currently I’m writing a sample script for a television show that’s very linear, and it’s a fascinating experience.  Whereas I’d normally hop, skip, and jump between characters and locations, here my guiding light is one particular story being followed through the duration of the programme.  And that’s stretching me in interesting ways.

In practice, what it means is I’m having to approach the story in a different fashion, pausing to find the drama inherent in every scene.  There might not be any on the surface, but this is a show where all the main characters are involved in the same profession, so one way to get across conflict is to present different professional attitudes and approaches.  And that itself is useful, because it forces me to delve more deeply into the characters I’ve been given to work with and reveal their differences.  In the process, it also creates interest for the audience, hopefully, who can see what makes their heroes tick and enjoy the teamwork and tensions they experience.

Linearity also changes story choices that I’d otherwise make by reflex, and anything that challenges writing habits has got to be a good thing.  In this instance, I can’t cut away to what some of the other characters are doing without one of the protagonists being there, and the protagonist will always be there in a professional context.  Again, it obliges me to bring fresh thinking to what I’m doing, rather than rely on whatever traditional approaches to writing I’ve habituated to.

So.  It’s not an easy piece of writing, the script I’m working on.  But it’s one that’s teaching me things that’ll be useful in more personal projects that I tackle, and get me to think in terms of the advantages of linear thinking, rather than dismissing that approach as I’ve tended to up until now.  Anyway, straight lines were good enough for the Bauhaus movement, so I’m sure I can do something interesting with them.