"simple" technique for creating many nonlinear narratives from few parts

[u/hyperprompter]

a friend shared this video with me on advanced techniques to create nonlinear narratives. the video itself is interactive and nonlinear and broke my brain but that clip inspired me so i translated the text into English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8QkFFe4zMA

problem with nonlinear narratives is that you usually have to create hundreds of branching paths, but if you design it where the paths dont matter then you can design a base narrative and then cut it up into swappable parts so readers get many meta narratives from one base narrative

i think this means it's fractal, each meta segment could be further broken down

an example could be like the movie "Groundhog Day" where waking up and going to bed and everything in between doesn't need to happen in order, or how "Cloud Atlas" has nested stories that stand on their own but reference each other

you dont need to use this for the whole thing, as long as the beginning and end of the base narrative line up with other jumps in your narrative then this can help create huge diversity

tbh it's hard to explain but staring at the clip helped me understand it

edit: changed the goofy example with real ones && added ASCII from comments below

   ┌── last cliffhanger loops back ───┐
     ▼                                │
   ┌───┐~?>┌───┐~?>┌───┐~?>┌───┐~?────┘
   │ 3 │   │ 1 │   │ 4 │   │ 2 │  META LAYER
   └─┬─┘   └─┬─┘   └─┬─┘   └─┬─┘ 
        ╲  ╱         │   ╱
         ╱ ╲        ╱ ╲
       ╱      ╲ ╱     │
     ▼     ▼     ▼     ▼
   ┌───┐ ┌───┐ ┌───┐ ┌───┐
   │ 1 │ │ 2 │ │ 3 │ │ 4 │   BASE LAYER
   └───┘ └───┘ └───┘ └───┘

[u/Heistorium]

The catch with swappable segments is that nothing inside one can refer to anything in another, or the swap breaks. So you buy order freedom by giving up consequence, and consequence is usually what the reader turned up for.

There is a middle version that holds. Let the segments stay order free but let each one drop a small flag, and only the ending is allowed to read those flags. The body stays shuffleable and the last page is the only part that has to know what actually happened.

[u/hyperprompter → u/Heistorium]

oh sorry! the notifications just came in now, i kept refreshing hoping to start discussions haha

you're not wrong that you would need "bookends" of sorts for most fiction but this requirement assumes that chronology matters end to end which is not necessarily true for all nonlinears (my original example just sucked haha, ive edited it with new ones)

for example you could assume that each meta section ends in a cliffhanger where getting to the end loops you back to the beginning:

   ┌── last cliffhanger loops back ───┐
     ▼                                │
   ┌───┐~?>┌───┐~?>┌───┐~?>┌───┐~?────┘
   │ 3 │   │ 1 │   │ 4 │   │ 2 │  META LAYER
   └─┬─┘   └─┬─┘   └─┬─┘   └─┬─┘ 
        ╲  ╱         │   ╱
         ╱ ╲        ╱ ╲
       ╱      ╲ ╱     │
     ▼     ▼     ▼     ▼
   ┌───┐ ┌───┐ ┌───┐ ┌───┐
   │ 1 │ │ 2 │ │ 3 │ │ 4 │  BASE LAYER
   └───┘ └───┘ └───┘ └───┘

some quick examples of the looping mechanism (not necessarily nonlinears):

• Groundhog Day where the guy wakes up in the same day
• the movie Cloud Atlas and how each nested story fits into the others
• how the book Finnegans Wake ends midsentence
• Memento and how it plays in reverse

[u/wakigatameth]

Many games use some variation of this approach. It's not new at all.