This document discusses nonlinear writing, which presents information in a non-sequential, associative structure that allows readers multiple paths through content. Nonlinear writing has a long history including glosses, labyrinth poetry, and printed encyclopedias. In fiction, it emerged in novels and expanded in modernist and postmodernist works, including experimental novels, concrete poetry, and choose your own adventure books. Theorists note nonlinear writing complicates reading for closure but facilitates searches. Digital texts like hypertext further enable nonlinear writing through interactive fiction and programs like Twine.

1. N O N L I N E A R W R I T I N G
N O D E S , N E T W O R K S , & A S S O C I AT I V E L O G I C

2. N O N L I N E A R
W R I T I N G
• 1) a writerly activity
• 2) a specific type of
document
• 3) a readerly activity
• 4) playful, associative,
combinatory
• As opposed to linear
and sequential
Non-linear plot lines, illustration
from Laurence Sterne's The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman (1759–67)

3. - A S T R I D E N S S L I N , “ N O N L I N E A R W R I T I N G ”
Nonlinear writing: “their macrostructure follows an
associative logic, which assembles its composite
elements (paragraphs, text chunks, or lexias) into a
loosely ordered network. These networks offer
readers multiple choices of traversing a document,
which can facilitate specific types of reading
strategies, such as keyword searches or jumping
between main text and footnotes, and complicate
others, such as reading for closure or
completeness.”

4. H I S T O RY O F N O N L I N E A R W R I T I N G
• Middle Ages (glosses and
annotations)
• Baroque period labyrinth
poetry (poetic machines)
• Printed encyclopedias
during Enlightenment

5. N O N L I N E A R
P R I N T F I C T I O N
• Emerges with the novel as a
nonconformist literary genre
• Explodes in 20th century
(modernist and postmodernist
literature)
• Examples range from
experimental novels, to
concrete poetry, to
experiments with mathematical
constraints, to choose your
own adventure books
Marc Sarporta, Composition No. 1 (1961)
Lawrence Sterne, Tristam Shandy (1760)

6. Raymond Queneau, A Hundred
Thousand Billion Poems (1961)
Choose Your Own Adventure
books popular during 1970s
Digital text (hypertext and HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language)

7. T W I N E & I N T E R A C T I V E F I C T I O N

8. – J A C Q U E S D E R R I D A
Linear writing is “rooted in a past of nonlinear
writing, … a writing that spells its symbols
pluri-dimensionally; there the meaning is not
subjected to successivity, to the order of a
logical time, or to the irreversible temporality
of sound”
“The end of linear writing is indeed the end of
the book”
Linear / Nonlinear Writing

9. R AY M O N D Q U E N E A U ,
“ A S T O RY A S Y O U L I K E I T ” ( 1 9 6 7 )
reverse engineer: examine the construction or composition of a
product, typically in order to create a duplicate or similar product

10. – I A N B O G O S T, U N I T O P E R AT I O N S
“any medium—poetic, literary, cinematic,
computational—can be read as a configurative
system, an arrangement of discrete, interlocking
units of expressive meaning. I call these general
instances of procedural expression unit
operations.”
U N I T O P E R AT I O N S