Non-Linear Writing: How Nabokov, Faulkner, and Gabaldon Wrote Out of Order

In 1967, Vladimir Nabokov received Herbert Gold of the Paris Review in his suite at the Montreux Palace in Switzerland. When the interviewer asked how he worked, Nabokov answered:

"The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done."

Nabokov wrote his scenes in pencil on index cards, with an eraser on the end of the pencil, and then rearranged them. He drafted much of Lolita this way, in roadside motels, while his wife Véra drove across America in search of butterflies.

Many other writers have worked like this, to the point that the method has a name: non-linear writing.

What non-linear writing is

Writing non-linearly means drafting the scenes of your novel out of order, following neither the chronology of the story nor the order of the chapters, and then assembling them.

The sequential approach, which runs from chapter 1 to the last, is the most intuitive, and it's the one we learn at school. On a long story, though, it assumes you know exactly where you're going before you set out.

Non-linear writing suggests instead that you write what you can see right now, wherever your energy takes you, and sort out the order later.

Writers who worked this way

Nabokov and his index cards

Nabokov is the best-documented case. He had the whole novel in his head, what he called the "pattern," before writing a single word, and then filled in the squares in any order. Every morning he rearranged his cards, watched the structure take shape and found new paths through it.

This method partly explains the density of his novels. Since he didn't work in order, he could easily slip in a passage, add a reference or retouch a fragment to run a motif from one end of the book to the other, and his prose ranks among the most meticulously composed of the twentieth century.

Faulkner and the walls of Rowan Oak

William Faulkner went about it differently, with no more respect for order. For A Fable (Pulitzer Prize, 1955), he wrote the outline of his novel on the walls of his study at Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, in graphite pencil and red grease pencil, day after day.

He had first taped sheets of paper to the wall, but a fan blew them away, so he wrote directly on the plaster. His wife, furious, had the walls repainted, and Faulkner wrote everything again before varnishing the surface so nobody could ever erase it. The inscriptions can still be seen today at Rowan Oak, which the University of Mississippi maintains.

A Fable weaves dozens of narrative threads across one week of the First World War, and Faulkner needed to see that structure laid out in space in order to hold it, which writing in sequence would never have allowed.

Diana Gabaldon and the puzzle

Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series (more than 25 million copies sold), describes her method very simply:

"I don't write with an outline, I don't even write in a straight line! I write in scenes where I can see something happening."

She writes "little bits" that she "glues together like a jigsaw puzzle," working "back and forth, back and forth, until a scene is done," before jumping somewhere else to write something new. She doesn't even divide her text into chapters before sending it to her editor, since that division is "about the last thing" she does.

Cortázar and the book you read out of order

Julio Cortázar extended the principle to the reader. His novel Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963) offers two readings, one following chapters 1 to 56 in order, the other following a prescribed route through all 155 chapters of the book, and nothing stops readers from inventing a third by reading in whatever order they like.

The book opens with a "Table of Instructions" that guides this route. Its title is an image: the reader hops from square to square like a child playing hopscotch, pushing the pebble of understanding from one chapter to the next. In Cortázar, the non-linear structure is part of the work itself.

Why the method works

Writing out of order answers concrete problems.

1. It follows your energy

Some days you can see the climax clearly; other days a dialogue from chapter 3 won't leave you alone. Writing out of order lets you work on whatever is on your mind, whereas forcing chapter 7 when your head is in chapter 22 often produces lifeless pages.

2. It gets around the blank page

The blank page almost always strikes in the same place, between two scenes, when it's time to write the transition. Writing out of order lets you skip those passages and come back once the context is clear.

3. It lets you test the structure

By writing the key scenes first, such as the climax, the point of no return or the big reveal, you test the structure before filling in the gaps. If the climax doesn't work, you find out before writing 200 pages to get there.

4. It makes revision easier

When each scene is a self-contained unit, reorganizing becomes simple: moving chapter 12 ahead of chapter 8 just means dragging it, and cutting a subplot means removing the matching cards.

The risks, and how to manage them

The method has its traps.

Consistency. If you write the ending before the middle, your character may develop in contradictory directions. You need a way to track what they know and feel at each point in the story, for example character sheets that you keep up to date.

Seams. Transitions between scenes written separately are often the weakest passages, and you'll need a dedicated pass at the end to smooth the joins.

The big picture. With fifty scenes written out of order, it's easy to lose sight of the whole, and that's where a board of scenes you can see and move around becomes essential.

Writing out of order with Extypis

Most word processors impose linearity, since a Word file runs from beginning to end. To write out of order, you then have to create dozens of separate files, name them, sort them and merge them by hand.

Extypis was designed to allow this way of working:

Chapters and sheets. Your novel is divided into chapters that contain sheets, and each sheet holds one scene. You can write the third sheet of chapter 12 without ever opening chapter 1.

Drag and drop. You reorganize scenes and chapters by dragging them in the side panel, and moving a scene from one chapter to another takes a second.

Storyboard. Your chapters appear as columns and your scenes as cards, with their summaries, colored labels and a preview of their text. They're Nabokov's index cards, with no fan to blow them away.

Several sheets at once. You select several scenes (Cmd+click) to open them together in the editor, which helps you check consistency between distant passages.

Character mentions. Writing out of order carries a real risk of inconsistency. Mentions let you follow each character through the manuscript, with charts showing their presence chapter by chapter.

Versions. Before reorganizing, save a version of the manuscript, which you can restore if the new order doesn't work.

The two methods combine

Most authors who write out of order don't work only that way. Nabokov had the full plan in his head before writing, which is a form of structure, and Gabaldon assembles her scenes in a final chronological order.

Writing out of order lets you follow inspiration while keeping a structure. Nabokov's cards, Faulkner's walls and Gabaldon's puzzle are, after all, tools for building structure, and they show how much these writers cared about the final order of their books.

The real question is about your tool, which should let you do both. Software that forces you to write from beginning to end takes an option away from you, whereas software that lets you write in whatever order inspires you, then reorganize, lets you work like Nabokov, without the index cards or the fan.