Formula, form, experience

In studying writing, I've often encountered an idea that stories can happen some way other than chronologically. It's silly, of course, but let's start out with some vocabulary:

Story - The events that happen
Narrative - How the events are told

I know, these are not the real definitions. In fact, story and narrative are both words used to define each other. We could probably go back and forth about the best words for the job, but I'd rather talk about a particular concept and these two words are good enough for now.

Here's the concept.

A story goes on forever. A narrative has a beginning and an end.

It's the same relationship that a line segment shares with a line. A line segment is only part of the whole line.

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Why is this important? Because when people start to say that a story doesn't need to happen chronologically, that's baloney. The story moves from start to finish, and we can't stop it. If you write about someone's death and then write about their birth, they were still born first. And, here's the crucial point, as an audience we'll put the story back in it's natural order. When I watch a movie and the narrative takes me back and forth through time, my brain still takes the pieces of the narrative and puts them together chronologically. I make them into a story. It's what happens no matter how clever your writing. It's how the story happened. It's how the audience will understand it.

Now, when you understand what your audience is going to do (put the story back in order no matter what you do to mess it up), you can play around with narrative all you want. Do you have to tell the story in order? No! Tell it backwards, tell it forward, tell it inside out. Understand that your audience's brains will unravel everything you did by the time you get to the end, but then make that narrative journey exciting.

You can make your audience question the order of events. You can even help them step back and ignore the order if you want. But it's important to realize that the arc of a story happens the same way no matter what, and your audience will try to find that in your narrative. We're exposed to an idea, we struggle with the idea, and then we resolve the idea with our mental model of how the world works. That's how we interact with new information. That's how we interact with narratives.

So, just keep that in mind. No matter what, your audience is going to put the pieces of your story together in a way that makes sense. But how you present those pieces is totally up to you.