Editing Story structure (section)

=== Nonlinear narrative ===
Cinema can only provide the illusion through broken narrative, a famous example of this being the 1994 film ''[[Pulp Fiction]]''.{{Clarify|date=December 2024|reason=What illusion?}} The film is ostensibly three short stories, which, upon closer inspection, are actually three sections of one story with the [[chronology]] broken up; [[Quentin Tarantino]] constructs the narrative without resorting to classic "flashback" techniques.

An even more ambitious attempt at constructing a film based on non-linear narrative is [[Alain Resnais]]'s 1993 French film ''[[Smoking/No Smoking]]''. The plot contains parallel developments, playing on the idea of what might have happened had the characters made different choices.

Outside of film, some novels also present their narrative in a non-linear fashion. Creative writing professor Jane Alison describes nonlinear narrative "patterns" such as spirals, waves, and meanders in her 2019 book ''Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative''.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://books.catapult.co/products/meander-spiral-explode-jane-alison|title=Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison|website=Catapult|access-date=2020-01-28|archive-date=2020-01-28|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200128100825/https://books.catapult.co/products/meander-spiral-explode-jane-alison|url-status=live}}</ref> The chapters of [[Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni]]'s novel [[Before We Visit the Goddess]] are not arranged based on the linear sequence of events, but rather in a way that fulfills certain literary techniques. This allows the characters in the novel to have a believable life timeline while still employing the techniques that make a story enjoyable.