Toward a Nonlinear Essay
What would it even mean to write a nonlinear essay?
The philosopher in me kind of shudders at the very question. In my world, essays are either narratives or they are arguments (or possibly both). But narratives and arguments have an order. You can’t just start out with Q; you have to establish that P and that If P, then Q before you’re allowed to go around proclaiming that Q. That’s just how nonfiction works.
Only, it’s not. Or at least, it’s not necessarily.
Maybe an argument can be more than just a series of carefully-sequenced claims that build to a conclusion. Maybe an argument can be a sort of gestalt that emerges from a series of interconnected bits. My brother Josh likens the nonlinear essay to the experience of visiting an art exhibit— there are many possible paths through an exhibit, and the story you will take away turns heavily on which path you choose.
And, let’s face it, there really is more than one way that any given set of ideas can be organized. There’s a mind-boggling set of links between concepts. Don’t believe me? Go surf around Wikipedia for a bit.
For a long time, though, we’ve been pretty limited in how nonlinear we could be with our writing. The media available to us just didn’t lend themselves to anything else. It’s only in the last 50 years or so that we’ve had machines capable of creating the kinds of links we need for nonlinear writing, and only in the last 20 that said tools have been widely available.
The combination of the hyperlink and the relational database open up some pretty amazing possibilities for fundamentally rethinking nonfiction. But most of our writing continues to look just like it always has.
Which brings us to this little experiment. You won’t find an instruction manual for writing a nonlinear essay in any of the pieces in this collection. And you won’t find a full argument for writing differently in any single piece, either. But my hope is that both of those things will arise out of the whole collection.
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