# Stories with good unorthodox structure **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 13, 2016, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114 "2016-04-13T19:43:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![MichaelEmouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/michaelemouse/32/101_2.png) [@MichaelEmouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelEmouse)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2016, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/1 "2016-04-13T19:43:56Z")
Whether it’s books, movies, games, TV series or episodes etc, which ones have done a good job of spending minimal time (at least early on) in the traditional first act? What are some of the best cold opens? How about stories told in backward chronological order? How about non-chronological order? If not chronological, what order was it in? If no particular order, what enabled the audience/reader/player to make something meaningful from it? Basically, I’m wondering about what can be learned from successful deviations from the orthodox chronological 3 act structure, especially as it relates to audience engagement. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2016, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/2 "2016-04-13T20:29:37Z")
**[Betrayal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_(1983_film))** (both as a movie and a play) shows its scenes in reverse chronological order. **[(500) Days of Summer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_Days_of_Summer)** jumps all around the chronology. Same for **[Slaughterhouse Five](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five)**. ---
**Author:** ![Skammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skammer/32/143_2.png) [@Skammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skammer)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2016, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/3 "2016-04-13T21:10:53Z")
_Memento_ and _Pulp Fiction_ were excellent movies notable for telling their story backwards or in a jumbled sequence, respectively. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2016, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/4 "2016-04-13T21:13:30Z")
_Cloud Atlas_ and _If on a winter’s night a traveler_ are both wonderful books with entirely non-standard structure. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2016, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/5 "2016-04-13T21:17:14Z")
_Memento_ is forward and reverse chronological, interleaved. ---
**Author:** ![lisiate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f05b48/32.png) [@lisiate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lisiate)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2016, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/6 "2016-04-13T21:30:10Z")
The late Ian M. Banks’ _Use of Weapons_ has a great structure, and is a fantastic book overall. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of its structure. > [@](#): > > The book is made up of two narrative streams, interwoven in alternating chapters. The numbers of the chapters indicate which stream they belong to: one stream is numbered forward in words (One, Two …), while the other is numbered in reverse with Roman numerals (XIII, XII …). The story told by the former moves forward chronologically (as the numbers suggest) and tells a self-contained story, while the latter is written in reverse chronology with each chapter successively earlier in Zakalwe’s life. Further complicating this structure is a prologue and epilogue set shortly after the events of the main narrative, and many flashbacks within the chapters. Eleanpr Catton’s novel _The Luminaries_ has an incredibly intricate structure based on astrology (?!) but it still manages to be a pretty good read anyway. Here’s one reviewer’s description of the structure: > [@](#): > > The novel has an entirely original organising principle: each chapter is preceded by an astrological chart and each character is associated with a heavenly body; the characters act in accordance with the actual movements of the cosmos as they were, starting on 27 January 1866. At the same time, the novel is organised in 12 parts, each half the length of the previous one – thus the novel itself wanes. I’m a bit dubious about whether the characters are, “act[ing] in accordance with the actual movements of the cosmos as they were starting on 27 January 1866,” but the structure certainly is remarkable. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2016, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/7 "2016-04-13T22:03:20Z")
Primer Key: The Metal Idol Most of everything by Satoshi Kon 12 Monkeys The Usual Suspects Rashomon Karakuri Circus DOLL Frankenstein Dracula ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2016, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/8 "2016-04-13T22:11:23Z")
A lot of Youtube series do this. Lonelygirl15 was strewn across multiple channels and you basically need a wiki to watch all that stuff in order. Marble Hornets was done across two channels, and Twitter, and the structure itself is kind of interleaved between current events and watching tapes of the past. That’s not even getting into the ARG series where the story unfolds via dead drops, fan meet ups, Twitter conversations and emails, and so on. On the novel front, there’s House of Leaves, which kind of has a traditional story in some ways, but is structured in such a way that there are tons of footnotes and there’s really no clear cut way to read the book. There’s another book by the same guy that has two stories, one of which is written upside down and backwards compared to the other one. Mulholland Drive is also known for having a very strange structure, with two stories that are obviously related, but it’s not exactly obvious what that relationship is (one popular theory that I don’t entirely buy is that one half represents the subjective experience of the main character, and the other half is the objective reality). Of course, most surrealist fiction is going to invoke this. Edit: Some recent games have toyed with this, such as Gone Home, and The Stanley Parable. Gone Home can be experienced in a pretty arbitrary order. The Stanley Parable has several ways to complete the game, all hinting at the others. Then there’s Her Story where you watch very short clips of a woman giving an interview over several days, and you have to search for keywords you hear in the videos to find other clips. You figure out the story eventually, but the story is entirely non-linear by nature. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2016, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/9 "2016-04-13T22:40:18Z")
Mario Vargas Llosa’s [_The Green House_ (_La Casa Verde_)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_House) has a very complex structure interweaving five different narratives in the past and present. ---
**Author:** ![cjepson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a9adbd/32.png) [@cjepson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cjepson)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2016, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/10 "2016-04-13T23:44:04Z")
_Catch-22_ is a very well-known example of a non-chronological narrative. _As I Lay Dying_ was, IIRC, pretty much chronological, but each chapter was told by a different narrator, and a lot of the time, the narrator had only limited information about the events they were recounting. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2016, 12:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/11 "2016-04-14T00:55:56Z")
John Barth’s _Letters_ subtitled “An old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself factual.” Now, this can get confusing… [ul] [li]The novel is a series of letters by several characters in Barth’s previous novels, plus one new character, and Barth himself. In addition, by the end of the book, characters from all of Barth’s books make an appearance.[/li][li]Each character writes a letter on a different day of the week. Lady Amherst (the one created for the book) on Monday, for instance.[/li][li]If you take the first character from each of the letters in the book and put it on the calendar on the day it was written, it spells out “An old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself factual.”[/li][li]If you take the mark the dates of the letters on a sideways calendar, it spells out “LETTERS.” The calendar runs from March to September 1969.[/li][li]The narrative goes by character, starting with Lade Amherst. This does some odd things to the chronology: think of the sideways calendar with an “E” marked on it. You get four letters from character one, then the letter from character two, written the first week (while character one has gotten to the end of the week).[/li][li]The first character of the first seven letters in the novel (i.e., the downstroke on the “L”) use the characters A B C D E F G.[/li][/ul] I won’t even go into the characters and plot, which is extremely weird. The book is a tour de force of structure. It wasn’t successful, partly because you had to be familiar with all of his work to truly appreciate it. ---
**Author:** ![Guest-starring\_Id](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guest-starring_id/32/21736_2.png) [@Guest-starring\_Id](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guest-starring_Id)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2016, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/12 "2016-04-14T01:27:27Z")
D.M Thomas’s excellent “The White Hotel” doesn’t exactly have your usual structure. “Eraserhead” “Groundhog Day” “Sexy Beast” ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2016, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/13 "2016-04-14T01:31:32Z")
Finn: A Novel by Jon Clinch is pretty good. It tells the story of Huckleberry Finn’s father. The novel is written in the present tense, and involves significant flashback scenes. Because of the tense, the reader doesn’t know whether a given scene is “in the present” or “in the past.” Since the novel revolves around one murder and one attempted murder, it is very dramatic and thrilling, because, at the high point of the story, you don’t know which of the two it is you’re reading. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2016, 7:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/14 "2016-04-14T07:20:36Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > The novel is written in the present tense, and involves significant flashback scenes. Because of the tense, the reader doesn’t know whether a given scene is “in the present” or “in the past.” Somewhat analogously, Ken Kesey’s book _One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest_ (the book, not the movie) is told as a first-person narrative, in the voice of Chief Bromden, a thoroughly insane patient at the mental hospital. Some of the scenes he narrates are clearly horrible outrageous hallucinations; some scenes are (plausibly) for-reals, and a lot of scenes you just can’t quite tell. ETA: This telling, in Bromden’s addled first-person voice, was totally discarded in the movie, which IMHO rather drastically damaged the whole nature of the story. ---
**Author:** ![Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/les_espaces_du_sommeil/32/308_2.png) [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2016, 9:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/15 "2016-04-14T09:46:58Z")
**Georges Perec** ’s _Life a User’s Manual_ (_La Vie mode d’emploi_) is a [SPOILER]650-page novel that actually takes place in a single moment in a single apartment block in Paris. You don’t notice it because it’s filled with over 100 interwoven stories that jump back and forth in time, focussing on the (current and past) inhabitants of the building. “_While Bartlebooth’s puzzle narrative is the central story of the book, 11 rue Simon-Crubellier is the subject of the novel. 11 rue Simon-Crubellier has been frozen at the instant in time when Bartlebooth dies. People are frozen in different apartments, on the stairs, and in the cellars. Some rooms are vacant._” It’s also written according to a complex system of writing constraints that determine the contents of every single chapter and the way the focus moves from one apartment to the next.[/SPOILER] Also, **Bulgakov** ’s _The Master and Margarita_ alternates constantly between two settings: 1930s Moscow and Jerusalem at the time of Pontius Pilate. These are two of my favourites books. ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2016, 12:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/16 "2016-04-14T12:33:21Z")
The _Illuminatus!_ trilogy by Wilson and Shea is the single most non-sequential book I’ve ever read or heard of. Not only does it contain multiple interweaving storylines told out of order, it switches between them, sometimes even mid-paragraph. It’s actually quite remarkable that you can, due to the differing voices etc, figure out who is speaking and what is going on. It is, as myself and others have said, one of the only books I’ve come across that - marketing hype aside - actually changed the way I think. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2016, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/17 "2016-04-14T12:36:41Z")
Iain Pears’ “An Instance of the Fingerpost” tells the exact same story four times, from the point of view of four different characters. But it does it in such a way that each new character adds a level of depth that the previous narrators know nothing of (also, some, possibly all of them are liars) so that it’s a different story each time ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2016, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/18 "2016-04-14T12:45:02Z")
_Rashomon_ the Japanese movie does the same thing, about 47 years earlier than Pears. ---
**Author:** ![Ignotus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/ecc23a/32.png) [@Ignotus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ignotus)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2016, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/19 "2016-04-14T13:07:21Z")
Arthur Phillips’ _The Egyptologist_ is a detective novel consisting of two (or, if you include the detective’s own narrative) three intertwined story lines, each linked to the other by some main characters. I really enjoyed it. ---
**Author:** ![brainstall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/35a633/32.png) [@brainstall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brainstall)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2016, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114/20 "2016-04-14T13:16:20Z")
_Go_, the movie Just watched it again recently and still like it. Interweaving stories from different perspectives, that starts at the end. Similar vintage - _Run, Lola Run_. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stories-with-good-unorthodox-structure/752114.md?page=2)