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When a Story is Best Told Backwards ‹ Literary Hub

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When we listen to stories as children our whole being can rest on one small tremoring question—And then . . . ? When we watch TV we return after the ad-break because of that question, and it’s why we turn the page when we read; there’s something on the next page or on the pages beyond—however dramatic or subtle—that we want to find out. And then is the engine of all storytelling. Nestled within that impulse to know what comes next is the understanding of cause and effect—of a giving rise to b giving rise to c. This is our very experience of living. We live in what appears to us as forward-moving time, of cause followed by effect, of traceable paths from this moment to the next, and perhaps we’re most confounded and unnerved by life when those paths are only dimly traceable, or not traceable at all—when we just don’t understand how or why something has come to be. Given how fundamental the and then is to storytelling, I was a little deflated and concerned when my last novel came to me q

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