Is non linear writing more innovative or confusing?

 

 

Before reading ‘Why no one clicked on the great hypertext story’, I had never even heard of nonlinear writing. The idea sounded alluring enough in theory: no concrete beginning or end, a seemingly unlimited amount of stories within one story. And I wondered, why is it that i’ve never heard or seen this? Well, in reality it is incredibly confusing.

 

When I first opened the article and saw numbered paragraphs, I didn’t know what it meant, so i attempted to read from the top to the bottom like a normal person would; I couldn’t get passed the second paragraph. There was no alternate story, just a bunch of sentences that had absolutely no relation to the previous ones. Eventually I understood what the numbers and the arrows were for, and that they were supposed to relate to the material in the text, and I was able to decipher the true story out of the discombobulation. Nonlinear reading sounds like a really cool idea theoretically, but from my experience, it seemed like there was too much going on. For me personally, structure and order in a story is vital to it being a cohesive piece which I would be able to comprehend and enjoy.