nonlinearity

Nonlinear writing refers to (a) a writerly activity and (b) a specific type of written document. The first meaning relates to the strategy of composing a text in a nonsequential way by adding, removing, and modifying passages in various places of manuscript rather than producing it in one piece, from beginning to end. The second meaning refers to documents that are not structured in a sequential way, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Rather, their macrostructure follows an associative logic, which assembles its composite elements (paragraphs, text chunks, or lexis) into a loosely ordered network. These networks offer readers multiple choices of traversing a document, which can facilitate specific types of reading strategies, such as keyword searches or jumping between main text and footnotes, and complicate others, such as reading for closure or completeness. (Source: Author's introduction)

In this article Doménico Chiappe makes a list of suggestions to write hypermedia literature:
-A hypermedia narrative will be a novel if there are more than three plots;
-The structure will be nonlinear;
-The hypermedia writer develops a strategy to hit on the mind of the reader with minimum scenes, full of messages;
-It will be told with fragments that the author composes like a puzzle;
-Each chapter will have a beginning and ending;
-Free from the dictatorship of the paper, the links will drive to different narrative levels, that will tell real stories, textual contents, musical, animation, hemerographics, oral, photographical, audiovisual and plastic;
-Images wil be full of interpretations;
-The reader will be free to choose his/her own navigation;
-The quality of the work will compensate the reader for his/her interaction.

Crossing the tools of fluid dynamics with those of literary criticism, Gwen Le Cor casts a new light on contemporary writing in new media. Unlike first generation, “classical” hypertexts that were non-linear in the sense of using linked textual elements, Le Cor sees Strickland and Lawson Jaramillo’s poem, slippingglimpse, as a more “contemporary” instance of nonlinear writing that can be viewed (literally) as a “complex, nonlinear turbulent system.”