Parallel (non-linear) Narrative Seminar

Participants attending this seminar are strongly advised to attend the Conventional Narrative seminar because the mechanics of parallel narrative are complex and only understandable by grasping certain approaches to conventional narrative that are unique to Linda Aronson’s approach.

Experience level: All screenwriters - experienced, intermediate and beginners

Linda Aronson is the first to provide practical guidelines on how to write non-linear films ('parallel narrative') and is the only person to teach a course on these difficult forms. Her book Screenwriting Updated: New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen, in which these theories are set out. Linda’s theories on how to write non-linear films are now studied by professionals and students all over the world.

Linda's theories of how to construct parallel narrative have also been taken up by games writers in the UK and USA as tools in constructing the new generation of video games.

• how successful flashback narratives are constructed as concentric circles, starting at predetermined places in the structure, and they can be methodically planned;
  
• how stories-in-sequence models (like Pulp Fiction) can be held together by a 'portmanteau structure' which permits a number of stories to piggyback on the structural build of one story (a device also used by Homer in Odyssey, which is a brilliant non-linear structure, starting in the middle and featuring flashback narrative, multiple protagonists and a tuning fork plot construction);
  
• how tandem narrative (equal stories running simultaneously, as in Traffic) is held together by a range of cross-connecting devices, including the 'macro plot' and 'the facilitating character';
  
• how multiple protagonist stories (The Big Chill, Tea with Mussolini, etc ) are held together by one macro plot plus many interconnected plots linking characters in past and present.

The Big Chill, Shine, Citizen Kane, The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, Traffic, City of Hope, Mr Saturday Night, Pulp Fiction, Amores Perros (Mexico), Run Lola Run, Crimes and Misdemeanors, City of God (Brazil), The Ice Storm, The Thin Red Line, Remains of the Day, The English Patient, Fight Club, Memento, The Full Monty, You Can Count on Me, The Sweet Hereafter, The Circle (Iran), Children of Heaven (Iran), The Life of John Gale, Gosford Park, Short Cuts, Magnolia

Linda Aronson Scriptwriting Updated: New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen (aka Screenwriting Updated: New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen

Linda Aronson Television Writing – the Ground Rules of Series, Serials and Sitcom

Syd Field, Screenplay

Linda Seger Making a Good Script Great

Christopher Vogler The Writer’s Journey

Robert McKee Story