There's a joke I love about there being only two kinds of people in the world...

…those that subscribe to false binaries, and all the other kinds.

We writers, in general, love to sort ourselves into camps—plotters versus pantsers being the classic one. But I was just talking with some friends this morning (as of this writing) about synthetic vs linear writing, and what each one brings to the party.

I’m pretty sure these are terms I coined myself, back when I was trying to figure out how to make my own writing more accessible to more people without losing the things about it that made it fun for me, so pardon me for a brief digression as I try to define what I mean by each of them. By synthetic, I mean the sort of story where the throughline of the narrative and the thematic arc emerge in the interstices of what’s presented to the reader. I’m thinking of M. John Ford’s The Scholars of Night, or M. John Harrison’s Light (apparently it’s got something to do with being named M. John?), or Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia. (Phew, got out of that one.)

By linear, I mean, you know, straightforward books with a straightforward plot, or even a complicated plot, but one in which the causality of everything is cleanly laid out for the reader, and the meaning doesn’t have to be assembled by the reader’s subconscious.