Q&A Excerpt: Henry Lien

Henry Lien was a 2025 guest lecturer for Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. Henry is a graduate of Brown University, UCLA School of Law, and Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of the Peasprout Chen fantasy series and the non-fiction book Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling. His writing has appeared in publications including Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Literary Hub, and Poets & Writers, and he is a four-time Nebula Award finalist. Henry also teaches for institutions including UCLA Extension, the University of Iowa, Clarion West, and Writing the Other and won the UCLA Extension Department of the Arts Outstanding Instructor of the Year Award. Henry has previously worked as an attorney and fine art dealer. Born in Taiwan, Henry currently lives in Hollywood, California. Hobbies include writing and performing campy anthems for his books and losing Nebula Awards. www.henrylien.com

In this excerpt transcribed from a question-and-answer session, Henry talks about applying nonlinear storytelling techniques on a small scale and the relationship between unreliable narrators and linearity.

QUESTION:  All of the good examples you gave are ones where the nonlinearity is a focus of the entire work. It’s one of the organizing principles. I was wondering if you had any thoughts or examples of a work that is primarily linear but is using some of these elements—perhaps in a subplot, or when a character’s under great strain—and how you might do that without completely weirding out the reader?

ANSWER: Yeah, absolutely, phenomenal question. … So we don’t have to think about exploring these ideas—circularity, nestedness—on a macro scale for our works. They can be value-added on a micro scale. …

I’m blanking right now on a good example, but the answer is absolutely yes, you can have a smaller scale experiment in circularity where we revisit a scene, maybe sprinkle throughout or seed it throughout a fundamentally linear story. We revisit some pivotal scene multiple times, maybe from the viewpoint of a character when they were young, and this happened to them, and then again when they are older and they have different information. That absolutely would be an example of circularity on a more modest scale, but you can imagine that it could have impact.

Okay, let’s just make one up: a child was abducted. Maybe some traumatic, inciting incident when the child was abducted early on, and it’s only throughout the course of the story that we revisit that and we realize that the person “abducting” the child was their real parent, and that they had been previously abducted. The intervening information allows us to read that scene differently.

So the answer is a resounding yes. I actually encourage most of you to, if you are interested in exploring these ideas, do exactly what Geoffrey is saying. Start off on a small scale, and think of this as value added to your story rather than dismantling your linearity and forcing it into something that is overall nested or circular.

QUESTION: You mentioned this a little with Rashomon, but can you talk a bit more generally about how you see the unreliable narrator interacting with these forms of storytelling?

ANSWER: It’s a great question because, I mean, Rashomon, we get four—everybody‘s an unreliable narrator there. … I feel like the unreliable narrator is automatically pushing this away from the gravitational pull of a clean, linear story, just because there are at least two stories in every unreliable narrator story, right? There is what we are being told and what actually happened. So there are already two tracks, and we’re already twice as far from standard linearity as we would be with a reliable narrator. I had never thought of it this way, but I see what you are getting at, I see what your instinct is pointing out. An unreliable narrator is automatically pushing us away from linearity.

So now let’s take it to the next level because I’m a fan of taking it to the next level. We see a lot of multi point of view books. Especially in YA fantasy, it’s very popular now to have the roving POV, where we hop among three to five point of view characters. And some of them might be unreliable, some of them might be reliable, but often the fun of the point of view character is not just because something is happening over in the Western Kingdom and we can’t think of another way to report it without reverting into omniscience. No, often the reason why these YA authors will play with multiple point of view characters is in fact because each of them brings a piece of the puzzle, an incomplete piece of the puzzle, or a warped piece of the puzzle. That unreliability is part of the fun, which means that we the reader are trying to piece together what actually happened ourselves among these various accounts. We’re trying to figure out who among them are the unreliable narrators and who are the reliable ones, if any. And that means that we are engaged in some measure of nonlinearity.

So if we’re going back to what—I think it was Geoffrey who asked—this could be a way to dip your toe into these concepts. If you just lean into unreliable narrators, especially multiple unreliable narrators, you’re already going to be doing an experiment in nonlinearity on some level.

NOTE: This transcript has been edited for clarity.