Writing in a Straight Line

The writing process is anything but linear. When I put my story structure into a mind map, it looks linear, but that’s an illusion. So many novels are spirals, circling back to a primary incident that gets resolved or doesn’t. Novels map out as the mind thinks and feels, a pretty complicated map, anything but linear. Somehow, though, I have to process the story as linear, because the reader must read one page, turn the page, and then read the next page.