The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.
I'm a creature of adaptation. I take advantage of the second and the moment. My comedy breathes; it's not really that predictable. I do have a linear style, but other than that, there's a lot of abstract. I just go off on what I'm thinking. I'm not that topical. I like to talk about me and my experiences.
It's easy for me to play bad guys because it's a very linear acting. Bad guys aren't empathetic. Being a bad guy is great because you're not friendly and you don't have to do much with your face.
Many think of memory as rote learning, a linear stuffing of the brain with facts, where understanding is irrelevant. When you teach it properly, with imagination and association, understanding becomes a part of it.
My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you're not strictly bound to a linear narrative.
Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.
The horrible truth is we are linear beings; we can't multitask, and we shouldn't keep interrupting important connections to each other with the latest message coming in.
Life is not linear; you have ups and downs. It's how you deal with the troughs that defines you.
Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.
I'm basically an optimist because I do think there's this historical modernisation process, and by and large it's been very beneficial to people. But there are blips. History doesn't proceed in a linear way.