I don’t know the procedure Mikhail Bulgakov used when writing The White Guard, but I suspect it’s the same procedure that Robbe-Grillet used when writing La Jalousie and that Jean Genet used when writing Our Lady of the Flowers.
All three of these novels read like collages comprised of snippets—snippets of descriptions, dialogues, scenes—that have been placed against one another for contrast and emphasis.
The snippets all relate to a theme and are allowed to grow until, one by one, they are linked with other snippets.
In Bulgakov’s The White Guard, the collage that he constructs is aptly bewildering because the novel is set in Kiev under German occupation in 1918 while competing socialist and Bolshevik revolutionaries prepare their bids for power. A straightforward A-to-Z narrative wouldn’t fit the psychological dislocation caused by these events.
Likewise, a collage is apt for Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie, which is a concatenation of close observations that lead the astute reader to the solution of a mystery.
Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers builds scenes and characters bit by bit, with only a tenuous overarching plot. He aims for beautiful sentences to evoke the murderers whom he adores.
The snippet method of novel writing results in a text whose every part has been attentively crafted.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.