Hitting the Timeshift Key

When I'm writing, I find structure one of the hardest things to tackle.  Stories, situations and characters, and the language with which to describe them, come to me reasonably easily -- but structure!  I think I'm with David Lodge, when he says in his excellent book The Art of Fiction that we should avoid, "presenting life is just one dam thing after another," a trap that it is easy to fall into if you are writing a linear narrative, but in my bid to avoid this trap I find myself turning what I have written inside out, upside down, back to front and often it still doesn't feel quite right.

Lodge's solution is to use time shifts because he says that this, "allows us to make connections of causality and irony between widely separated events." This makes sense to me, as a story that has a strong thematic resonance can be more engrossing because you have to work a little bit harder to make the necessary connections.

Sooo, if you want to open a new door, creatively speaking (and because I just can't resist another picture)

have a go at writing something that moves about in time.  This will give you the opportunity to experiment with devices such as who knows what information when and the effects that that might have, and to see what happens when  cause and effect are separated by several decades -- does that make events more potent or less so?