Writing.Com General Discussion

I think we're all at odds here.

I thought 'flashback in a scene' meant the whole scene was a flashback, but apparently not. If you are in a moment in time in a scene, the only way you should recall the past is to say "Peter recalled that..." or something along those lines. Having a scene within a scene is (in my opinion) entirely wrong and will almost certainly confuse the reader, because you have two (or three) scenes without the usual signs of a break - a double line-break or graphic or whatever.

As for 'master level writers', Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice was her debut novel (although she'd been a lecturer on fiction writing for years).

The way the book is structured is such that it tells a single story, but begins in the middle. For obvious reasons, this makes the first part of the story too big to fit into a prologue. As you attempt to figure out who the character is, what their agenda is and what motivates them, you are given snippets of the earlier portion of the story. At around the middle of the novel, you have everything you need to make sense of what is happening; you understand who the main character is, and what their motives and agenda are. It is a much better story for not starting at the beginning, because there are so many questions it pulls the reader into the world the author has created. Which is the main goal of every story, right?

Incidentally, throughout the entire Ancillary trilogy, there is only character for whom we ever actually know their gender, and it isn't the main POV character. That is some very clever writing, and shows that details we usually consider vital can be omitted.

I'm not a fan of prologues, partly because they get skipped by readers, especially if they are reading an ebook. A prologue should only exist if there is information you wish to impart to the reader that the POV character(s) can't possibly know. Therefore, if a POV character does know it, you have to let the reader know what they know, and a flashback is one of the mechanisms for doing that - although it is worth keeping in mind that it isn't the only way of passing that info to the reader.