I find that as a reader, I’m happy with much less backstory than I want to put in as a writer. My reader self goes ‘ok, arrival at space station, whom does she meet’ where my writer self wants to talk about space travel technology and the distribution of space stations and how expensive the ticket was.

Hmm, well, the exciting incidents are definitely not of the being chased by the monster variety. I just want to start with the start of the story. The flashbacks really are backstory, scenes from years before, I think, and if I put them first, I’m worried it would feel like a prologue.

Reorganizing the story so it begins at the earliest chronological point is possible, but I don’t know if it would be better. I ended up cutting a lot of backstory because it wasn’t important, and I really tried to trim it to the relevant bits. Finding the balance between beginning at the real beginning and making sure the reader has all the information they need without bogging down the story is really tough.

I’ve never written a prologue hat I didn’t have to cut out. Many prologues don’t work for me because I get interested in the character, and then they die and a hundred years pass and I have lost the character I’m in and I am just that bit less keen to read about someone else.

On the other hand, a prologue can add tension when we see an obvious bad guy setting an obvious bad thing in motion – someone sabotages the magical defenses or the spaceship or gathers an army, and we start the story with an innocent protagonist who isn’t aware that there’s doom coming up on them.

Won’t work for every story or every reader, but it _can_ work.

I think for a prologue *to* work you need a very good sense of story, and tension-building. If it’s _just_ to give us backstory, it’s a bad idea. A prologue must be able to justify its existence just like every other scene.

I guess (from the comments) it seems like most people resort to flashbacks near the beginning of a novel to fill in some back story because they wanted to start with an inciting incident. So I think this is partly tied in with the prologue question.

Basically, it starts out with various characters, including one angsty, drunken fellow, and the reader starts getting invested in the character and what happened to him and where he’s going to go from here. Then it flashes back to him as a kid, doing exciting things, and you KNOW IT WILL END BADLY.

So basically, the character I was invested in was *the adult*. And I don’t *want* to be invested in the kid, because… I know this is going to end badly! He’s all messed up in “present time,” so this whole great bit of tension and whatnot about what he and his friends are doing is going to end up with them losing and probably all of them *dead* and I don’t want to read that. It’s depressing. So I set down the book and never picked it up again.

So my rule of thumb is: If I spend more than a very short chapter with one character, getting invested, I am *not* going to be interested in spending multiple chapters in a long extended “Oh, but the *real* story is in the past…” excerpt.

If a person runs from a monster, I know I’m supposed to root for the underdog. I don’t get given the opportunity to make up my own mind about the situation, it’s pure reader-button-pushing: here’s a big bad, root for their victim. And it’s boring because I haven’t had a chance to get to _know_ the character as a person, and because – in several decades of reading – I have read that type of scene so often that they *do* feel repetitive.

Not saying your specific book suffers from this, but something to keep in mind. If you start slightly earlier, and give me a reason to care for the character, and make me understand why this particular confrontation _matters_, I’ll be much more engaged. You can keep me engaged by giving me small mysteries – who is this person, what are they doing, what is the explanation for [strangeness] – and then the story will just keep moving from there.

I tried to change this, but I have a really hard time trying to balance starting out with an active, exciting incident, and filling in all the necessary information so the MC’s actions make sense. I’m worried my current WIP has the same problem, and I’m not sure how to fix it.