Dear Miss Snark,
As always, I heart you and KY (more so this week for taking a stand against tantrum throwing scam agents - I hope KY hasn't gotten a sore throat from yapping back).
I'll keep this brief: are flashbacks in openings of novels one of those things you wish we'd stop doing, like dream sequences and narrators looking in the mirror to describe themselves? I searched the snarkives but didn't find anything.
Thanks so much.
I hate prologues, flashbacks, dream sequence openings, and anything akin to "it was a dark and stormy night". Yuck yuck yuck. Start the damn thing with someone being eaten by a crocodile and you're much more likely to hold my attention. Well, ok, the crocodile is negotiable, but I really want some sort of literary toothsomeness in those first pages.
Here's the secret scoop: hold on to that prologue or whatever until someone asks to read the full novel. When you're querying, send the opening chapter. That prologue or flashback won't have any significance unless you're reading the entire book anyway so why risk shooting yourself in the foot.
There is no law that says you have can't change the chapter order any old time you want. It's your book.
For an example of how a flashback in the first chapter REALLY works well read Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper and you have to read the ENTIRE book to see how clever and crafty that first chapter is (which isn't exactly a hardship, I liked that book a lot).
and PS Thanks again to Miss Adventure for those indexed Snarkives.