Once Upon a Time...

Once upon a time, all an author had to do was start a story at the beginning and keep writing until they reached the end. And sometimes that is still the way to do it, especially if you happen to be producing an eroticised version of a traditional fairytale. However, some bright spark started spouting Latin and going on about stories starting in the middle of the action: ‘in media res’. It was, in fact, some Roman dude called Horace talking about Homer’s The Iliad in the first century BC. Tha...