A war novel's first page has the platoon already pinned down under fire, with nothing yet said about who they are or how they got there. What is that opening technique?

Chapter four of a detective novel breaks off from the present investigation to show the detective as a rookie on the night she lost her partner. What structural move is chapter four?

A narrator closes chapter one by remarking that the family would never sit at that table together again, then goes on describing an ordinary evening. What is the narrator doing?

A novel alternates its chapters between a woman in 1943 Warsaw and her granddaughter in 2019 Chicago, giving the two storylines roughly equal space and weight. What structure is that?

Beside a novel's main storyline about a mayoral election runs a shorter thread following the campaign driver's effort to finish night school; it crosses the election twice. What is the shorter thread?

The Prologue of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet announces, before any action begins, that the two young lovers will die. What is the Prologue doing to the events of the play?

Early in a novel a character mentions, and never repeats, that she never learned to swim. Which later event is that dropped detail setting up?

A novel ends with a fire that spreads through an apartment building because no alarm ever sounds. Which earlier detail was the hint that prepared it?

The second paragraph of a short story lingers on a hairline crack running up the reservoir wall above the town. What does that description promise the reader?

In act one a young man shows off a pistol he has just bought and jokes about how easily he got it. Nothing comes of it in act one. What is the play doing with the pistol?

Chapter three mentions in passing that the youngest brother forges his father's signature on a school note. In chapter twenty a will appears signed in the father's hand years after his death. What was chapter three?

Midway through, a novel breaks off to show the narrator's mother refusing to open a letter from the same hospital he now refuses to telephone. What does that scene accomplish?

A story pauses to show two friends at eleven years old swearing never to speak of what they saw in the quarry. In the present-day chapters they barely speak at all. What does the earlier scene give the reader?

A courtroom novel interrupts the trial to show the defendant at sixteen, turned away from a job over a conviction that was not his. What is that interruption's job in the novel?

Halfway through, a memoir stops the present-day chapters to describe the writer's first week in a new country twenty years earlier. What does that stop do to the telling?

A novel breaks off to show a father teaching his daughter to drive on an empty airfield. In the present-day chapters she drives a delivery truck for a living. What does the earlier scene do?

A novel's main storyline is a months-long hospital strike. A shorter thread follows a nurse's brother learning the trumpet. Which detail best shows that the thread is a subplot tied to the main plot?

Two storylines in a novel each carry their own conflict and their own ending. Which detail would show they are parallel plots rather than a main plot and a subplot?

What makes a storyline a subplot rather than a novel's main plot?

In one novel, storyline A appears in every chapter and ends with the mine closing; storyline B appears in four chapters and ends with a wedding. Which storyline is the subplot?