In medias res is Latin for in the middle of things: a story that opens inside an action or crisis already underway, with earlier events filled in afterward.
Where the term comes from
Merriam-Webster defines it as in or into the middle of a narrative or plot, and dates the English use to 1786. Britannica glosses the Latin as in the midst of things and describes the practice of opening an epic or other narrative by plunging into a crucial situation that belongs to a chain of earlier events. The story then moves forward, and the earlier events are supplied by flashbacks. Britannica traces the principle to Homer's practice in the Iliad and the Odyssey, noting that the Iliad begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. It also reports that the Latin poet Horace, in his Ars poetica, contrasted the immediate interest of this approach with starting ab ovo, from the egg, at the earliest point of the story.
An example
"The ledger was already smoking when Imre Valk pushed through the harbour office door. Someone had been there first. He had until the afternoon tide, and a signature on page forty that would hang a man if anyone read it." The reader arrives with a crisis, a deadline and a hint of danger, and with no idea yet how Imre came to care about this man. That explanation can wait. Two chapters later, on the cold deck of a fishing boat, the book steps back to the winter Imre first took the clerk's job and shows how the signature came to exist.
Common mistakes
- Starting in the middle of action with no anchor. A reader needs a name, a want and something at risk before a crisis means anything.
- Stopping at once for pages of explanation. The strength of the technique is momentum, and a long backstory in the second paragraph spends it.
- Choosing a dramatic moment that is unrelated to the story the book is about, so the opening feels like a trick.
- Using confusion as a hook. Questions the reader enjoys holding are different from questions that feel like missing information.
How to check your manuscript
Read your first chapter and mark the point where the story begins to explain itself. Ask whether the reader has enough ground by then to care. Next, try the opposite test: move the opening back by a scene or two and see whether the book gains clarity or loses energy. Look at each piece of backstory you supplied later and check that it arrives when the reader is most curious about it, not before. The entry on the inciting incident shows the event your opening needs to be heading toward, and the guide to how to start writing a book covers openings in more depth.
In Musael, the world and characters timeline lets you keep the true order of events beside the order in which you tell them, which is useful when a book begins in the middle.