Thank you, William Goldman!

Not knowing the story, nor wanting to at this point;-) I'd have said that effectively you could start the story all the way up to the moment before the actual "reveal", so long as there are no actual "spoilers" in the chosen scene.

In fact the chosen scene can be so chosen as to provide a "red herring" making the reader feel that the story, when recapped, is going to go direction a) when all along the writer intends it to go direction b).

Your 'love affair' with Time Travel stories always provides great story-telling so I'll look forward to seeing this. Sometimes though I like the fact that starting the story from the beginning can add way more strength. For example:

Story opens with Person-B opening a window to break-in to a hotel room and a piece of paper blowing out into the street. Person-A is apparantly happily married. Someone apparantly kills his wife. Person-B is arrested. Person-A wants to go back in time to stop Person-B from killing his wife (Sounds like a Van-Damme film already-LOL). Person-A builds time machine and goes back. Person-A confronts Person-B before they kill his wife and kills Person-B in the struggle. Person-A goes back to the future and his wife is still dead. Person-A [and the reader] discover that the wife had infact commited suicide from the outset and Person-B was the 'red herring' and her suicide note was blown out of the window in the opening scene.

Technically you could start the story at the fight between both A & B. I guess in fact you could have it start as late as him coming back from the past and running to see his wife and her still being dead. The reader would be "still?" then go back to go forward. I suppose actually it's a taste thing!

I've yet to read a bad-time travel story from you so I'm quite excited.

JB,

I am in the process of writing a novel, and, taking this advice to heart when you first posted it some time ago, I have the victim show up dead in the second paragraph (the first paragraph describes the setting).  How's that?

I remeber telling someone that I thought JMS "Strange" mini-series wasn't that good because thier was so much buildup, a lot of things happened that could have been cleared away. I was quickly reprimended for it of course, but I couldn't understand why the writer would think that somebody who picked up a comic supposdly about the sorcerer supreme would want to read 3 issues about a foppish surgeon...

Its good to know you haven't bought into this crap, JB. I look forward to whatever you are writing, probably.

I'm a big fan of the "start late, leave early" style of writing. People who read my short stories are often horrified when they get to the end and realize that I didn't wrap everything up in a neat little bow.

To see an example of this to the extreme, see John Sayles' LIMBO.