Where to Begin?

The kid in me that likes to be told a story is alive and well. I read books and watch movies voraciously and always will. I've noticed there are two different ways to tell a story. You can begin at the beginning and move forward directly to the end. Or you can begin at the end and then go to the beginning and then jump back to the end again and then address the middle of the narrative for a while and then lurch into somewhere undefined that ends up being a dream and then back and forth perpetually until your audience feels cognitively violated.

It's a literary device that probably has a name of which I am ignorant.

Mary Shelley uses it in Frankenstein. It begins with a ship captain who harbors the tortured Victor Frankenstein. The Captain is writing letters to his sister relating the events that Frankenstein is telling him while lying on his deathbed. So the story goes back and forth between the end...on the ship... and the beginning... Frankenstein's life and experiences.

Pulp Fiction does it too... There's a part in the film where John Travolta comes out of the bathroom and Bruce Willis blows him away with a sawed off shotgun. But the film ends with Samuel Jackson and Travolta (alive and well) walking out of a diner after a hold up perpetrated by Tim Roth initiated in the first few moments of the film...

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may be the most blatant offender. It begins with two people meeting each other, seemingly for the first time. Eventually, if you're really smart, you'll realize that they've met before and had their memories of each other removed from their minds and the movie tells the story about how and why this was done.

I'm kind of linear in my taste for a good story. None of this back and forth for me. Begin at the beginning and tell the story as events unfold. That's how I live my life and so that's how stories will have the best chance of making sense to me.