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Thanks for all the feedback @Desiderius Price, @GeorgeGlass, @Wilde_Guess and @Thundercloud For additional context, the story that inspired me to write this story involved the main character Dom seducing two subs. In the story, the two seductions happened over a couple chapters before the author didn’t finish the story. The first seduction happened but I was looking forward to the end of the second seduction, which wasn’t finished. So part of the reason why my story kinda “recaps” the first seduction is because I was left… satisfied story wise with that first seduction dynamic. It’s not referencing the story that I didn’t write, the story is different and even built on a story I originally wrote before I read this story that inspired me. I wanted to get to the second seduction and complete the thing I didn’t get in the story I enjoyed. Part of my reason for recapping is my own interest. But the other aspect is that I wanted the two subs to meet, which they didn’t. And the main character uses the first sub to tempt the second sub into being seduced. Hopefully that makes a certain amount of sense. The recap is about one page long, but I need to fill in details so at most it will be a recap of about two pages. But about half of that recap is the first seduction and the second half is how the main character is using the first sub like I mentioned above.

What? That’s limiting… More seriously, I learned by doing it wrong in my first original story (now deleted). I crammed it with so much backstory/flashback that I confused my readers and myself. On reflection, I realized I basically had multiple stories in one. So, I spun one backstory off as a regular chaptered story (complete), and the other off as an episodic serial (still WIP). And working on a second episodic to explain where the main protagonist’s swimming instructor came from, so yeah, gotta cut backstory off at a point or it’ll explode with plot bunnies and you’ll never get back around to writing the story you intended to write in the first place.

As a general rule you should include stuff that is important for the story and cut the rest. Deciding what parts that are important to the reader the experience you aim for is the central task of being an author. In this specific example...if the second seduction is the important thing then you should probably start there, but if you feel the second seduction need to start with a internal monologue about the first seduction it sounds like the first seduction is not just some back story but part of the important stuff. At the end of the day you must start somewhere that is well beyond character-was-born. This means your character will have done tons of non important things before the start of the story. Things that impact the future plot is probably important...but it is not given. For instance, a story about a character suffering from a trauma might work better if you keep the trauma hidden from the reader until events of the story make the character recall the event. Telling the reader about all the important events of the character but keeping them hidden from the character is not a way to make the writing easier.

Hi, Deadman and all. Beyond what GeorgeGlass and Desiderius Price wrote, I would add that you should try to go more for “telling the story” instead of “telling about the story.” I.E. show the “action” directly as much as possible without making the story too unwieldy for either your readers or yourself. You could briefly describe the first seduction as the “intro,” and have the protagonist flashback and compare “key” parts of the second seduction to the first, comparing the two. Cheers!

That depends on how central this character and this point in their development is to the story, and also on whether you think readers would enjoy reading that scene.

When I write, I generally prefer “showing” over “telling”. Thus, don’t tell them a character is angry, show them slamming a door, raising their voice as they shout back, etc. Obviously there’s extremes to either end, 100% showing winds up with a 1M+ Harry Potter fanfic… I typically don’t like being told what to think, I prefer judging for myself, which is why I prefer showing over telling as I read and as I write. An internal monologue…sounds like either a good start to summary/outline or a wall of text doing info-dumping (use sparingly). However, a short monologue/dialogue is a decent way to introduce facts you want to de-emphasize to some degree, maybe soften/de-gory some bit of it (ie, a rape, an abortion). Overall, you can tell I favor character/story development over recapping, and it’s spun off stories as “character development”