Can AI add a flashback without giving the story away?

Imagine a woman refusing to open a letter. A flashback could make that refusal heartbreaking. Put the explanation first and you may lose the question that keeps someone reading. I'd give an AI writing assistant that question before asking it to shuffle scenes. ‘Make it nonlinear’ says little about what the reader should be waiting to learn. A new arXiv preprint, Can LLMs Tell Stories Out of Order?, compared model-written versions of the same events. Its 71 readers generally preferred the models' default chronological tellings to versions written under structural instructions. That isn't evidence that readers dislike flashbacks: every story they judged was AI-generated, and the authors couldn't isolate the cost of the added instruction from the cost of nonlinearity. For a draft, I'd try a smaller request: ‘Keep why she won't open the letter unknown until the kitchen scene. Let the earlier scenes give us reasons to care.’ That's an editing experiment I'd suggest, not a technique the paper proved. Which question do you want your reader carrying into the flashback?