Matt Dicks has a story he wants to tell about his son's swim test at Scout camp. The 5-second moment is the moment his son tells him, "I heard you in my head, Dad." That moment happens in 2024. But the full setup for it runs all the way back to 1983 — Dicks's own scout-camp swim test, where he gave up after 50 yards and ended up classified as a beginner swimmer, paddling across a lake in a rowboat for two days. The story needs both ends of the arc.
Raw chronological span: 41 years. Audience-tolerance for a 41-year story: zero. Nobody wants to hear a 40-year story. A 40-year story sucks.1 If Dicks told the story in straight chronological order (A → B → C: 1983 → 1984-2023 background → 2024 swim test), the audience would leave during the 1984-2023 stretch. The chronological structure cannot carry the material.
So Dicks restructures using what he calls the BABC model. I started in the middle, actually, of the story. I started with: my son is going to camp and I know he has to take a swim test and I know it might not be easy for him. The real beginning of the story happens in 1983. I'm going down to the waterfront to take a swim test with nine pancakes in my belly. I jump in the pond and think it's stupid and get out and I end up a beginner swimmer. 30 years later I'm with my son. That's a terrible way to tell that story — you can feel that already. But that's how most people tell it.2
The BABC model fixes this by reordering. Start in the middle, at the B [2024 setup]. The next part of the story, the next scene, is the A [1983, 40 years earlier]. So I'm bringing us back in time, but I've started us in sort of the present. So it's a story that takes place in the present but I yank the past into the present for a moment. And that way the story doesn't feel like it's taken 40 years — it feels like it takes a week. A guy tells a boy a story and then he waits to see how the story plays out.3
41 years becomes a week. The audience never feels the span. The full setup arrives without breaking the listener's attention budget.
BABC is a structural model with four named positions:
B (start): The middle of the chronological story. Specifically, the moment that is closest in time to the destination but also contains the setup tension. In the son's-swim-test story, B is the present-day moment of preparing for camp, when Matt decides to tell his son the cautionary story. This position sets up the audience for the destination without revealing it and without dragging them through 40 years to get there.
A (flashback): The chronological beginning. The earliest material the story needs. In the son's-swim-test story, A is 1983, the original swim test, the pancakes, the rowboat humiliation. The flashback is brief — it delivers only the material needed for the setup, then returns to B. The A material exists in the listener's experience as a story Matt is telling his son, which embeds the past inside the present and keeps the listener oriented in the present timeline.
B (return): Return to the present-day timeline. Continue from where B left off, now with the audience understanding the setup. In the son's-swim-test story, this is Matt sending his son off to camp, waiting for the pickup, asking about the swim test.
C (destination): The 5-second moment of change. Always at the end. In the son's-swim-test story, this is the son's reveal that he heard Matt's voice in his head during the swim test, and the resulting realization that Matt is in his son's life in the way his parents weren't in his.
The structure is BABC, not ABBC or ABCC, because of where the flashback sits. The flashback is embedded inside the present-tense narrative (BABC), not appended before it (ABBC). The embedding is what produces the "this story takes place in a week" feeling. The audience experiences the present as the dominant timeline; the past arrives as a quick excursion that returns.
The reason BABC works is audience time-perception. Audiences perceive story-duration based on where they begin and where they end, not based on the total chronological span. A story that begins yesterday and ends today feels like a one-day story even if it includes a brief flashback to ten years ago. A story that begins ten years ago and ends today feels like a ten-year story even if most of the action happens today.
The BABC model exploits this by beginning near the destination (B), making the brief excursion to A feel like a digression rather than the spine, then returning to the B/C timeline. The audience's time-perception is anchored to the present-tense framing. The 41-year material is processed in one-week duration because that's the apparent runtime from the listener's perspective.
The structure also produces the destination is already implied effect. Starting in the middle means the audience knows from sentence one that something is about to happen — Matt is preparing his son for camp; some test is coming; some realization is forthcoming. The audience leans forward into the anticipation. They don't get the resolution until C, but they're committed from B because the destination is already implicit.
A chronological structure (ABBC) destroys this. Starting in 1983 means the audience has to infer the destination from the past material. They don't know if this is going to be a story about Matt's youth, a story about Scouting, a story about life-lessons, or something else. They're in the dark. By the time the chronological progression reaches 2024, the audience has either committed (to the wrong destination) or disengaged. BABC keeps them oriented toward the right destination from the first sentence.
BABC is the Big Three Step 3 (Master the Middle) deployment of chronological re-ordering. Once the destination (Step 1) and beginning-as-opposite (Step 2) are set, the middle's chronological span has to be compressed; BABC is one of Dicks's primary tools for this compression.
The model pairs with start with location and action: the B opening is necessarily a location-and-action moment. My son's trunk is laid out in the bedroom and he's throwing stuff into it in a way that will never work out for him.4 The B-opening obeys the location-and-action rule even while being structurally a middle-position rather than chronological-beginning.
BABC enables beginning-as-opposite-of-ending for stories that span long chronological periods. Without BABC, long-arc stories struggle to deliver the inverse-of-end opening because the chronological beginning is too far from the ending to feel like a clean contrast. With BABC, the contrast can be engineered between B (present setup) and C (present resolution), with A operating as the historical-evidence supplying context.
The model relates to the time-travel rule (usually stay in the moment, with this as the exception). BABC is the canonical exception to the stay-in-the-moment principle — it explicitly time-travels backward and forward — but it's licensed because the time-travel is bounded (one excursion to A, then return to B) rather than continuous.
Dicks demonstrates the model in real time during the Knowledge Project interview, including self-critique of his own opening attempt.5
B (start, 2024 present): My son's trunk is laid out in the bedroom and he's throwing stuff into it in a way that will never work out for him. I'll let him make this mistake for a while, and then eventually my wife will come in with packing cubes and she will solve all these problems. But while he's throwing stuff into this trunk for Scout camp, I'm sitting on the edge of the bed and I decide this is the right moment to tell him what he needs to hear. The audience is placed in 2024, in a specific room, with specific action (throwing stuff in a trunk). The location-and-action opening is in B-position.
A (flashback, 1983): When I was a kid, I first went to Scout camp, they had us do our swim test at 8:30 in the morning right after breakfast on a Monday. And I was annoyed — I was just that kid that I always wanted to do things on my own terms. I've got like nine pancakes in my belly and I go down in the cold of the morning and I have to jump in the lake and I swim about 50 yards and I'm done. I'm like, this is stupid. So I get out and they go "okay, you can swim but you didn't swim far enough, you're a beginner swimmer." And I was like, "okay, whatever." And they said, "that means you can only swim in this little area here." And I was like, "oh." And they said, "and you can only take a rowboat." And I was like, "oh, forget it. I'll do it again, I'll take the test." They go, "great. Wednesday — that's when the next test is happening." So for two days I was a beginner swimmer. The flashback delivers the cautionary material. Compressed. Specific. Returns to present.
B (return, 2024): I pick him up a week later. I don't make it the first question I ask but it is the first question I want to ask. I sort of like try to play it cool. I wait a while and I go, "oh hey, what about the swim test? How'd that go?" He goes, "oh, I passed on the first try." The return-to-B picks up from the previous B-position, now with the audience understanding the setup.
C (destination): "And he said, 'actually on the second lap I was going to quit because I was so tired, but then I heard you in my head, and I remember you said don't quit just because you're tired, quit if you can't swim anymore. And I heard you say it, Dad, and I swam the other two laps.'" I'm oddly emotional — not oddly emotional, I'm appropriately emotional right now — because I sent my son off for seven days and there was a moment when I was in his head. It was like I went on that swim test with him. The 5-second moment lands.
Total duration of the spoken piece: roughly 4-5 minutes. Chronological span covered: 41 years. The BABC compression is what makes the time-management work.
Note Dicks's self-critique: he opens with my son is going to camp instead of with the trunk-in-the-bedroom scene. He recognizes this as a failure — he taught instead of scening. The corrected version starts in B with location-and-action, not with the teaching-statement. Even the structural model can be undermined by an opening-violation. Both disciplines have to fire together.
You have a story draft with long chronological span. The destination is in the present. The setup material is in the past. The piece feels too long.
Step 1: Identify your B (present-day setup-moment that is closest to your destination C). Look for a specific moment in the present-day timeline that sets up the audience to receive C and is itself a clean location-and-action scene. For Dicks's swim-test story, B is Matt and son in the bedroom packing for camp. The moment establishes the present situation, foreshadows the test to come, and supplies the trigger for the flashback to A.
Step 2: Trim your A material to the minimum needed. A is brief in BABC structure. Cut everything from the past timeline that isn't strictly required to set up C. The audience needs enough A material to understand the present-day situation; they don't need the full historical arc.
Step 3: Engineer the transition from B to A. Most BABC stories have a trigger — a moment in B where the storyteller (or character) decides to recall A. I'm sitting on the edge of the bed and I decide this is the right moment to tell him what he needs to hear. The trigger justifies the flashback's appearance and embeds A inside the B-narrative. Without a trigger, the flashback feels like an editorial choice rather than a narrative one.
Step 4: Engineer the transition from A back to B. The flashback ends and the present resumes. The transition should feel natural — usually the storyteller returns to the present-tense narrative with a clear time-marker (30 years later... or as my son is throwing stuff in the trunk...). The audience needs to re-orient to the present timeline cleanly.
Step 5: Verify your C lands as inversion of B's setup. The destination should resolve the setup that B established. I sent my son off worried he would make the same mistake; he came back having heard my voice and avoided it — the C inverts the B-anchored anxiety into the B-relief.
The full BABC restructure typically takes 30-60 minutes per piece. Working storytellers report this is one of the highest-ROI restructures available for long-chronological-span material — pieces that felt unsalvageable in chronological form often work cleanly in BABC.
Your A material dominates the runtime. A is supposed to be brief — usually 20-30% of the spoken duration. If A is 50%+ of the piece, the structure has reverted to flashback-heavy storytelling and lost the present-day anchoring. Trim A or rebalance.
Your B is teaching, not scening. My son was going to Scout camp — that's teaching. My son's trunk is laid out in the bedroom and he's throwing stuff into it — that's scening. B has to be location-and-action just like any opening.
The A-to-B transition feels mechanical. And that reminded me of 1983 — that's a mechanical transition. The trigger should feel natural. Often the storyteller's internal narrative supplies the transition: I'm sitting on the bed and I decide this is the right moment to tell him what he needs to hear.
Your audience cannot tell which timeline they're in. The flashback should be clearly marked. When I was a kid... / 30 years ago... / back at my own Scout camp... Tell the audience explicitly when you're in A. Don't ask them to figure it out.
The destination C doesn't connect to B's setup. B established a worry; C should resolve it (or invert it). If C is about something unrelated to what B set up, the BABC structure is fragmented. Either change C to resolve B's setup, or change B to set up the right destination.
You use multiple flashbacks. BABC has one A-segment. Multiple flashbacks (BABABABC) overload the audience's timeline-tracking. If multiple flashbacks are genuinely needed, the story is structurally different (consider a non-BABC model) or the material is over-compressed (consider splitting into multiple pieces).
The BABC model is named explicitly in the Knowledge Project interview and demonstrated in real-time with the son's-swim-test story.6 It is consistent with how working storytellers across the Moth-StorySLAM community describe their structural craft.
A real tension exists with the time-travel rule (usually stay in the moment): BABC explicitly time-travels. Dicks resolves the tension by treating BABC as the exception that's licensed when chronological span exceeds audience tolerance. Most stories should stay in the moment; long-span stories use BABC.
A tension also exists with Karlsson's essay methodology: Karlsson's essays often move freely across time without BABC discipline. The form differs — essay readers have self-selected for sustained attention; oral audiences haven't. BABC is calibrated for oral; essay can be looser.
Open question: does BABC scale to very long forms (novels, multi-hour talks)? Working novelists report the structure works but typically with multiple BABC cycles rather than one large BABC arc. The model's natural runtime ceiling may be around 30-60 minutes; beyond that, multi-cycle structures take over.
Dicks and Gelb converge cleanly. Gelb's documentary practice often uses BABC-shaped structures: cold open from the middle of the story, flash to past background, return to present, land on destination. The same model operating in visual rather than oral medium.
Dicks and Bilton diverge on scale. Bilton's narrative non-fiction often uses more complex structures (multiple parallel timelines, interleaved flashbacks) because the print-form supports longer runtimes and reader-pacing. BABC is calibrated for oral; Bilton's structures are calibrated for print.
Dicks and Karlsson partially diverge. Karlsson's essay structure is not BABC-constrained — essays can move freely. The split reflects medium-specificity rather than disagreement.
BABC is fundamentally a time-compression structural model — a specific reordering pattern that makes long-chronological-span material fit within short audience-attention windows. That move has analogues across disciplines.
Eastern spirituality: The Five Sandhis — Junctures — Sanskrit dramaturgical theory's plot-structure includes explicit techniques for non-chronological narrative ordering, including embedded flashbacks (kathā-pīṭhikā) that operate functionally like BABC's A-segment. The classical tradition theorized embedded-flashback storytelling at least 1,500 years before contemporary craft did. What neither domain produces alone: Sanskrit theory supplies the philosophical depth of why embedded structures work better than chronological for certain content; Dicks supplies the practitioner-grade compression (just call it BABC and teach it as a four-position model). Cross-tradition convergence: non-chronological narrative ordering is a load-bearing technique across centuries of dramatic-craft tradition.
Behavioral mechanics: Six-Minute X-Ray (Hughes) — Hughes's elicitation work uses temporal-reordering techniques: instead of asking targets to narrate events chronologically (which produces low-information accounts), the elicitor asks for specific reordered framings (start with the most surprising moment, then flash back, then return). The mechanism is structurally parallel to BABC: reordering chronological material produces higher-engagement (and, in Hughes's case, higher-disclosure) than chronological order. The cross-orientation parallel reveals that chronological order is structurally suboptimal for live-craft contexts, and practitioners across orientations independently arrive at reordering disciplines.
The Sharpest Implication BABC implies that most amateur storytellers default to the worst structural choice. Chronological order is the structure people produce when they don't think about structure — start at the beginning, proceed to the end. BABC requires deliberate restructuring away from the natural default. The misallocation is structural and ubiquitous: most amateur speeches, articles, presentations are chronological because chronological is what brains produce without intervention. The cost is that long-span material doesn't fit, and audiences disengage during the middle stretch where nothing's happening yet. BABC is the simplest possible repair — four named positions, one re-ordering — but it requires the storyteller to recognize that chronological default is harming the piece. The recognition is the hard part. The application is mechanical.
Generative Questions