1.The V shaped story
Open with flashback, cut to present, cut to flashback further along, cut to present day, reveal relevance of flashback to present day, resolve.
I wouldn’t say this is an archetype, not the same way that particular kinds of characters are, or, say, John Irving’s amputation thing. (Which I’d tend to call a tic rather than an archetype, but it’s a fuzzy line, so hey.)
What you’re describing is a structural issue, and while sometimes structures are authorial tics, sometimes they’re…well, structural issues. The structure you describe isn’t something inherent in a writer’s psyche, but a particular strategy for dealing with suspense and forward motion. It’s not a workable strategy, but for various reasons it’s a common one at a certain stage.
Suspense is a complicated thing. Generating the kind of interest and movement that will keep your readers reading even when things aren’t exploding, or when your characters aren’t in actual, mortal danger, is tricky. From a certain angle it seems like one of the first, most obvious, most simple methods of generating it is to conceal something important. Your structure does that--it starts with a flashback (this tends, by the way, to really kill forward movement, which you really don’t want right at the start), then zips to the future, and then back again but doesn’t explain the connection until nearly the end of the story. That’s the problem, right there, that “reveal relevance of flashback to present day” bit way at the end. Assuming that the reader will stay interested just to find out what’s really going on…that’s not a safe assumption. It’s not enough—and chances are, the thing you’re concealing is the most interesting aspect of the piece. Why hide it? Why save it for later? Just so you can jump out and say “Boo”? You’ll get so much more out of it if you just give it to us.
My rule of thumb is, whenever you think that the revelation of a certain piece of information is going to have some drama or energy to it, that information is exactly what you shouldn’t be concealing—it’s what the focus of your story is. Give that to us right up front, and wring every bit of good you can out of it.
Now, this is harder than just putting the cool thing at the end. Figuring out how to get the drama out of it—or trusting your material to actually work on its own merits—that’s tough. But the results are much, much better.
Of course there are some very successful works that do the “sudden revelation” ending. But they’re real virtuoso performances. Pay close attention, sometime, not to just the surprise ending, but the way the writer has put together everything before the big reveal. She doesn’t just throw a bunch of stuff at you that might or might not make sense and then, finally, give you the key to it. The reveal at the end usually doesn’t finally make it all make sense—it transforms what had previously been an entirely comprehensible structure into something different. Very tricky. Worth trying, certainly, but not a good default setting for plot structures.
