My novel starts with a prologue section that tells of a character telling a detective what happened three days earlier. How do I format and state that in my novel? Do I just put: "Days earlier" above the title: Chapter One? Or...how do I write this?
Yep, pretty much, although it's much more common to put the time stamp under the chapter title, instead of above it. You could also add a slightly more specific timestamp to each chapter (x hours earlier) to create a sort of countdown/ pressure cooker effect as we get closer to whatever landed the character with the detective, but that's completely up to you. I will note, that in this case you probably don't need anything stating that this is three days earlier, presumably you ended your last chapter with the character beginning to tell their story, and the reader will understand that the first chapter is now in 'the past' compared to the prologue. It's a very common framing device.
Do you need a prologue? If you want the prologue, you can simply title it "Prologue." For what it's worth, in reading articles by agents and publishers, I have come across a fair number who disregard prologues (actually discard them) and read the submission from the first chapter thereafter.
You're spoiled for choice at the start of the story. So long as you can read it back to someone else and they understand it's fine. One way is to change the prologue into a direct-speech report to the detective. Then the characters can establish re-establish that it was three days ago as many times as the reader may need. "And that was three days ago?" "-Yes. Tuesday." "No more, no less. But exactly three?" "-Yes." "Being the number one more than two and one fewer than four?" Another approach is to try and keep everything vivid and present the events from the other character's pov. That might not be so natural if they are prologue-y and the OP's instinct is to separate it from the flow of the main story, but vividness and excitement in the opening pages is often desirable for its own sake. But even then, the pov doesn't have to be slavish. At the start of the main character's chapter, where the detective's viewpoint takes back over, it's okay to step outside the new pov for a moment at the start and say something like. "From his point of view, that's what he remembered happening three days ago, but in the here-and-now my main concern is to capture any little details the prosecution might use to catch him out at cross-examination." Normally we don't want characters' viewpoints reaching over into each other - but it's okay to give someone an omniscient moment if that's the fastest way to get the reader settled correctly. And this is in a context of detective and witness (or client or whatever) so the reader doesn't necessarily have to re-watch the events being reported. A device that might be transferable from film media might be to open in a vivid pov, leave the events on a cliffhanger, and segue into the interview. ======== [at the end of chapter one] "So they'd seen off the cops. I was chained upside down, any moment I'd be dunked in boiling tin." [chapter two] "Wait, wait, wait... You're saying the tin was boiling - so you're hanging there, being enveloped in tin vapour at a temperature of at least two-thousand, six-hundred and six degrees celsius, but you were still conscious?" ======= Something to possibly bear in mind is that whilst there are endless ways for a narrative to skip forward and backward, readers get used to how a book's going to treat sequentiality. So it might be useful to make this first jump match any others later in the story: which makes it something to come back to later.
When i dealt with it in the second chances trilogy i just made it clear in the text of the first chapter that it was 2006... then in the second chapter after he 'dies' the protag wakes up back in 1990 and again its made clear in the text. that said if you're going to jump around a lot you could also put a date in the chapter heading chapter 1: 2021 , chapter 2: 1856 etc
A number or day of the week is a good point of reference, however it's impersonal, bleak. What takes three days to complete? A TV series for instance - Three episodes. Watching a film in three days. Painting a picture. Some yearly event (still impersonal, but less than a day of the week). Or an event happening to a Character, something ordinary, like picking up something from the cleaners, someone passing through, a test (got sick or suspects being sick, waiting for the results).
