You may have heard that editors aren’t fond of prologues. We open our mail before reading who it’s addressed to. We fast-forward through the first song in any Disney movie. We refuse to read the instruction manuals for anything, and insist on being shown how it works. And when the best man opens his wedding speech with ‘Let me tell you a little bit about Carl,’ we leap from our seats roaring ‘GET TO THE POINT.’
This is only half-true. Most editors aren’t against prologues on principle. It’s just that we read a lot of them, and we often find they’re unnecessary. The reality is that most stories start too early, even when the first thing we read isn’t taking place ten thousand years ago and detailing every last battle of the Geometra War up until the Triangular Knight finally defeated the Right-angled King.
So I figured it’d be worth outlining some simple strategies for determining what your prologue’s doing for your story, what should be in it, and whether it needs to be there at all. This isn’t an attempt to shift you from the pro-prologue camp to the anti-prologue camp – it’s more of an attempt to set up a new camp, somewhere in the middle, where both sides can throw stuff at us. It’s also a three-part series, so settle in. We’ll start with a question:
Why does your reader need your prologue?
Um. So they know about the war. And the Triangular Knight and stuff.
Sure, but your first chapter starts in the peaceful village of Circleshire, so how soon is any of that actually going to come up? Think about it: when you write a prologue, you are signalling to your reader that this information is so important that the story simply cannot start without it. If it’s not – if it’s just some history or some atmosphere or a character running away from a monster that doesn’t return until chapter nine – then why does it need to be at the front? Why are we reading it now if we don’t need it until later?
Foreshadowing, you howl. Setting the scene. All right, fair answer. But foreshadowing happens alongside the story, not instead of it. And what we learn from the prologue should always have some immediate relevance. It should change the way we move into chapter one.
Take the first few minutes of Stranger Things. Here’s that exact monster-chase sequence I was talking about. Our doomed scientist flees for his life down a creepy corridor, hammers the elevator button in panic, then gets snarfed up by a creature we never see. But look at that transition. We go straight into Mike playing Dungeons and Dragons with his friends. His dialogue: ‘Something is coming. Something hungry for blood,’ takes on new weight, given what we’ve just witnessed. Without that previous scene, this would all just be a game, but the opening has taught us something very important – monsters in this world are real. And that changes how we see things.
Another example: Robert Jordan’s Conan the Triumphant begins with a prologue featuring the villain, the priestess Synelle, attempting to summon her god – a three-eyed, four-horned demon. There’s plenty of dark activity and sinister overtones, but also some information that’s absolutely critical to how the story plays out. Synelle’s ritual fails, and it fails because she’s missing an idol of some sort. So now we know what she’s searching for, and we have some idea of why we don’t want her to get it, and this is key to understanding what comes next.
Because in the very first chapter, Conan the barbarian is wandering through the market when he spots something that’d make the perfect gift for his barbarian buddy: an ugly little statue with – you guessed it – three eyes and four horns. And we know immediately that this is the statue, and that Conan’s about to let himself in for a whole world of trouble, which wouldn’t be the case if we hadn’t read the prologue. In this instance, the prologue creates a situation where we know more than the characters do, which generates tension and conflict that otherwise wouldn’t be there.
In summary: the information in your prologue should be critical your story. There should be a reason why the reader needs to know this information now, and can’t simply be told later. An effective prologue will enhance a reader’s understanding of the following chapters, often by allowing them to know something the characters don’t.
Melancholy Whale 