Last time around, we examined how a good prologue can add weight and tension to your story’s first chapter. Today we’ll look at some techniques for adding tension into the prologue itself, along with some common pitfalls.
First impressions are important. Most readers (and publishers, and editors) only take a few pages to decide whether or not they’re into a story. Sometimes less than that. And your prologue doesn’t get a free pass. It shouldn’t be something we have to slog through to get to the ‘real’ story. The real story should be starting now, while you’ve got our attention.
So think of your prologue as the frontrunner for your book – the master of ceremonies for your story. You don’t want the first impression of your writing to bore your readers, or frustrate them. But equally, you don’t want it to fake them out with phony action sequences, or misrepresent the work to come. Today’s topic, then:
Your prologue needs to function as a first chapter.
Foul. Red card. If my prologue has to do the same job as my first chapter, why don’t I just open the story with my first chapter?
I don’t know. Why don’t you?
All right, all right. Olive branch. Prologues and first chapters aren’t the same thing. Sometimes you need an early scene that’s separate from the main story. And, as we saw last time, sometimes there’s something your reader needs to know before you get started. But that doesn’t change the fact that the prologue is the first thing your readers are going to be applying their eyes to, so it needs to have the same hook and gripping power that you’d expect to see in an opening chapter.
Of course, you can’t just solve this by tossing in a whole heap of motorcycles and action and explosions before having the protagonist wake up from their dream or exit the computer game. You still have to play by the first rule: the prologue has to need to be there. It has to connect to whatever happens next. This is why fake-out openings are a bad idea in general, since they establish a conflict that has no consequences for the actual story. If you’re using an exciting prologue to try and cover for a dull first chapter, then you’re setting a trap for yourself. Your reader’s going to reach that first chapter eventually, and when they do, the drop-off in tension is going to squash your story flat.
Wait, I’ve got it. I’ll write a prologue, but the prologue will actually be the climax. After all, that’s the most exciting part of the story, so why not put it at the front?
Well, basically, because the climax is only the climax because you build up to it. If you put it in the prologue, then you’ve just got a prologue full of characters I don’t know fighting a villain I don’t care about while trying to disarm a nuclear device that’s about to destroy a setting I’ve had no time to get invested in. But hey, maybe you’ve made it engaging enough that I’ll keep reading to see what happens. It’s entirely possible. I’m still going to be expecting the tension to build, though. If you cut off the nuke-disarming and drop me into a school-day chapter one, then we’re back to the first problem.
That’s not to say the climax-as-prologue never works. Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer does a reasonable job of it. In her prologue, a girl with blue skin falls from the sky and dies. Taylor then spends the rest of the book making us not want the blue girl to die, and setting up the situation so that – at any given moment – the blue girl dying would be the worst thing that could possibly happen. The threat established by the prologue colours the entire story, and by the time we reach the actual climax, we’re hoping that, somehow, it’s going to be different from what we’ve seen.
Having said all that, the climax-as-prologue is also how Twilight starts. Make of this what you will.
In summary: your prologue is the reader’s first impression of your book. It needs to draw them in and make them want to read the rest. However, this doesn’t mean you can bluff your reader with artificial action. If you raise the stakes in the prologue, they have to stay raised in the first chapter, otherwise the drop-off will kill your tension, and you’ll lose your reader’s trust.
Melancholy Whale 