Potency of Prologues

[ndmellen]

Addison- Honestly, I don't know. I would imagine 300k is too long, but it was just an example...How about 25% increments of what ever you have? Whichever one draws more "I need more, now!" votes wins.

As for how people will post, I don't have a clue...I'm halfway retarded when it comes to computers. I'll do the diligence on finding out, and progress from there. We just need enough people to make it worthwhile. Ireth has said she will, and I'm hoping Steerpike will also concede. I figure we need at least 8. If I can get that, I'll proceed.

 

[Ireth]

300k words? Am I reading that right? Like, three hundred thousand? That seems enormously long, far too much for a simple challenge about intros.

 

[ndmellen]

No, no...I was simply using that as a huge reference...

Whatever you have that you are most confident in, regardless of length. (5k or 300k, if it's good, it's good.)

 

[Rullenzar]

In short Prologues are lazy. I never read LOTR or GOT prologues. They are a snooze fest. I would have been so much more interested in LOTR if I wasn't fed all that hoopla at the start of the movie. I like finding things out as I go through the book. Don't you think it would have been more interesting if you were scratching your head when gandalf and frodo first found the ring and gandalfs reaction towards it?

And after watching the show I went back and read the prologue to GOT also. You find out about the whitewalkers too early. You already know from the start they will make a comeback. I would have liked to have been scratching my head when they talked about the wall and learned about them when Jon snow first went there.

 

[Addison]

I agree. For worlds that different the prologue should just cover the basics "The kind hobbits live in the shire, sprawling hills of green and gardens, protected from the other realms and their toils and troubles." The prologue is a place of introduction, not exposition.

 

[SeverinR]

In my reading history,
I begin chapter 1, prologue or not.
If I feel like I am missing something (and care about it), I check the prologue, if not it probably wasn't needed in the first place.

 

[Steerpike]

I know quite a few people who skip the prologue. Which, I suspect, is the reason I once heard advice from an editor saying never to put information indispensable to the story in a prologue, because enough readers skip them that you end up giving a bad impression of your book.

I agree that the story, from Chapter 1 on, should stand on its own merits. If you want to have a prologue to dramatize earlier events or give backstory to the world or whatever, I think that can be done without compromising the story so that people who don't read your prologue can still make sense of the story.

 

[Addison]

Exactly.

The last thing a writer, and reader, want is to be halfway through the book, right before the climax, and one of the character remembers something important of a great battle that is somehow connected to the present but the readeis shaken out of the story because he didn't read that. The prologue didn't pull him in, he skipped it, he was let down.

I feel that, as has been said, prologues are lazy. They're a dump of information that can easily be woven into the story if the effort is made.