Prologues essential? or just a band-aid.

[eartshala]

I would like some opinions on prologues please. Who uses them? Do they make a story better or worse?

For those who don't use them, what are some techniques on how to incorporate the grand schemes and history throughout your stories without them?

 

[Jabrosky]

I don't see the point to prologues anymore. Why not just start the story at Chapter One?

 

[Ireth]

I personally don't use prologues. I've seen them done well and done poorly. If I want to incorporate my characters' history in the book, my go-to option is usually just to have them talk about it. Some would start a story-telling contest, and they'd weave the tales of their people's heroes, great battles, etc. As for themes, I like demonstrating those through the characters' actions. One of my books has a theme about embracing change, so I have the MC basically become a revolutionary, shunning his people's stagnant, selfish ways and trying to make peace with their longtime enemies for everyone's sake.

 

[Lumani]

I used a prologue in mine. The two main characters met once, several years before the story takes place. It isn't long, but I felt it was needed and plays a role later. For me it works, and I feel it adds to my overall plot and story. Not having it, I feel would leave my readers missing an important piece of condensed information. Chapter 1 starts 7 years after he promised to go back. Saves me having to go into depth on why he is there. Instead I can focus on the action and plot building.

 

[Steerpike]

They're never essential. I've seen them done well but generally prefer the author get on with the story.

 

[Ankari]

Before I joined Mythic Scribes, I thought all epic fantasy books needed a prologue. Now, none of my WIPs has one. I think a prologue can be absorbed into the main story. Most use it to share (tell) a part of the history of their world with the audience. Why? Let the reader discover it as the story unravels. Why force such a concentrated block of information down their throat at once?

I felt that GRRM, Robert Jordan, and R. Scott Bakker do a good job with their prologues. The similarity is that the prologue is a setup rather than an info dump. GRRM and R. Scott Bakker introduce a threat of some kind, but then chapter 1 appears relatively normal.

Robert Jordan offers a glimpse into a scene some three thousand years before the events in chapter 1. You're left wondering what does the prologue have to do with the rest of the story.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I almost always have a scene that introduces the characters and shows how they interact with each other before I bring in the story's main conflict. Because the main conflict is generally the "start" of the story, I used to call these beginning scenes the prologues. However, some people on MS say they don't read prologues, and if you don't read the first scene of any of my stories, you'll miss important information, so now I just call them chapter 1 while writing them exactly the same way. (Regardless of names, I will not remove these scenes, because my stories would be worse without them.)

 

[eartshala]

I guess it just depends on the story... It's a lot more work to weave history into a story and make it work when you have x amount of things to focus on. But I think it's worth it.

Opinions enlighten. Ya all are real helpful thanks . : )

 

[Penpilot]

Prologues aren't always necessary but like any tool in the writer's tool box, it can be useful. And to not use it ever IMHO is like never using a hammer just because every one else says so. The guidelines I use in determining if I need a prologue or not is as follows.

If there's a large time jump between what happens in the "potential prologue" and when the story starts and the events in this prologue are necessary to the understanding of the beginning of the story, then a prologue may be necessary.

If the events in the prologue are necessary to the understanding of the story and there's no possible way any of the characters in the story can know about those events or can find out about them, then a prologue may be necessary.

And finally, be careful with this one, in a story that absolutely needs to relay heavy amounts of backstory at the beginning, the prologue may be used to relay some of that backstory, and relieve some of the workload that the early chapters need to do. BUT BUT this is where a lot of prologues go wrong. They try to relay information that could easily be woven into the main story or irrelevant information. To me, this is the hardest part of when and if you choose to insert a prologue based on this reasoning, knowing if the info passed along can't be passed along in a different way. Most of the time it can, but on rare occasions it can't, and that's when the prologue is necessary.

I used a prologue in my most recent novel, an urban fantasy, because there's a key event that happened 20 years in the past that shadows over my entire story. It was a quick snapshot of the past that I used to contrast the present.

In my first novel, an epic fantasy, I didn't use a prologue and when I showed my novel to a professional editor, he told me I needed a prologue because my first chapters were too weighted down with having to set up the world, my characters, and their individual stories, even though I only had two POVs at the beginning.

 

[Philip Overby]

I'm seeing prologues used less and less, but I agree that they can be useful in some cases. I don't use them myself anymore, but I don't gloss over them like I've heard some people do. If I feel like the prologue is an excuse for the writer to tell all about the history of their world or something, I more than likely don't see the point in it. This kind of information can all be revealed in more effective ways, I think. But I'll second that I thought GRRM's prologue in A Game of Thrones was well done. I almost feel like if it wasn't there, the book would be missing a key part. Some may use a prologue as an overall view of some looming threat or such. In that case, I don't mind them as much.

For those who don't use them, what are some techniques on how to incorporate the grand schemes and history throughout your stories without them?

Some techniques that may work to integrate history or some such:

1. Have a character talk about something that happened from a historical viewpoint (as long as it's not an "As you know, Bob..." kind of scene.)
2. In the case of magic, show people using it. If the rules are complicated and need to be explained, you can always use the "Everyman" kind of technique, but some may not like that. It basically means use a character to be the PoV of the reader, someone you can explain things to. I think a lot of successful authors have used this to explain magic without info dumping.
3. Show the effects of historical events. If a castle was obliterated by a sorcerer, show the scorch marks and rubble left over on the stones. If an army used the slash-and-burn technique to cripple an enemy army, show the blackened earth and remnants of towns in ruin. If people are deathly afraid of a medusa because she turned their army to stone, make the mere mention of her name send people running.
4. You can also use the make-up of people in a place to show how history has changed it. If the population is more integrated, then maybe there was a big influx of people from all over at one point during their history. If there are ethnic groups that live side by side that hate each other, you can show this hatred by having them never seen in the same places together.

I hope some of these ideas help!

 

[Chilari]

I don't use prologues and in what I read, I'm not a fan of them. All too often they're unnecessary or even irrelevant. In many cases they're boring. Often, they're written in a different style to the rst of the story - which is really annoying and not good for the author because if the reader liked the prologue style but not the rest, they feel cheated, but if they didn't like the prologue style they might never bother to read as far as Chapter 1.

I think, to be honest, a prologue is a screen tool. It works great in movies and TV series as the audience settles down and starts paying attention, and allows the director to start with a strong visual element. In books, though, I'm not so sure. You need to get the reader hooked on the story, and if you give them an unrelated pre-story, you've got to hook them twice. Generally, most information inexperienced writers put into prologues can be included in a different manner in the early chapters of the story.

Worldbuilding information is always a bad prologue, because it's boring, it lacks an empathetic POV, and they often read like Wikipedia pages - interesting enough, but hardly engrossing narrative.

The 25 years ago type of prologue usually means there are different character from the novel's main cast, so you've got to get the reader interested in a character set's activities, and then in chapter 1 you've got to do it all over again. These often also fail to account for the time between 25 years ago and now, especially with inexperienced writers. It's like: here's the setup, now, 25 years after the last thing changed in this world, someone finally gets sick to death of the situation and decides to fight back, which nobody thought of in all this time.

The six months earlier type of prologue usually does have relevance to the plot, but isn't necessarily the best way of presenting the information because the events don't stand alone very well, or because the 6 month gap between then and now presents a bit of a hump to get over along with the prologue to chapter 1 gap.

I don't have a prologue on my WIP. I could have one, if I wanted it - there was a plague, the Governor and his staff left on ships to escape the plague, now the penal colony island is an anarchic mess run by gangs of convicts, until one of them takes control of the Governor's palace and its leader calls herself the Governor. But do I need it? No. I want to get to my protagonist and her struggles under this system, so I jumped right in. And that backstory is being fed in gradually. My protagonist mentions how things were before the plague, and is confused when one of her friends is willing to give up on rescuing their other friends because of how they all became friends in the first place. I haven't managed to cover the self-styled Governor taking over yet, but I don't know if I need to. The reader will have worked out by now, from the way my protagonist and her friends take about the Governor, that they don't think she has any legitimacy, and that the previous Governor left. As the story progresses, little details about the past will get added, and the reader will add it all together and work it out. They don't need that information all at once, because while it does show the setup for the story and explain the circumstances at the start of the story, all this history of what happened 6 months ago isn't itself part of the story, it's just the foundations, so it doesn't need a scene to itself, it just needs to be acknowledged.

 

[Steerpike]

It is worth keeping a couple of things in mind: 1. The reader often doesn't "need" as much information as the writer wants to give them. I'd say if you have information that you're trying to put into a prologue because you can't figure out how to fit it into the story itself, then the reader probably doesn't need to know it; and 2. A lot of readers skip prologues, so if you do write one I suggest following the advice I saw from an editor or writer somewhere, which is not to put essential information in the prologue (or at least not only in the prologue).

 

[Aspasia]

I like prologues, as long as they are relatively short. Personally, I'd rather "see" the critical historical scene taking place rather than "watch" two present-time chars discuss history. If you use the prologue as a mere info-dump, yeah that's not interesting. But like Ankari mentioned earlier, RJ's use of prologue is really quite good. It's a strange, interesting scene taking place long before the story starts (though "short" does not describe anything RJ does!). Then you hit the "present time" with a relatively calm scene Chapter 1, but the threatening feeling from the prologue remains. Starting with just a lot of his Ch. 1's, I would get bored a lot faster if he left off the prologue. It makes you wonder what will happen and how it will play into the story.

If a collapse of an Empire is critical to the backstory of your novel, I'd rather have a prologue showing this collapse rather than chars discussing it. Discussion of history is generally quite boring to me, because too often authors turn it into an info-dump or "As you know ..." scene. Actually being in that scene makes it more dynamic, I'm more likely to care about the event. If you use the prologue like a hook, I'm good. Boring, slow infodump so Ch. 1 can start info-dump free? Nope. It depends on how you write it, and what is going on in Ch. 1. I like it when the prologue and real beginning of the story contrast in tone or pacing. Like if Ch 1 starts with a bang, a prologue full of (interesting!) intrigue would make it seem even more dynamic. Relatively calm Ch 1? Burning and death and explosions in Prologue may keep me interested in MC's boring village life a little longer. Honestly I tend to write more short stories so my experience in actually writing this stuff is painfully limited. They're by no means necessary but if you use them well, they can really help your tone and pacing, I think.

 

[Addison]

Everyone has their own opinions on prologues. Some say that prologues are generally used to describe a world or build some sort of set up/build up for the bulk story. Others argue that the world description can be written in with the bulk story. Several have said that the first chapter of "Harry Potter, The Sorcerer's Stone" could be a prologue, but J.K Rowling made it the first chapter instead. So really think, is this a prologue or a first chapter? Do they really need to know this to understand the story?

My opinion is that a prologue is something that doesn't directly affect the story. Like and introduction or foreword. If it's just character back story then either it's a prologue or it can be broken up and re-written into the story. If it's not backstory and can't be re-written into the story then it's a prologue. Just really think if it's prologue or first chapter.

 

[Chilari]

Aspasia, characters talking about history isn't the only way to make that history known. Nor does them talking about stuff in the past have to be done in a history lesson style or an "as you know" way. There are plenty of ways to show this stuff in little dribs and drabs. Let's say that 1000 years ago, there was an elven empire which collapsed after a tyrant seized control and a group of elves opposed to the tyrant took drastic action to bring her down, having lasting catastrophic consequences on the elven population and forced drastic changes to their culture. Humans gradually expanded into former elven territories, transforming sometimes barren landscapes into productive agricultural land. Without a prologue or a history lesson, how might this be conveyed?

• The protagonists pass the remnants of an elven city. Most of it has gone, but what remains shill shows the scars of the past - deep cuts right into the stone.
• An old man, complaining about these new lords trying to rule over them, mentions his ancestors, nine generations ago, came to this land as pioneer and it is the sweat of their brows that turned it into the fertile land it is today.
• Weird elven magic makes some locations out of bounds. The characters take a longer route to avoid a spot rumoured to flare with lightning magic randomly.
• When the characters encounter elves, they discover what seems to them to be an odd society, where no one individual is in charge and decision making is shared. The elves are deeply suspicious of the leader of the human group, and his apparent power over the others in the group. They deliberately don't address him directly, but address all of the group as one and don't move forward until they have decisions from every member of the group.
• The elves have an expectation that great sacrifices will be made for the greater good, to the point that it seems to the human characters that they're almost suicidal or fanatical in fighting their causes.
• Characters who originated in the more magically active former elven lands find it strange that vegetables from more mundane landscapes don't occasionally discharge magic against the knives cutting them, or that the knives of mundane landscape residents don't have special handles on their cooking knives and other utensils to dissipate these shocks.
• When making an emotional plea to a long time friend, an elf character brings up how they survived the Purge to remind her friend of the importance of their friendship.
• The human characters notice, as they walk through a smallish elven settlement, that only the homes in the centre are occupied, and the others are so neglected that they've been reclaimed by nature and are barely recognisable as houses.

So, maybe I don't have the timescale in there properly, but the reader doesn't need to know it happened 1000 years ago, they just need to know it happened a long time ago. We can see the effect it's had, though - we see that it used to be elven land, but now characters have to travel far to find elves, passing ruined cities along the way, to discover a population that is clearly smaller than it once was. We see that the land used to be unfertile and barren, but that humans worked it until it was good land again. We can see that the elves have a very different culture to humans, and are suspicious, even paranoid, of individuals holding power over groups. We can see that something magical has happened to the land, leaving some areas dangerous and damaged as a result.

That's enough for a smart reader to work out that something big and bad happened a long time ago to the elves, probably involving a tyrant and a massive sacrifice and huge amounts of magic, and that former elven lands have since been settled in by humans. That's the key information, and it's been delivered to the reader organically, allowing them to build up a picture of the past and work things out rather than being handed it all. It has allowed the author to avoid info dumping or "as you know"ing, but instead keep things moving at a good pace. It has shown the reader how this event in the past has rippled outward to affect the present - and that is an important factor in deciding what to include of backstory. It needs a point, and the point here is "people are still dealing with this past event in very different ways". Sometimes, using a prologue to show the events of 1000 years ago or whatever fails in that respect, requiring the author to show it anyway, in which case, why include the prologue if you need to reiterate it later too?

 

[Caged Maiden]

I think a prologue sounded a whole lot more necessary to me before I knew a bunch about story-telling. Years ago... I thought it was the way to entice a reader in... to say, "This is an overview of this wonderful world and the current situation"... even if it was only a couple paragraphs. Now I realize that's what the blurb on the back is for

The only "real" prologue I've ever done was a 17-page one in my 7th book. I did it because there is history and events mentioned that the MC cannot ever know happened, and the rest of the book is told from her POV. That was a miserable failure and everyone who read it told me to make it just the first chapter... so I did! and it's much better. I couldn't possibly have trimmed it short enoguh to work as a prologue and it's far better as a chapter. It still irks me that it isn't from her POV, but I just CANNOT leave the events unseen because otherwise the story doesn't make sense.

 

[Aspasia]

Chilari, that was very helpful and informative! I admit I am still quite inexperienced as a writer and I have problems with info-dumps and conveying past history to the readers in an effective way. I can see how a more experienced writer would be able to trickle that information down in a way that the reader doesn't even notice they are getting bits of history -- indeed in that case a prologue would be extraneous if its purpose was to show that history. Personally I have used prologues as a way of avoiding that horrible first-chapter info dump that is unfortunately quite common in my writing. As I grow more experienced I will hopefully become better at more subtle ways to deal with this ...

As a reader, a prologue is sort of an "extra". If it's good, I'll be more interested in the story. If it's boring ... eh, I'll still read Ch. 1. Interesting, suspenseful, dynamic prologues would definitely keep me reading. Hmm. I guess I'm talking more about the start of the book than a prologue specifically.

My opinion is that a prologue is something that doesn't directly affect the story. Like and introduction or foreword. If it's just character back story then either it's a prologue or it can be broken up and re-written into the story. If it's not backstory and can't be re-written into the story then it's a prologue. Just really think if it's prologue or first chapter.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Prologue: first you must define it. It’s use is pretty broad. LoTR’s prologue is way different than the prologue in the ASoIaF. The “prologue” for Eve of Snows is different yet.

Good and bad come down to execution, not some inherent fault in the prologue, however it is defined.

 

[Chasejxyz]

You can do anything with writing, as there's always situations where something would work awesome and situations where it would be horrible. One of my novels has a "preface" because it's supposed to be an in-world "nonfiction" text like The Handmaid's Tale, so it's just a few hundred words setting that up (though it's not necessary to understanding the book). Another novel does not, though I'm sure if I wrote it in high school it'd have a prologue because back then I thought you HAD to have one for "good" fantasy. And my interactive fiction has a prologue, because it's first person and it's the MC recounting a really important past event that set him up for what's about to happen. How I'm structuring it, a "chapter" is multiple linked scenes that have choices and various routes, while the prologue is just the one short scene that is always the same for everyone. Narratively and mechanically it's very different from the main story so it makes sense for it to be something else.

An important thing to think about with regards to any start of your story is that it's not great to "restart" your story, which is what a lot of prologues do. If you start off with some action but then we have to read a few chapters of your hero mucking around on his farm before the dark lord burns it down, then you have a story beginning in the prologue which is then abandoned for a much slower, less exciting story. The longer your prologue is, the more jarring this is going to be. This is also something that can happen if you have multiple point of view characters. Sometimes you gotta do things that aren't the best generally for servicing your story, so you need to measure the pros and cons of these choices. There should be some other really good stuff going on in the start in order for your reader to get past the "restart" or time jump or what have you.

 

[Mad Swede]

A good prologue can really make a novel. Think for example of the epigraph that Ray Bradbury uses at the beginning of the Martian Chronicles. Its brilliant.

But all too often prologues become what Edgar Rice Burroughs once described as literary racketeering, a way of increasing your word count without adding much to the novel itself. (And for those of you who want that attributed, if I remember correctly he wrote that in the foreword to the Skeleton Men of Jupiter.)

Personally I don't use prologues or forewords, because I don't think they add much to the story itself. I'd rather work any neccessary background into the novel itself, as a way of developing the characters and the setting as the story progresses.