What’s Prologue Is Past
The Point of Its Usefulness
I have amassed a great many thoughts on prologues over the last several weeks, which is bad news for you because now you have to read them. Or don’t, I’m not the reading police. I’m going to put them in the space below and if you choose to read them that’s on you. You could be reading something else. I recommend Gailey’s Stone Soup or CL Clarke’s Honing the Blade, they’re both better than this.
Today’s article is on prologues: What they are, what purpose they serve for the reader, examples of good ones and bad ones, and how to tell if your prologue is fodder for the discard file.
I have urged you, several times lately, to delete your prologue, and that has led several people to ask me why they should do that. I answer this question a lot, so much in fact that I keep the tripartite answer right here upon my tooltip to paste at a moment’s notice:
Most prologues do not enhance the story they precede; and
Even fewer prologues are necessary; and
No manuscript should contain anything unnecessary that does not enhance it.
It wasn’t really on my tooltip that was an exaggeration.
It might be better put as “no unnecessary piece of a manuscript should survive revision and editing”—ultimately, it amounts to the same thing. The final, revised, polished manuscript should not contain anything it doesn’t need, and that includes most prologues.
I never said you shouldn’t write a prologue, I said you should delete your prologue. Can’t delete something you didn’t write, now, can you?
I will explain.
What’s in a Prologue
Look, today you get subheadings. You don’t get subheadings when I’m exhausted.
The first thing I want to cover is what a prologue actually is, what it contains, what makes it different from Chapter 1 and all the other types of things that precede Chapter 1.
The prologue is different from things like the preface, foreword, or epigraph, because the prologue is not front matter and it’s not introductory—it’s part of your story. It’s told in the voice of a narrator—either the story’s overall narrator or a character who is narrating this particular part. A prologue is so much a part of the story that Chicago Manual of Style doesn’t even list it under the different parts of a book. It’s essentially just another chapter, though it is one that does not have to take a chapter number. Sometimes a prologue is named Chapter 1, as in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Calling it Chapter 1 doesn’t make it not a prologue.
The idea of the prologue comes to from drama, where an actor would often come out on stage before the play started and give a brief speech to set the scene. Consider this bog-standard example:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
Or, if you will:
It is a period of civil wars in the galaxy.
A brave alliance of underground freedom fighters
has challenged the tyranny and oppression
of the awesome Galactic Empire.
Those are dramatic prologues. They come before the main action of the story and set the scene for you so you know what to expect. In the first example, if you are sitting down to watch Romeo and Juliet for the first time and you have no idea what you’re getting into, you’re learning a few important things to keep in mind as you watch the action unfold:
We’re in Verona.
There are two ancient households duking it out.
(There’s more but that’s the part I clipped.) Likewise, if you’re watching Star Wars for the first time and you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, the prologue wants to make sure you know:
We’re in space.
There are two opposing factions duking it out.
That way, when the action begins immediately after, you have an idea of why these two parties are fighting each other in whichever one you’re watching.
In a novel, a prologue could be anything from a few lines to a page to a chapter-length section, but it is intended to serve the same purpose: It gives the reader background information about something that has happened prior to the beginning of the story’s action in order to impart crucial plot-related details and set the scene. If you have a prologue—and you haven’t deleted it yet, oh my dog Jan delete your prologue already—it needs to accomplish all four things.
If your prologue is only imparting background information and not giving the reader any details that are material to the actual plot, for example, you need to squint really hard at it. It’s probably an exposition dump. Nobody wants to read an exposition dump.
What’s in a Good Prologue
A good prologue has to do all of the four things above mentioned, but it also has to hook the reader—fast. As I discussed in an earlier article on getting the reader to ante up for you, you don’t have forever to get your show on the road. The reader is always ready to put your book down and move on to something else. You have to convince the reader to choose your book in the first place (purchase it, download it, borrow it) and then you have to deliver on what you promised fast to get them to keep investing more of their time and energy. If your prologue is a chronicle of the history of the kingdom of which your character is a citizen, you are not going to hook any readers with that. Action and dialogue get readers invested. Dramatic tension gets readers invested.
A good prologue, therefore, is not only backstory and scene-setting, but also delivering key details that the reader will need later on in the story. For me, in my considered opinion (and what is Shelf Life if not my long-winded considered opinion persevering?) the best prologue does two things with those key plot details:
Slip them to the reader so elegantly that the reader doesn’t, at first, understand what they’ve been given; and
Let the reader in early on information that the main story characters do not have access to.
One of the best ways to get a stranglehold on your audience's attention and keep it is with dramatic tension. Dramatic tension invests your audience in the characters and their journey and its ultimate outcome. A great way to generate some dramatic tension right up front is to give your reader a key detail that they will rapidly realize the main character they’re starting to love doesn’t know. The reader automatically begins anticipating how the character will come to learn this detail and whether it will be in time to avert whatever disaster is coming their way. I’ll go over how some of my favorite and least-favorite example prologues do or don’t do this in the next section.
The other thing a good prologue is accomplishing is acclimating the reader to the world they’re about to be thrust into. When I pick up a new book or start playing a new video game, I expect that it’s going to take me some time to understand what’s going on. I expect things to start in medias res, that’s the best way to start anything. There’s a time period where I feel a little uncomfortably out of my element before I get into the swing of the story or the gameplay. If that acclimation period goes on too long, and I feel uncomfortably lost for too long, I put down that media and move on to something else. I don’t mind feeling confused briefly but if it carries on too long I’m done.
Good and Bad Prologues
One of my favorite examples of the a good prologue, although it’s one I don’t particularly enjoy, is the one from A Game of Thrones. Will, Gared, and Weymar Royce—members of the Night’s Watch—are patrolling north of the Wall to find a camp of wildlings that Will insists has been killed by something or someone unknown. In the course of investigating, Will encounters an Other, which kills Royce and turns him. The prologue closes on Royce’s reanimated corpse scaring the daylights out of Will.
The action of the book picks up some time later with Bran Stark tagging along with dad Ned who is off to behead a criminal. We learn that this man has forfeited his life for deserting the Night’s Watch and that he’s already “dead of fear” before they cut his head off. The story then continues on as most of us probably know, with all of the political and familial epic fantasy drama.
Only we—the readers—know that the man whose head Stark cut off was Will, and Will was the only person who could have told the Starks that the Others are real. So we have to hang onto the knowledge that while the Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens and everybody are engaging in their petty succession war, there’s another terrifying threat at hand and no way for them to find out about it.
Look at how this prologue accomplishes its mission:
It gives us background information on the world we’re in—we learn a bit about the Night’s Watch and, if we’re reading carefully, we pick up on the fact that winter in this world only comes around every dozen or so years.
It takes place weeks or months prior to the beginning of the story in Chapter 1.
It sets the scene with a knight on horseback, sword in hand, riding through the wilderness. We’re in an epic fantasy.
It imparts critical, plot-related information in that there’s a supernatural force killing people and turning them into zombies.
It’s only later, when we’re reading Bran’s and Catelyn’s and the other Starks’ early chapters, that we realize these people don’t know about the zombies.
How about a prologue we could all do without? Chapter 1 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is billed as a regular chapter, but let’s face facts—that’s a prologue. It takes place ten years before the inciting incident (when Harry’s Hogwarts letter arrives) and introduces us to Mr. Dursley going about his day. He notices several odd occurrences, like owls flocking around in the daytime and oddly dressed people milling around. A dialogue exchange between Dumbledore and McGonagall establishes that they are magical people, and schoolteachers of some kind, that Lily and James Potter have died, and their son, Harry, has survived to be dropped off on the Dursleys’ doorstep in a basket.
The action jumps forward ten years to Chapter 2 where we encounter Harry, now eleven years old, who knows none of this information—he doesn’t know he’s a wizard and he doesn’t know his parents were killed in a magical war. But Harry finds all that out in short order. It’s not a meaningful mystery that is withheld from Harry. There was no reason to spend a whole chapter telling us what we’re going to find out all over again in the next three chapters.
This prologue:
Gave us background information about the world we’re in—that we’re in modern-day England but with the presence of a magical community.
It takes place ten years prior to the beginning of the story in Chapter 2.
It sets the scene, again in modern-day England.
It does not provide us with any plot-critical details we weren’t getting anyway.
Look to number 4: There is no important information in Chapter 1 that we don’t get in the rest of the book. Years later we’ll learn that there was significance in the provenance of the flying motorcycle, but we did not need an entire chapter two books ahead of time for that.
Harry himself is a reader-surrogate character, meaning he has no knowledge of the story’s fantastical elements and must be told about them, usually by Ron or Hermione. Because everything is going to be explained to Harry at an appropriate time when he needs to know, there was no reason to frontload us with a bunch of exposition in Chapter 1. We would have gotten that information anyway, when Harry did.
The story is, in fact, stronger if you skip Chapter 1. Rationing information to the reader is another excellent way of generating dramatic tension—drib and drab bits of information to the reader that make them want to learn more. If you begin with Chapter 2 instead of Chapter 1, you encounter an elegant chain of interesting questions that drive you forward: Why do the Dursleys resent this child who lives in their house? How is it possible that this ordinary boy can talk to a snake? Who is sending these mysterious letters? But we already know, because Chapter 1 already told us. There are no pressing questions to push us forward. Not that we need them—it’s Harry Potter, most of us did not have trouble getting through these books—but we would have had a stronger and more compelling start without Chapter 1.
Frontloading your text with a bunch of exposition is a great way to put your reader to sleep. Rowling was able to get away with it in this early HP installment because it’s a solidly middle-grade book, intended for 8- to 12-year-old readers, and that’s an age group for which repetition and gentle handholding are appropriate. A prologue like this would not be as well-received in a book for young adult or adult readers.
How to Tell If Your Prologue Can Go
So why would you write a prologue at all if you’re only going to have to toss it at the end? In my experience, some writers (and especially newer writers) are more comfortable kicking off their story with a big exposition dump. You’re champing at the bit to get started, your worldbuilding is exquisite, you know the backstories of all your characters going back three generations, and you want to give the reader all of it. Friend, the reader doesn’t want all that.
But if you need to write a prologue or an exposition-heavy Chapter 1 to get yourself moving, then go ahead and do that. You can always remove it in revision or editing if it doesn’t serve your story. Here’s a few ways to tell:
After getting some distance from the drafting phase, try reading your story beginning with whatever is second—Chapter 1 if you wrote a prologue or Chapter 2 if you didn’t.
Ask beta readers to consider the prologue or opening chapter critically and tell you if they think it’s the best starting point.
Consider your prologue and see if it meets all four of the main criteria outlined above and also generates dramatic tension.
What do you do if your prologue doesn’t pass muster?
Read it again, line by line, asking yourself what information is absolutely critical for the reader to have.
Make a list of those critical details.
As you revise your manuscript, figure out where you can reinsert those details organically throughout the text so that they’re not being dumped on the reader in an exposition block right at the start.
That’s it, that’s all you have to do. If you end up clipping out that prologue for the better of your story, hang onto it somewhere. When your fans come at you one day begging for more stories set in your fictional world, you’ll already have one ready to go.
I hope you enjoyed today’s thoughts on prologues, unless you navigated away to read Gailey in which case, honestly, me too, I don’t blame you. Coming up Thursday, I’m talking about how to distill your entire story shebang down to a thirty-second elevator pitch, which is perhaps the crummiest job in all of writing. Forthcoming, as well, the long-promised article on sentence diagramming. I have not forgotten you.
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