The day I heard that some people actually skip over prologues when reading novels, I was shocked. To my sixteen-year-old self, prologues always seemed like the most fun part of writing, and I had included them in every single story I’d written for the past few years (finished or unfinished). Besides enjoying writing them, I could not understand why someone would skip any part of a book. The author went to all that trouble to write the prologue, so it must be important. Now, I think I’ve changed my mind on prologues.
Someone said, in an online discussion about prologues on a young writers’ forum that I moderate, that an author should be able to put the important information into the actual novel, and so prologues are just a way of cheating, especially when author’s use it as an info dump where they tell their readers the entire history of their fantasy world. They forget that unless they’ve already got a following of avid readers, no one’s going to care about a war that happened five-hundred and fifty-one years ago.
There are cases where prologues do work, or else I would feel like a complete hypocrite writing about this because one of my novels still has a prologue in it, six years and four full rewrites later. I’ve decided that the occasional prologue is all right, so long as it’s short enough and to the point. A fifteen page prologue with a vague connection to the actual plot of the novel is stretching it in my book, yet I’ve seen this done (and it is part of the reason I never got more than twenty pages into the book).
I still find prologues extremely fun to write, though now when I begin a new story I try to limit myself when writing prologues. Most of the time, they’re unnecessary. Even for my rewritten novel, I’m considering cutting the prologue when I eventually reach a final draft, but then I remind myself that my prologue hooks up with the main story right away, and I’m still left undecided. To write a prologue, or not to write a prologue?
Now, I've only ever written three or four books, but my general rule is to write prologues when they're needed. EC had a prologue, because I needed to establish the danger of the Hellhorse species, and I couldn't do that with the main character's first encounter of them. TOQ doesn't have a prologue because it just ... doesn't need one.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the less obvious decisions (which, thankfully, I have never forced myself to make) are when important events happen years before the story begins, which the protagonist has no opportunity to witness properly. One could say that Harry Potter technically had a prologue, although it was called Chapter One and therefore slipped under my radar the first eleven times I read it. GRRM has prologues, but not ones that cover events from years before, and anyway, he already tells the story under eight different viewpoints, so what's one more?
I guess, if you are to have a prologue, try to go in the unexpected direction. Prologues seem exclusive to fantasy, and they're always introducing some plot-central artifact or describing some character's birth or some character's death, and that does get repetitive after a while. But if you still want to write the prologue, the solution is simple. Write it, and then call it Chapter One. Nobody will skip it then.
EC's prologue is a good prologue. Like you said, it shows the reader what the hellhorses are like.
ReplyDeleteRight, so you've helped me in my decision on whether the Legend of Zirannia needs a prologue. I'm leaning towards no now, since it just shows the king's death, but I probably won't decide for another few months at the least. Or more. Probably when I go back and edit it for the tenth time.
I actually realized that, for my December 2010 novel, I wrote what was basically a prologue, yet called it Chapter One as it happens only days before chapter two and is from the same POV.