The whole point of a good prologue is to do something that the writer cannot do in the main part of the story without violating some important aspect of storytelling, like chronology or viewpoint or continuity. For instance, if the main story is told entirely from the viewpoint of one central character and takes place over the course of six days, except for one critical scene that takes place twenty years before the POV character was even born, that one scene is a clear candidate for being made into a prologue. Similarly, if there’s a ton of background detail and information that the reader truly needs in order to get through Chapter One, but which would bog that chapter down to a snail’s pace, a cultural/historical summary prologue may be in order.

One needs to be very, very cautious about deciding that you really need a prologue to do whatever-it-is. There are very few things that a writer truly cannot do without resorting to a prologue. Adding a prologue may be the first and most obvious thing the author thinks of when faced with a recalcitrant bit of backstory or characterization, but that doesn’t always make a prologue the best choice. Easy and obvious are not the same as effective.

On the other hand, while it may be quite possible to have your archeologists discover letters or a diary discussing life in Pompeii, it really isn’t plausible for them to find a first-person account written by somebody as they were fleeing the erupting volcano. The archeologists can piece things together and imagine what it must have been like, but if the author needs that dramatic flight scene as a scene, he’s probably going to have to put it in a prologue.

The second thing to remember about prologues is that if a book has a prologue, the prologue is the start of the book. The prologue doesn’t have to be full of action, any more than any other opening of a story does, but it does have to pique the reader’s interest so that they’ll keep reading. (This is why so many “ancient myth” and “historical background” prologues fail – they’re just not very interesting on their own.)

The third thing to remember is that no matter how brilliant your prologue is, there are going to be readers who skip it on principle. This means that a book with a prologue has, in essence, two different places (the prologue and Chapter 1) that each have to function as the start of the story (i.e., hook the reader into reading more).

Depending on the sort of prologue you’re doing, this usually means that Chapter 1 is going to have to start even more strongly than it normally would, in order to re-hook the readers when they have to switch gears, however slightly, at the end of the prologue. (Note that I said “start strong,” not “start with action.” There’s a difference.)

Prologues come in several varieties, and it helps to have some idea which sort you are doing. The different kinds of prologues tend to fall into categories according to timing, viewpoint, and style/function.

Timing: a prologue can happen before/long before the action of the main story; at the same time as the main story; or look backward after the main story is over. Viewpoint: The prologue can be told from the point of view of the main character from the main story, from the point of view of a secondary character, or from the point of view of some other character who never actually appears in the main story as a character (as with Steven Brust’s Paarfi novels, where the POV of the prologue is a crabby Dragaeran historian who is the putative author of the “historical fiction” that follows). Style/function: The prologue can be a scene; it can be narrative in a style different from but related to the main story (as when the prologue is a fairy tale or myth, or a summary of the historical background, or a fictional academic introduction to the material that follows); it can function as an introduction to the world or characters, or as a frame (usually with an epilog in the same vein) for the main story.

All of these aspects can be mixed and matched to some extent; that is, your prologue may be a dramatized scene from your protagonist’s childhood or a first-person protagonist’s narrative introduction to his memoir (setting the prologue solidly in the “future” of the main story); it can be a myth from your world’s ancient history or a centuries-in-the-story’s-future mythologized version of the events in the story; and so on.

A good prologue should leave the reader with more questions than simply “How does this tie in to the main story?” or “What happens to these people next?” This is especially important if the prologue is from a different viewpoint than the main story, because if the only thing the reader wants to know is what happens to these people next, she’s likely to get annoyed when the main story turns out to be about somebody else.

Generally speaking, a good prologue requires the reader to switch gears (from one time period to another, one viewpoint to another, one style/structure/format to another, or all of the above) between the prologue and Chapter One. The bigger the shift in gears, the stronger your opening of Ch. 1 has to be to re-catch and re-interest the reader. If there is no shift of gears between the end of the prologue and the beginning of Chapter 1, then what you have is probably actually Chapter 1 and not a prologue after all, and all you really need to do is renumber your chapters.

In addition to all of the above stuff, prologues are usually significantly shorter than the average chapter in the rest of the book. This isn’t an actual format requirement, but it is well to remember that the more one can condense the scene or information, the more likely one is to get at least some of those readers who hate prologues to read it anyway. On the other hand, three pages of super-neutronium-density narrative summary are likely to put off more readers than one might lose with a ten-page scene that conveys less actual information but keeps the reader interested with less effort on their part. It really depends on what you’re trying to do.

7 Comments
  1. One of the best examples I’ve seen of an effective prologue is actually from a tv show – the opening sequence of Firefly. Told from different characters depending on the episode and interspersed with images that assist the story, it briefly sums up the history and political situation, as well as a little bit of background on each character, just enough so that you can watch the episode, even if you’ve never seen any of the rest of the show, without being too confused.

    Obviously a novel’s prologue is quite different from a tv show’s opening sequence, but there are enough similarities to help me pick up clues for writing effective prologues, too – keep it short, keep it simple, give a sense of the flavor of the world, and just enough snippets of the characters’ personalities to give the readers something to connect to.

  2. I can scarcely express my irritation with the present cursed status of prologues, specifically F/SFnal prologues – largely brought about by the detestable convention of using them as a dump for stuff that is not story, nor has yet earned interest in the course of the story. Tolkien, by making an outrageous instance of this work, has a great deal to answer for!

    I like prologues, properly done. I don’t write them, unless somehow I have framing matter which is both delightful and unnecessary to the story. The idea of telling a tale to a reader who expects to be enchanted by it without even attempting to read it all, in the order I present it, seems like an exercise in unspeakable futility.

    So I try to avoid sending out the signal that this is a good idea. I do commit epilogue, on the grounds that the mode-change does really have a value, and that anybody who trusts me so little as to drop the tale like a hot brick at the first suggestion that the action movie is over, has probably not stuck with me that far anyway.

    I wish I had that flexibility with prologues too, but that ain’t the way the cookie crumbles. Pity, for everybody concerned.

  3. Oops, I guess I’ve committed prologue after all. Both Cantata and Pavane start out with a short (less than half a page) introduction from within the context of the story. An author’s note, but written by the character who is writing the story down within the story world itself, rather than by me.

    These notes seem very detached from all the above warnings and advice: there is no infodump, no historical incidents, no narrative summary, no *scene*. “To the most eminent inhabitants of the Coral Palace, I humbly present this new form of Art, the art of life stories…” But I’m willing to accept that they’re prologues, and I really don’t care if people skip/skim them. The most important piece of information is provided just by knowing that they are there — this story is written from INSIDE the context of the story world.

    But it gets me thinking. My EFP Epic has, immediately following each title, a note that goes like so: “Being the nth volume of an account of the journies of Prince Asond of Agolith, commissioned by the Council of Bards, and entered into the archives on the nth day of month, year.” This is doing the exact same thing that the “Author’s Notes” do in Cantata and Pavane, it just does it using fewer words. So is that single sentence a prologue also?

  4. Note that someone writing a parody might want to deliberately make a number of prologue mistakes.

    But probably not ALL of them, so as not to exhaust readers.

  5. Is it wrong that I now really want to add a prologue to something, just to see if I can write a good one?

  6. I can see why there are so many differing opinions on prologues 🙂 What’s interesting is that I normally don’t skip prologues, but one day, I noticed that my Kindle had done it for me… I started the book and later went back to look at the title. I started paging forward and realized the Kindle hadn’t recognized the correct starting point! In this case the book didn’t really need it, so I was still fine. My Kindle does the same thing with epigraph, strangely enough.

  7. Tiana – that’s not the Kindle, that’s in the coding for the book. The electronic typesetter decides where the default start of the book is. I haven’t looked into it in detail, but there might be a preset start where it says “Chapter 1” but if there is stuff before that, the person/people doing the book coding should know how to set it to the real start of the book.

    As for prologues, I think the problem I see far too often is the one of not starting strong enough with Chapter 1. The number two issue is the prologue-as-info-dump, which as you say, Pat, is the easy and obvious route.