Context: Prologues

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

Context is important. It’s not the only thing that is important in a story, though, and sometimes it isn’t as important as writers think it is.

Getting the context into the story is a perennial writing difficulty. There are two main solutions: working the context into the story as it’s needed, and providing it in a lump, as a prologue that is outside the main flow of the story. Today, I’m talking about prologues. I’ll do “working it in” next week.

I think I’ve written four books that have had prologues. Three of them were the middle-school Star Wars novelizations, and the prolog were there because that’s how the movies start—with that crawl of text that sets the stage. The other one was The Raven Ring, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Star Wars prologues are classic science fiction infodumps, and they work because a) the movies set the readers up to expect them, b) they are short—two to three pages, tops (and that’s large print), and c) they point straight at the action, which nearly always starts in medias res, usually with someone getting chased and/or shot at. They add context, letting the reader know up front who to cheer for, in a brief and hopefully interesting way that is part of the format for these stories (as with fairy tales that often start with a stock phrase, like “once upon a time,” or “long ago and far away).

The prologue for The Raven Ring is a bit different. I wrote it as part of Chapter One, because I wanted to show what my heroine was fighting for. My editor suggested making it a prologue, and after much consideration (and a change in viewpoint), I did. It’s not an infodump; it’s basically a chapter. It shows the main character and her family from an outsider’s viewpoint, and sets up the action that’s going to happen in the rest of the story. It’s about half as long as the other chapters in the book. So it, too, is short, and points toward the action in the first chapter.

The Raven Ring prologue also takes advantage of the slight speed-bump that many readers experience when going from a prologue to the “real” opening of the book. There’s a two-month time-skip and a change in viewpoint between the prologue and Chapter One, which would feel awkward and a bit odd if it came between Chapter One and Chapter Two. Between a prologue and Chapter One, though, the change emphasizes the gap in time and place between the prologue and the rest of the book.

Those are the two main types of prologue:  the information summary, and the short scene. The purpose, in both cases, is to provide the reader with key information that doesn’t fit easily into the first scene of the first chapter. Sometimes, it’s background or backstory information that happens months or years before the main story starts. Other times, the prologue sets up something—the fact that the protagonist’s seemingly idyllic farm life is taking place on an alien planet, for instance, might make readers feel cheated if it isn’t mentioned until Chapter Six, when the protagonist has to take the harvest off to the spaceport. In other words, prologues are there to provide important context for the opening chapter or two.

Both types of prologue have their perils.

Information summaries can get dry in the absence of characters to identify with and get interested in. Too many writers assume that because they needed ten pages of history, political intrigue, and protagonist’s personal backstory in order to write the story, readers need all that information up front in order to understand the story. 99% of readers are not going to be fascinated, interested, or sucked into the story by many pages of worldbuilding detail, no matter how important it is to the protagonist’s motivations or the eventual plotline. Because at the prologue point, neither the plot nor the characters have appeared yet.

The Star Wars opening crawls are examples of this sort of prologue that are worth looking at. Even when they start with a summary of why the galaxy is in trouble, they all move quickly to what specific groups or people are doing about it, leading straight into the in medias res action. Basically, they give just enough background to tell you whether you should root for the people who will be shooting at someone or the ones who are trying to escape, and then it’s off to the races. In other words, the two things an information-summary prologue really, really needs to be are 1) extra-interesting and 2) short.  If characters relevant to the main storyline can be included, that’s a plus.

Short-scene prologues have the opposite potential problem—the reader can get interested in characters who aren’t the focus of the main story, risking loss of reader interest when Chapter One doesn’t address those characters. Also, writing a short-scene prologue raises the question “Why is this a prologue and not Chapter One?”

Usually, a short scene prologue works best when there is a major shift in time, place, and/or viewpoint between the prologue and Chapter One (as in the one for The Raven Ring, mentioned above). It’s also used sometimes in as-told-to books, where the bartender or newspaper reporter or review board asks the narrator to explain how something happened, and the narrator says, “Well, it started like this…” and we cut to Chapter One.

Having a clear break in time/place/viewpoint between scene #1 and scene #2 does not automatically mean that scene #1 should be a prologue. The first Harry Potter book opens with Chapter One, wherein Dumbledore leaves infant Harry on the Dursley’s doorstep. J. K. Rowling chose to make it Chapter One, rather than a prologue, even though the scene checks a lot of the this-could-be-a-prologue boxes. I don’t personally know why she made the choice, but as a writer, I think the story flows better without calling the scene a prologue and creating an even bigger reader-speed-bump than the ten-year time skip between Chapters One and Two.