“Agents hate prologues. Never write one.”
“Prologues are great! They hook a reader and spare you a lot of work.”
Yes? No? It all depends?
A prologue is something before the action of a book, play, or longer poem.* It might provide background, as Shakespeare does with the first four lines of Romeo and Juliet. The playwright gives us where, who, and what the background to the story is. Then he tells us the problem facing the two main characters. From there, the story jumps to punning dialogue between two servants, and a street brawl. Without the background of the prologue, we’d be tossed into the fight with no understanding of why these guys go after each other, aside from being touchy young men.
Note too that in all of Shakespeare’s prologues, the speaker is NOT one of the main characters of the play. It is a chorus, or a single person acting as chorus, declames the prologue. Then the scene shifts and the story truly begins.
A prologue tells something about the story to come. A bit of background, a hint that all might not be as it seems, some setting that explains some of the action or reasons for the story… It’s important, but separate from the main plot.
Do you need a prologue? Well, let’s say you are going to write a fantasy novel based on the legend of Holger Dansk. Raise your hand if you know who Holger Dansk is, and why he’d have a legend about him? I thought so. Unless you want to make learning about that part of the story, you might want a prologue, where, oh, two characters are arguing over if there’s any truth to folklore. One tosses out, “Nah, come one, every country has stuff like, oh, the good king in disguise, or a sleeping hero. It’s just an archetype, like Prof. Jones talked about in class,” and things move on.
Or you could have a security guard inside a castle, somewhat bored. All of a sudden an alarm shrills, and someone races past, arms waving, screaming about a “medieval warrior” and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake him!” and flees before the guard can stop him. The guard, and police, find nothing, aside from how the burglar got in, and a medieval sword display that’s now askew. Twenty years later…
Your reader knows there’s a legend, that many don’t believe it, and so on. You’ve spared yourself a possible info-dump or two, and teased the reader. Or, if you use example two, the reader knows that a medieval sword links to something strange—summons a spirit, perhaps. In either case, if Something Bad Happens, and two-thirds through the book, the sleeping hero awakens when the protagonist gabs the sword to fend off an attacker, or protect it from the evil invaders, or whatever.
Many books don’t need prologues, and some genres don’t do prologues, at least by name. Modern romances, cozy mystery, new adult, those tend to avoid prologues. Most thrillers, if they have a prologue of some kind, call it something else. Red Storm Rising comes to mind, where the first chapter is a prologue of sorts, because the POV character and events are separate from the main book, but trigger the events of the book, even though they are not referred to again directly until almost the last chapter, IIRC. I’ve seen a few where you have a date, or “Opening,” or something different from the usual chapter title or number.
Epic fantasy, epic sci-fi, fantasy in general, those tend to have readers who are more open to prologues, and where I usually find them.
If you opt for a prologue, it needs to be short, related to the story but not directly part of the story, interesting, and useful to the reader. In the above examples, the reader gets a bit of a hook, some important information, and a genre cue or two. The Shakespeare example gives the viewer setting, overall conflict, foreshadows part of the main plot, and then roll into a fight scene. “Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” When, genre, and where, so the watcher doesn’t boggle much at space aliens in a dive bar or space troopers riding giant lizards, or two suns in the sky. It also sets a mood of “fairy tale,” so the Force, sword fights, and so on are less of a surprise.
Prologues are for longer works. Short stories just don’t have room for them, unless you squeeze in a sentence or two, then launch. The prologue can be serious, it can be funny, it can be an appeal to the Muses, or to the gods, “Rage, o Muse, sing to me of the wrath of Achilles…” It can be monsters attacking out of the mist, or someone dying without naming an heir, or…
Do you prologue? When would you try one?
All About prologues, from the always useful Writers in the Storm.
*One of the most unusual books of environmental history I read is subtitled “A Prolegomena to its History. ” It gives all the scientific and agricultural background then available on the topic. The author died before he wrote the actual history of the place.
Image credit: A Tuscan Landscape. Image by Sabine from Pixabay
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “The Past as Prologue, Getting Past a Prologue, Why for Prologue?”
Months ago, I wrote my first prologue ever for the current WIP because it seemed like the right thing to do and the story demanded it.
And it’s just about what you describe! A quick introduction and setup so you, dear reader, understand what’s going on and who these once minor characters are.
A fantasy novel based on the legend of Holger Dansk? Three Hearts and Three Lions – Poul Anderson.
I don’t think it had a prologue, but it has been a long time since I read it. I do remember the big reveal (that the central character was Holgar Dansk) didn’t come until the end of the novel.
Yes, but [spoiler perhaps], he’s not the original Ogier the Dane, but a resistance fighter who took the name Holger Dansk. So it’s slightly different from the “sleeping hero” idea in the traditional legend.
SPOILER
Actually he’s the real Ogier the Dane. He was magically sent to our world, having been turned into our baby, and grew up just before WWII.
Sleeping only in the sense of ignorance.
Which is part of why it was a fantasy novel and not historical fiction.
Thank you. It’s been a decade since I last read the book, and things blur.
One fairly common prologue in SF after the “or…” – is an “excerpt” from an academic source. A future encyclopedia or history. Interestingly, casting my mind back over what I remember, I don’t recall this being used by writers who are academics.
Well, Isaac Asimov used this in his “Foundation” series (excerpts from the “Encyclopedia Galactica” at the beginning of chapters), and I’m pretty sure he was an academic at the time.
Wags paw. Chapter heads are different from the Prologue. They can serve as a mini-prologue, but IIRC he used them to avoid what later became known as info dumps.
Barely – and not for most of it. He only became a professor of biochemistry in 1949. The Foundation stories were written between 1941 and 1950. (It is possible that the “excerpts” weren’t written until the collection into the trilogy – anyone have that trivia?)
Who? *searches* Aha. I know him better as Ogier the Dane. 🙂
I’ve seen prologues, or first chapters used as such, in Golden Age mysteries, mostly those with complicated, vaguely Gothic backstories about dysfunctional families.
I’ve done prologues I kept, prologues I deleted for giving away too much, first chapters followed by a timeskip; first chapters that were fairly relevant in the sense that they set up the core conflict and some of the major players, but felt prologue-y. Both the second space opera and the current WIP were/are sequels about the ongoing adventures of the same set of characters, and their opening chapters both spend some time catching us up on what’s going on with the cast of characters.
The one time I included a few paragraphs I labeled “Prelude” in something I sent to Sarah, I was strongly urged to get rid of it. (I wanted to foreshadow the place the main character was going to end up and hint at a greater mystery, but it would take a couple chapters in his ordinary world to get there. I did manage to chop off one of those chapters to start closer to the action though. I am still thinking of putting the Prelude back in as long as the first chapter remains cut off.)
I did a prologue for the first book in the Adelsverein Trilogy – setting up the eventual hero of the story, relating his experience in escaping from the massacre of the Texian garrison in Goliad during the Texas War for independence. It started off the story with a bang and explained why the character was the way he was when the main story began eight years later.
I also did a prologue in My Dear Cousin, with the newspaper account of the wedding of two characters – which established those characters, the year and the situation. That prologue was mirrored by another newspaper account at the end, regarding another wedding – that of two other characters.
I don’t think I’ve done prologues in any of my other books, though.
My sense is that a successful prologue must be good story or good storytelling (or both), and that the reader’s experience must be poorer without it.
How does good storytelling differ from good story? An engaging painting of milieu or teaser-like backstory can be good storytelling, but is not itself fully story.
Ellery Queen’s =The Finishing Stroke= is split across three time periods decades apart. It could not be a complete story without all three parts. But all three are full-fleshed story and story-telling.
What about the opening of LoTR, which paints the milieu? The opening matter of Volume 1 of Manchester’s =The Last Lion=, some of the most powerful writing you will find?
I always thought prologues should come at the end of the story. After all, the past is prologue.
I was thinking of putting the opening of one work in a prologue because that was the only part of the story not in the hero’s point of view, but rather in his father’s and his father’s men, but I decided against it because of readers who openly said that they always skipped prologues. That wouldn’t work here.