In dark and far-off times, when the creak of mastodon harnesses of the beasts pulling the great the great turbines of the city was the only sound in great city — except for skritch-skritch noises of the scribes laboring into the night, penning their illuminated manuscripts about how much better things were in the old days…
Yes, well, um. There’s many a prologue that makes less sense than this, and is even more tangentially related to anything that follows. Um. True confessions: I love prologues, and epilogues. My wife loathes prologues, but loves epilogues. I have friends who loathe both… and some love both, and sometimes I like to please myself, especially when opinions vary.
For what it is worth, I suspect the little prologue above is spot on. They have largely gone out of fashion. Old bastards like me like them, and feel books were better when they had them. I also suspect they belong in some books — particularly where the reader TRUSTS the author to produce a good yarn, and will put up with a bit of scene-setting, and that scene-setting is going to make the book make sense (or more sense).
They’re also the lazy writer’s way of doing a tour of the starship (or whatever setting). The sort of equivalent of ‘as you know, Bob’ info-dump.
There is also an element of setting the tone and mood (and possibly genre) of a book. It can be of value, or at least I think so. YMMV. I am curious about your thoughts on this.
Epilogues… well I am very biased. I often HATE to leave a book, and desperately want to know what happened. Yes, it is fiction. So what?
Chapter headings… What are your thoughts? I am busy inserting them right now, because I feel they REALLY belong in this book. I have used them in quite a few books, partly because I think they can be fun, and set tone, and foreshadow. The danger of course lies in foreshadowing that which you don’t want the reader to know about. Once again, I suspect they’re a rather dated style… but in this case I am trying to capture a rather dated style, and I’m hoping it is coming around again.
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “Chapter headings, prologues, epilogues”
Prologs can be a useful teaser, but don’t make them mandatory (it’s too easy to just go to chapter 1 and miss anything before that)
Epilogs can be useful to tie up loose ends, breaking the style of the rest of the book to give more of a ‘narrator/historian’ view or potentially several short scenes that cannot fit in the main story flow (if they could fit in the main story flow, they belong there, not as epilogs). I’ve had e-books where the book considers you ‘done’ at the end of the main story and you have to go back into the book to see everything after that point.
Chapter headings are much harder to categorize.
I’ve seen some that are just a distraction (“wherein the hero meets the villain”)
I’ve seen some that give very useful information, separate from the story flow (the story is first-person present the chapter heading is a ‘snippet of a historical lecture’ covering the same events. in a couple spectacular cases the chapter headings were from different viewpoints trying to paint the actual activities in very different lights, and then we see what actually happened)
If in doubt, skip the chapter headings. They can be good, but most of the time they aren’t
Chapter headings are a mostly unused opportunity for a laugh. (Yes, I remain profoundly unserious even at my age. ~:D This is not advice, more of a warning, maybe)
To wit, the first few from recently published Secret Empire:
Hammer of the Gods
Jysetha’s Gun
At The Movies
Car Thieves
Cheese It, The Cops!
You get the picture. If the story is a mighty tragedy, this might not be your best plan. But in -my- world we avoid tragedy by being quick on the draw and never taking anything seriously.
Like an incursion of pushy aliens, for example, that chapter is called “The Last Pogo” which is an amazingly obscure Toronto punk scene reference from the 80’s.
Because if we can’t have fun with our books, what’s the poor reader going to have?
Yes, but don’t have fun with the poor reader, unless thy name be Pratchett (or Wm. Schwenk Gilbert).
I’ve done an extensive prologue to one book (the Adelsverein Trilogy) which wasn’t really scene-setting, but started off with a bang, in detailing how the hero escaped a massacre of his fellow soldiers eight years before the main story began. The Lone Star Sons series has a sentence at the head of each individual story outlining whatever challenge/mystery/adventure is contained therein. And I put in an epilog to The Quivera Trail just to wrap up the story because it just seemed to need it.
I had a bit of fun with the WWII story: each chapter title is the name of a pop song of the time, which had some kind of reference to the story. I did a variant of that for chapter titles in “That Fateful Lightning” – only pulling a relevant lyric from a Civil War song.
We’re writers – we’re allowed to have fun with our stories!
The sequel I’m working on has a prolog since I feel would be difficult to read as a standalone. At this point, it has chapter headings as well, but only to keep me straight as I write.
That is a very good justification for a prolog
What about Chapter titles with erudite quotations from the classics? Like Watership Downs has?
It depends. Does it enhance the book?
For this reason — and because we love beautiful books — we ALWAYS have a table of contents with real titles (lifted from the dialog in that chapter), prologues and epilogues as needed, cast lists, glossaries (if needed), drop caps, and other decorative frills like built-in chapter opening art, fleurons, footers, headers, and other art as needed. Maps, too, sometimes.
Thank God for being indie! We can do all those things and look as good or better than trad pub.
I think, so far everything I’ve written, which isn’t much, has had some form of prologue, even if it’s not labeled as such.
And all of them have had some form of epilogue too, because I don’t think I’ve written anything that has a complete win for the heroes either.
Actually, strike that, the very first thing didn’t have a prologue. It had a cold open. The second none had to have a prologue because I needed to explain the stuff I’d broken in the first one without a ‘go back and read the one best left forgotten.’
Everything after that has had some form of ‘here’s the world, and here’s how it works, no starts the story’ thing at the beginning.
Marrying a Monster has a prologue (covering the last occurrence of a Bad Thing that happens every seventyish years, before we jump into the comparatively mundane opening chapters leading into the current occurrence of the Bad Thing). Spiderstar is the second book in a duology and has a prologuish first chapter to catch us up on the aftermath of the previous book and reintroduce us to the characters, before a timeskip in the second chapter starts their new set of adventures
Prologs, epilogs, chapter headings? You don’t go far enough. What about introductions, prefaces, author’s notes, and all that other clutter? Amazon allows a reader to see 10% of a text as a free preview, the digital equivalent of browsing in a bookstore. By not letting the reader sample the author’s actual work, they are doing physical bookstores a big favor–yay! When my wife put up her novel on Amazon, she put all the ‘about the author’ ‘about the work’ stuff at the end as a treat to a reader who actually had enjoyed her book. You don’t sell a vacuum cleaner by showing potential customers the owner’s manual.
IMO prologs are usually lazy exposition, the ‘as you know, Bob’ as you call it. There are only two pieces of introductory matter that I remember. First is ‘The Single Cell Preface’ that got me to by Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The preface was hilarious. The book not at all. The other was the prolog to Newton’s Canon, which was a complete mess and explained nothing except that ‘all you know about history since 1600 is wrong’. In that case it perfectly exemplified that utter mess of a book, so I guess introductory matter is one for two as far as I’m concerned.
As to chapter headings, I’m agnostic. I used them in my first book because it seemed to fit, but I’d hate to have to come up with witty headings for 52 chapters of a novel.
One work I was thinking of a prologue because it’s from the hero’s father’s point of view, but it’s vital, so I decided to make it the first chapter.
Now I just have to work out how to handle the time skip in the middle.