Prologues and Other Stories

Why you probably shouldn't put a prologue in your novel, and why maybe you should

There are several variations of the hardy, perennial question: ‘Should I have a prologue?’ ‘My agent suggests a prologue.’ ‘My editor says she hates prologues.’ And judging book competions, as I recently did for the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown 2023, showed me that they most definitely haven’t gone away.

One of the things about doing Book Doctoring at writers’ conferences and forums is that you get to see a lot of beginnings of novels. I’m starting to think that a great many aspiring writers believe that a book isn’t properly dressed without a prologue. And, to be frank, most of the prologues I see aren’t earning their keep.

It’s not that they’re never the right thing (I have one in A Secret Alchemy, and a sort-of one in The Mathematics of Love), only that usually whatever they’re supposed to be doing would be better done by other means. And because of that, many agents and editors regard them with a jaundiced eye, shall we say: though of course they know prologues have great uses, their experience tells them that it’s not a promising start.

Fundamentally, the task of the opening of a book is to get us involved in the characters-in-action as quickly as possible and persuade us to keep reading (I explored some of the ways you can do that here.) With a prologue, our getting to care about both the characters and the action is delayed.

We invest in the world of the prologue, but then the pause-button is pressed on that, while we’re expected to start all over again with a new world. And yet we can’t even let go of that first piece of the story jigsaw once we’ve read it, because our readerly savvy knows that at some point it’s going to be relevant again.

That’s a cost in readerly irritation, and/or un-involvement, which must be outweighed by the benefit that the prologue can offer in return. Are you sure the benefits your prologue brings to the story outweigh the extra work and divided attention it asks of the reader do? In the interests of making a better book and improving its chances out there with readers and the industry, I'd suggest that you ask yourself very stringently,

1. What is my prologue trying to do?

2. Could I do that as well or better by other means?

If that doesn’t show you the anwer, then these questions should help to stress-test your decision:

1. Is it really Chapter One? A prologue is something which its title makes clear (‘pro’ = ‘before’ + ‘logos’ = ‘word’ or ‘text’) is not part of the main narrative of the novel. It’s in a distant time, setting or form from the main story, or it’s manifestly a different voice or a different character from the main narrative, which will only get going later. If it’s not different in any of these ways, then it’s Chapter One and should be called as much.

2. Is it trying to start the novel with a bang? If the main story starts too quietly or with stodges of back-story which you're convinced the reader needs to know, then bolting a bit of drama onto the beginning isn’t going to cure that. Instead the excited reader of the prologue will then find themselves wading resentfully through the stodge, waiting for the action to start again.

   1. What will cure this problem is getting enough urgency and immediacy, enough instability, into Chapter One... or recognising that the real start to the story is currently called Chapter Four.

3. Is it trying to create atmosphere or contribute to a theme? Again, if it’s an atmosphere that matters in the novel, then it needs to be there for the ‘real’ start: Chapter One. If it’s building a theme, then I see why you’re doing it, but I’d suggest that the need for the ‘real’ story to start as quickly as possible paramount: you can always re-work the first real scene so as to incorporate the theme.

4. Is it trying to set up mystery and suspense: narrative tension? At the beginning of a book we have no investment in the characters and their fate, so simply being mysterious about stuff - hinting, implying things - isn’t enough. It may seem enough to you, because you know what the hints and teases are hinting at, but we don’t.

   1. Narrative tension doesn’t, fundamentally, come from information being hinted-at-but-witheld, unless we’re also given a real desire to keep the incomplete information on our mental clip-board, while we keep reading, without the whole picture, until the information is explained.

   2. Narrative tension does comes from instability, as I was explaining here: from us caring about what happens to characters-in-action. If you do want to hint things, then what you do say has to be full of delicious, fascinating stuff: not so much witholding something so we only get a glimpse but, as Susannah Rickards puts it, like dropping a trail of sweets to lure us on into the forest.

5. It it trying to explain backstory? If it’s just straight stuff about their past, I’d put money on the reader not needing to know it: almost every novel I see in manuscript (full disclosure: very much including my own) needs less explaining of backstory than the writer thinks it does. (Think how little we often know of characters in films, though the actor may have dreamed up all sorts of things to help develop their rôle: what matters to us is how they act now).

   1. There may be a case for a prologue of, say, a mother or father kissing the sleeping babes and leaving forever, when the main novel is about one of those babies, grown-up, trying to track the mother or father down. But a prologue like that has its own instability: as with putting a murdered body on page one, we KNOW that something like a missing parent is unstable: something has to happen. That’s proper narrative tension.

   2. But if the prologue is in there purely to explain your series detective’s dysfunctional character, not as an element of character-in-action, plot and story of this book, then like most kinds of backstory, it’s much better dripped in, rather than giving us a wodge at the beginning and hoping that we'll hold onto it. Again, doing the latter delays the caring-about-the-character.if it's put in at all.

As with many storytelling fundamentals, Pixar’s Andrew Stanton crystallises a crucial point in his TED talk, which I blogged about here. He talks about how the title and opening of a story makes a promise to the reader that sticking with the storyteller will be worth the journey. Your story then needs to deliver on that promise.

So the first thing the reader reads is essentially a statement of that promise: as I explored here in the context of waking-up openings, the opening is what powers the reader’s desire for and involvement with the journey of reading the novel. Whether is a separate, prologue-y sort of chunk, or the beginning of the main story, it needs to be stuffed full of promises about what the next 300+ pages will be delivering.

If you’ve decided you do need a prologue, click through here for my further thoughts about how to make your prologue really earn its keep.

When it comes to offering work to agents and publishers, if you’ve tackled all these questions and decided that the prologue really, really is the answer, consider nonetheless taking it out if you’re about to submit the first few chapters. If the sample you’re submitting doesn’t get the reader to the point where the significance and purpose of the prologue is clear, then leave it out of the submission. If you’re asked to submit the full MS, then put it back in.

An earlier version of this post appeared on Typepad in July 2011

Image credit: Gwen King on Unsplash