The Epilogue on Prologues
Last month, we looked at what prologues can accomplish. This month, let’s look at how they go off the rails.
As often happens, the comments section last month raised enough issues to make up another column, and I’ll be drawing from those comments extensively. Think of this article as being crowdsourced. And thank you Don, Barbara, Joyce, David and all the rest for sharing your experience as readers, agents, and editors.
Ironically, the reasons prologues fail are the flip side of why they succeed. For instance, I’d mentioned that you can use a prologue to give your readers background that’s tricky to work into the main story, either because it involves something that happened in the past or at a faraway location or to someone other than your main character.
But writers, and especially beginning writers, have a hard time judging how much background they need to include. Delving into the history of your characters is a wonderful way to get to know who they are and what drives them, so it’s only natural to feel your readers need to get to know them the same way. So you slow the story down with backstory your readers don’t really need. And a fair amount of that padding shows up in prologues.
So if you’re fond of prologues (and judging from the response last month, a lot of you are) give yours a critical look. Do readers really need to know what you’re telling them? Do they need to know it before the story begins? Remember, they don’t know what’s coming, so they won’t see the information in context the way you do. They are also willing to cut you some slack at the beginning of your story — they don’t need to know all the background nuances before they get hooked. So check how your story reads without the prologue. It may be able to stand on its own.
I’d mentioned that prologues can foreshadow a tense moment from later in the story to let readers know what’s coming. These “menace” prologues (in Don’s term) often run aground for the same reason overly tense opening scenes do. Writing coaches and courses hammer home the idea that you need a dramatic first five pages (or first page, or first paragraph). In trying for the dramatic launch, a lot of writers wind up with an opening scene that doesn’t connect to the rest of the story. The first five pages are full of action and conflict, then page six settles down to mundane storytelling. Calling those first five pages a prologue doesn’t necessarily help. In fact, as Don points out, a tense prologue can take the storytelling pressure off of chapter one, giving it room to be even more bland.
Also bear in mind that your moment of tension, like the glimpse of a character’s past, hits your readers without context. The thing that gives conflict its power is that readers know and care about your characters — they know what’s at stake. Too many opening “menace” prologues ask readers to care about the conflict involving people they don’t know yet. Even if your story eventually turns dangerous, you still might be better off with an opening chapter that makes your readers love your characters than a glimpse of future mayhem. The characters matter much more in the end than the mayhem does.
A lot of commenters mentioned that prologues can be used to set a mood or establish a motif – one of the things the Dick Frances opening dream sequence that I mentioned does so well. Being aware of the mood or motif of your story well enough to manipulate it effectively is high-level storytelling. If you’re just starting out, you’re probably still not aware of how much you don’t know. So if you feel like adding a prologue to try to set the mood, you might want to hold off until you’ve had a little more experience.
Most of the skills needed for an effective prologue – creating characters readers care about, in a situation readers understand well enough to feel strongly about, creating a mood, all within just a handful of pages – are the same skills you’d bring to a short story. Not all novelists have these skills – novels just make different sorts of demands. So if you don’t write short stories, then you might want to hold off on trying a prologue.
Don’t give up on prologues. A lot of commenters gave examples of beautiful and effective examples from well-published and well-reviewed works. But stay skeptical. They are not as easy to write as they seem. And chances are good you don’t need one. So figure out what your prologue is for, then try to do that some other way – or decide whether you need to do it at all. Turn to the prologue only after you’ve exhausted other options.
So last month you came up with wonderful examples of prologues that worked. How about examples of prologues that don’t?