A common issue I see with people looking for feedback on their writing is the dreaded prologue. It’s right there on the first page, just waiting to wallop the reader like a frying pan to the head.

While prologues are not inherently evil. Like any other tool, they can, and have been used quite effectively. But as soon soon as I see the word prologue, sitting over that first page in someone’s writing, I have a visceral reaction. It’s like my body is expecting to the work to suck, even before it has a chance to breathe.

Hooking and Re-Hooking Your Reader

When a potential reader opens your book, you generally want to hook them in quickly. Among other things, you want to establish a sympathetic connection to one of your core characters, present them with an intriguing problem or situation, orient the reader in your fictional world, and let them know that this is the book they’re looking for.

A prologue is not a Chapter 1, usually because it involves different characters, or is removed in time or setting from the main story. While it should explain something about the main story, that connection is not always obvious.

As a result, the reader comes in, gets attached to the prologue characters, gets oriented in the prologue world, gets all the feels for the prologue problem, and poof… that’s gone. They have to re-enter the story at Chapter 1. Different time. Different setting. Different characters.

This is an opportunity for the reader to put the book down. And not pick it back up.

As a writer, a prologue puts you in a position where you have to do all that up-front work to hook the reader twice.

When You’re Really Just Worldbuilding

I’ve read a lot of prologues that were info dumps–an assault of information about the fictional world and character backstory without any actual story progression.

Don’t get me wrong. In Science Fiction and Fantasy stories worldbuilding is a huge element of what draws fans in. Many readers want unique, carefully-constructed, special worlds that they can escape into. Learning the idiosyncrasies of your fictional world can make a reader feel like they have access to privileged information. But a poorly executed prologue can often come across as a fire hose blast of information. In that sense, it becomes a roadblock to your story that readers have to slog through before they can get to the good stuff, and that gives them another reason to put the book down.

The trick with worldbuilding is introducing all of those wonderful, unique, intriguing dimensions to your fictional world in digestible chunks. There are lots of tools for doing this… parsing out critical information, inclusion of a newbie or rookie character who doesn’t know the world, critical technology that doesn’t work, subtle hints at a history that’s different from the real world, etc.

The Author is Afraid to Tell The Story

Often writing a new story is like that moment when a movie starts. The lights go down. The production logos come up and your anticipation peaks.

At the beginning, the story is full of potential. All the ideas swirl in your writer’s head and this could be it… the big breakthrough novel!

But as soon as you start writing, get through that first scene or two, the momentous construction you have in mind crashes into reality. And you realize that you’re going to need a whole lot of polish just to make it presentable.

A prologue presents a way to psychologically avoid this crash. Sort of. Because the prologue is not directly connected to the main story, the main story remains locked in that Schrodinger’s box of gleeful uncertainty. The writer can put something out there, and if it’s not a great as they envisioned… well… it’s just the prologue.

Sometimes this goes even further in that the writer doesn’t really know what they want the main story to look like yet. So they write a prologue to introduce themselves to the world.

That’s okay by the way. If you need to write a prologue to grow the story… by all means write it. Just be aware that it doesn’t need to make it into the final draft.

People Skip Prologues

I get a lot of hate when I mention this. For the record, I do read prologues myself. But not everyone does. Some people just flip straight to Chapter 1, because that’s where the story starts. Reading a prologue is like reading a manual for the book. You can always skip back to it when you run into problems. If you have too. But problems that require the reader to go back and look something up in the prologue are going to cause at least some readers to put the book down, and of those, many will not pick it back up, because that’s too much like work.

And because a portion of your audience is going to skip anything labeled prologue, it’s probably not a great idea to have any critical information in it. This creates a dangerous negative reinforcement loop. The more information you keep out, the less critical it is to read. The less critical it is to read, the better it is not to put any critical information in it.

Eventually you just have to start wondering whether your prologue is worth including in the first place.

An Avenue to Boring Writing?

This is just speculation on my part. But when you think about it, if you use a prologue to convey critical information about the characters or the plot, it keeps you from having to work that information into the story. There is less for your characters to discover as the story line moves, and less opportunity to be creative in how you convey that information. Often critical information that characters need to address whatever core problem they’re facing should come at some cost to the character… particularly if you want that character to grow and progress through their arc.

Sometimes writers purposefully add an exciting prologue because they feel their first chapters are otherwise slow. The problem is that even with the exciting prologue, those chapters are still slow.

How to Make It Work

Start by getting the story written. If that means adding a prologue, write a prologue. Get that first draft out on the screen in all its fabulous mediocrity.

But once you have that first draft, start looking for ways to cut out the prologue altogether.

In fact, a number of editors I know have mentioned that it’s quite common in first drafts to find that the first chapter can be cut out entirely. That’s because while the writer first is getting the story down, it’s really challenging to nail down exactly where it starts. The prologue is backstory and the first chapter is the character introduction and the story doesn’t really start until chapter 2. Start where the story starts.

Incidentally deciding on where the story starts is one of those decisions a professional developmental editor can really help you out with.

But let’s say you really, really, really need that prologue.

Of course it can work. There are lots of examples of great books with prologues. A Game of Thrones (George R.R. Martin), The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss), The Eye of the World (Robert Jordan) all start out with prologues. (Of course there is also a lot of debate on whether these were needed.)

What will really make a prologue work, is that ultimately it’s going to add something of value for your readers. They’ll read it and come away with a sense that it was worth their time to have read that part of the story and that their experience as a whole is better because of it.

Usually this means that on top of having its own hook, there will be something unique about it, but also something familiar that will allow your readers to identify it as the kind of story they want to read. It will also have a clear connection to the main story and that won’t be too much work to discern.

In the original Jurassic Park (Michael Chrichton) novel, the prologue opens with a scene in Costa Rica where an injured worker is helicoptered into a local clinical with wounds supposedly from a construction accident, however it turns out they have come from a “raptor” prompting the reader to question… what the heck is a raptor? Remember, this book came out in 1990, when “raptor” was not a common word in most peoples’ vocabulary. So it was necessary to explain to the reader what it was.

The Jurassic Park prologue worked because not only did it set the hook with some suspenseful foreshadowing, but it managed to introduce a concept that was of core importance to the story and the readers in a short space, it established an ominous tone that would be followed through the novel. Crighton was able to identify and introduce that core concept of dinosaurs in a modern world, and tie it to that nostalgic fascination with dinosaurs that so many people have.

But that said, it’s also important to note though, that modern readers wouldn’t need that same introduction. Most people know what a “raptor” is today.

And please… just don’t let it be the birth story of the Chosen One.