Prologue(s) - A great place for an argument.

Awesome! We can be capitalism-buddies. But 'honey' is my word. You may call me 'Princess', if you like.

What makes prologues special is that they're one of the things that have clearly become a filter. Filters, by definition, are things that in their experience actually say something about the quality of a book.

Chapter numbers, to take one of your examples, don't do this. They'll be found in damn near every bad book, but they'll be found in damn near every good book too. Prologues evidently filter at something approaching the right level. See a prologue, the odds of the book being shit just got too high for it to be worth your time. See chapter numbers, you don't really have any more info on whether or not the book will be shit or not.

Now, maybe you disagree with the premise that a prologue raises the odds that way. Fine. But there's evidently some agents who believe in it, and their opinion is the one that matters here.

 

I thought you were asking if you should label them prologues or not. Did I misunderstand?

 

I'm sorry but you don't know any of this. You are arguing, essentially, that agents must have a rational reason for a blind personal bias. That simply because they do it that means that it must be based in some logic that we can only guess at. They don't treat many other very arbitrary features of books the same way so what's special about prologues?

You are arguing that prologues are correlated with bad writing. Can't you see how absurd a claim that is?

Ask yourself this; what is more like:

That agents are making decisions based off their personal feelings.

That agents have iron clad proof that even using the word prologue (remember, that's what we're talking about here; not the use of an introductory chapter. We're talking simply about applying the label of prologue) means that a project isn't worth reading.

Which of these do you think is more likely?

I think it is substantially more likely that agents are just following their personal feelings. If you see a hundred books in a week that all have a prologue then obviously you are going to roll your eyes when you see it a hundredth time. Not because it's poorly written, because you've just seen too much of it and your personal feelings stop you from wanting to care.

And that's their prerogative. They are free to do that. But don't stand there and tell me that of course they are these perfectly logical, rational actors who's actions clearly make sense in a vacuum. There is no correlation here. This is not a decision based in logic. The notion that changing 'prologue' to 'chapter 1' is enough to turn a book from a failure to a success if laughable. There is no possible way that could be true. There is no reason to suspect that it might be. And yet because an agent claims it you are approaching that uncritically; determined to believe that he is right (which he might not be) that he is telling the truth (which he probably isn't, since after all you believe that having obfuscated rules is useful for agents) and that he is perfectly enlightened about his own motives (which he may well not be). But he's an agent so you want to believe him that 'Prologue = Crap' even with no evidence.

You're putting agents on a pedestal simply because you want to believe that they have some magic powers to separate the good books from the bad. And I can understand that. Of course we all hope that agents will notice our books because they are good. But it's substantially more likely that instead of a prologue saying anything about a books objective quality that agents feel like they've seen that done too much.

Isn't it more likely that using a prologue (or a generic title, or a pedestrian opening line) turns agents off not because these are signs of a bad book but because they just don't feel fresh?

Why is it required for a prologue to make a value judgement about your writing? Why is it so impossible it's the agent having an emotional response?

 

The most likely explanation is that after reading 100 bad, prologued manuscripts in a row, they decided the correlation is strong enough to assume every prologued novel is bad.

After reading 100 novels with chapters, or written in English, or any other ridiculous feature you've come up with, and discovering a mixture of good and bad, they have decided those features are not correlated with bad writing in the same way.

"They're overdone" is not an argument you usually see applied to prologues.

It's really, really, really not difficult.

 

You might be assuming I think a reader shouldn't be curious about your story's past. Not at all. Get them curious about whatever you want. But if you treat your story's past as a mystery, then you will focus your reader on solving the mystery. That may well be what you want to do.

However if that's not the effect you want, a prologue can help. (There are other devices as well.)

I speak from experience here. In my first draft of my novel, I didn't tell the reader about my protagonist's past trauma (which happened six years previous to the start of the main story.) Instead, I presented him as he was in the 'now' of the story, dropping little hints about the trauma along the way. My first tranche of beta readers became so focused on trying to figure out what his past had been that they lost sight of where the story was actually headed. Some of them lost patience as well.

It was quite funny, when the penny dropped for me. I was having a gentle barney with my main beta at the time, who is a very experienced author. He kept complaining 'what IS this guy's deal?' about my main character's behavior.

I remained coy."Well, just keep reading and you'll find out."

"I'm getting fed up wondering why he's acting so weird. Cut to the chase!"

This guy isn't happy with my carefully-constructed mystery man, dammit! I became sarcastic. "SO ...you're telling me you want to know what this guy's 'deal' is, right from the very start? That you don't want to find out in due course?"

He said, "Yes. Exactly."

Bingo. Giant light bulb. Prologue. It totally changed the focus of my story for the better. Because my future betas were let in on the mystery at the start, they were able to immediately understand my character's 'present' behavior, focus on how he was dealing with his past, and worry about it returning to ruin his life (which it did.) That was the effect I was after. They aren't going to worry about the past returning, if they don't know what it is, are they?

It's not a question of right or wrong, or absolutes of any kind. It's simply a matter of focus. What particular things do you want your reader to be curious about in your particular story? Focus your reader's attention in the direction you want them to go. Not everything needs to be a mystery.

 

Why do you assume that a hundred books with prologues won't have a mix of good and bad books though? What makes them all bad? Just having a prologue? Because that's circular reasoning.

It is simply not logical to assume that the prologue is the factor that is making a book bad. To do so is directly a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. It's focusing on the prologue as the correlated factor, not the bad writing. Bad books are bad because they are badly written, not because of anything else.

The first hundred crap books with prologues have no connection to the quality of the hundred and first. That book will be good or bad by itself because it will be well written or not.

And of course, you are still speculating on the logic of other people. You have no idea how many bad prologued books they see. You have no idea how many good books of any kind they see. Less than a tenth of one percent of all submissions will be represented by an agent, assuming they genuinely do see about 30k per year. The rest are 'bad'; not worth an agents time. Just follow that logic. The overwhelming majority of every kind of book they see will be 'bad'. You can read pitches all day every day and you potentially wouldn't see a winner until you thousandth pitch.

Now go back and draw inferences from that. The thousandth one was a romance. So romance is good, and everything else is crap? The thousandth one didn't a prologue, so anything with a prologue is crap? No. A book worth representing is an incredibly rare thing to find and the qualities that make it worth representing aren't tied to it in that way.

Even if you never, ever saw a good romance your whole career that doesn't mean all romances are bad. Clearly not. It would be stupid to draw that conclusion. What you see has no bearing on what you will see. With such low odds of anything being good anyway you have to treat any possible connecting threads of goodness with extreme caution.

Getting heads ten times when you flip a coin just happens by chance. It doesn't mean that every coin will forever land on heads. Rolling ten sixes in a row doesn't mean that all dice will only ever land on a six. And we're talking about something vastly less likely than either of those.

Finding ten good romances in a row does not mean all romances are winners; you've seen huge numbers of bad romances to. Finding ten good books without prologues also implies you've seen hundreds of bad books without prologues. Maybe you've never seen a good book with a prologue but you've seen bad books without them, good books without them and bad books with them. It's hugely more likely that that patterns completes and there are good books with prologues you haven't seen yet than for it to be impossible to create a good book with a prologue.

If you roll a dice a hundred times and never roll a one do you conclude that rolling a one is impossible or that you just haven't observed it happening yet? Each roll is independent. Each book is a new roll of the dice. Even if you've never, ever seen a good book with a prologue, you know that such things can exist. There have been best sellers with prologues. You can make money that way.

And really none of this matters because you're speculating about the thoughts of others with no knowledge of their reasoning. So lets not talk about agents.

Tell me; why do you believe that a prologue correlates to a badly written book? And, further to this, what is your explanation for how books with prologues are successful if this is the case?

Could it be that the prologue isn't effecting anything? Could it be that good and bad aren't in any way related to prologue or not?

 

We're not assuming anything. We're parsing a train of logic that leads to an attitude held by agents with sufficient regularity as to give rise to this conversation in which we are engaged.

I don't think anyone is saying that a prologue makes a book bad. I think @Tenderiser was, in fact, pedantically clear as to pointing out only correlation, not causation.

You know I work as a translator, yeah? When I get an extradition document from, say, the Republic of Colombia, where they hold to the old-school legalese of Cervantian ilk, I can just glance at the first page and if I see that all the nouns have been capitalized (it's a thing), the safe bet is that I'm in for a doozie of a translation that will require more time than usual. It nearly always means that the person who wrote it prides him/herself on magniloquence. It will be written in a language that is paisley and filigreed, baroque and obfuscatory. Am I sometimes wrong about this? Yes. Occasionally. But not often. There is a strong correlation between capitalizing of all nouns (a very old orthographic rule that even English had at one time) and painfully ornate language in Spanish. The fact that I am occasionally wrong about this does not make it logical for me not to set aside extra time for this document to make sure I meet the deadline.

Agents are not statisticians. I imagine that this fact is of no consequence to them.

ETA: All the new material you added concerning rolling of dice and flipping of coins is pointless, and to be frank, were I the agent with you sitting on the other side of my desk going off on this tirade concerning probability, I would right now be counting down the seconds to when I call security, hoping for all of our sakes that you run out of steam before I get to zero.

What else would we be doing in this discussion?

 

@Tenderiser and @LostThePlot you two are arguing two different things. Largely, I think, because Lost insists on misrepresenting what is being said, for one reason or another.

EDIT: Wreybies beat me to it.

 

I really should have known better than to fall into that trap of a "discussion."

 

I think we're banging our heads against the wall here.

The issue seems to be that many agents THINK prologues are bad, so if we want to have a better chance of them looking at our work, we shouldn't include a prologue—however well written it might be.

That's a decision we prologue-writers have to make. Unfortunately. Do we keep our prologue and risk losing agents? Or do we arse around trying to disguise our prologue as something else?

I know which way I'm going.

 

I agree. This is much ado over nothing and whole lot of kvetching over things outside one's control. Write the damned book and stop giving yourself ulcers already. I repair to what I said earlier in the discussion. If I were to make such a fuss over the fact that there are uncounted agents and publishing houses uninterested in even looking at LGBT lit, most people would just shrug and say, "Yeah, that sucks, but... that's life, bub. Find an agent and a publishing house you know is friendly to that kind of work."

That would be the answer. I genuinely do not see how this is any different, other than all the whinging that's verging on the need of thorazine to calm it.

 

Find writers who used a prologue in their first published novel, who also write in your genre, then find out who represents them

 

Tada!

 

I don't think I really need to add anything to what @Tenderiser, @Steerpike and @Wreybies have already covered... but this bit involved maths:

If that happens, I conclude the die is weighted. The odds of 100 rolls with no ones is so small on a fair die that 'weighted' starts to seem more likely. A decision process not dis-similar to the one agents seem to be using.

 

I am eternally grateful that self-publishing not only exists, but seems to be on the rise. It's annoying that a self-published author has to work so hard to get noticed and read, but hey-ho.

 

But it is what it is. You said it yourself a couple of posts ago. This discussion is beating its head against a wall. No one here has the power to wish away aspects of the industry that we don't like. Even if we sidestep the traditional process and make use of self-pub, that has its costs too and drawbacks. If it were easy, everyone would be King and Rowling and even King and Rowling have extolled that it was hard AF for them at the begining. They spent poor nights eating Ramen soup cut in half to make two meals.

 

Yes. I like having the choice, though. At least until Amazon pulls the rug out from under the process. Yeeks. I could have talked all day and not said that.

 

With as much money as there is for them to make? No, no, no... Amazon as an entity may not last forever, but someone else would fill the void. Nature abhors a vacuum.

 

As Alice learned to her detriment:

 

So.... what's your view of epilogues?

(Ducks and runs for cover)

 

Doesn't impact my buying, because I'm done with the book by the time I realize it's there

 

Agreed. If I get to that point, I already read your book. If the epilogue is really needed is no longer a question that affects my initial choice. It becomes a non-sequitur at that point. I may not read it, but do you really care?