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

Go ask a used car salesman how he feels about turning down a couple of potential sales in a day just so he doesn't have to waste his time with people who are just looking. Perhaps you get good at telling between 'serious' and 'not serious' but you still have to go run your sales pitch on all of them because sometimes you're wrong and you can't afford to lose any sales.

To put it another way; what the hell is wrong with these professional literary agents who would turn down the next Harry Potter because they can't be bothered reading past the prologue?

There is a giant gaping difference between seeing eyerollingly bad writing in the first paragraph and leaving it at that and deciding that a prologue alone is enough a signal of shitness to not bother actually looking at the text.

Again, think of the used car sales man. Sure, you don't want to waste your time on someone who simply could not ever buy a car. But you never ever ignore a guy who comes over to talk to you about a car because he's not wearing a tie. If this guy is going to make you some money then what do you care how it's dressed up? If it's a good idea that's well written then why does seeing 'prologue' instead of 'chapter 1' fill you with such rage?

 

How many have you sent? I agree the first few take a while, but... what are the variations, really?

Standard cover letter, yes? Maybe add a different opening line for different agents.

And then either a three-page or a five-page summary.

And either the first three chapters or the first x number of pages...

It's been a few years since I queried, but that's about all the variation I remember, to be honest. What are some of the other special requests you're finding?

 

I agree. And what a disconnected, info-dumpy prologue does is get you invested in its character or a certain situation and then jerks you into another and makes you start all over again. Or, if it's a really bad prologue, it bores you.

If it's integral to the novel--i.e. it's really Chapter 1--it doesn't do that.

 

Who cares, though? It's THEIR problem if they're bad at agenting, right? Not ours. There are other agents we can use.

(And I think a possible difficulty with the car salesman analogy is the relative size of the pool they're picking from. If car salesmen were faced with hundreds of potential buyers a day, I think they'd find a way to screen the potential. If it was a good way, they'd do well as car salesman. If it was a bad way, they'd do poorly.)

 

It is a pretty unique dynamic between agents and authors... and maybe agents and actors or models? The key difference is the demand. There are more manuscripts that publishers can possibly publish. There are more wannabe authors than agents could possibly represent. The agents are the ones in demand, not us, so in this situation WE are the car salesmen who lower our chances by ignoring certain buyers, and the buyers are the agents who can move on to the next in a long list of car salesmen.

The balance of power is with the agents.

 

Good used car salesmen do filter prospects, so they can focus on the biggest sales. That's part of why they're good.

There isn't a difference, if the volume of submissions you've got is high enough to merit that strong a filter. If you've got time to look in more detail, then sure, go for it. If you've got a huge stack to get through and 95% of the time when you've seen the word 'Prologue' the MS has turned out to be shit, I think it's pretty sensible just to dump anything that has that word. So you miss a couple of good ones. You don't care, because your system will let you find another good author faster. It just won't be an author who used a prologue.

I don't think there's any rage. It's just a convenient way of throwing out a load of manuscripts that probably aren't worth your time. It's efficiency.

 

There are forty documents in my folder of things I have been asked to submit. I have submitted maybe twenty five times. I am not kidding. I have been asked for a half page synopsis, a one page synopsis, a two page synopsis, a three page synopsis, a four page synopsis, a thousand word synopsis, a thematic synopsis of indeterminate length, a letter with an author biography, a letter drawing comparisons to other authors that are similar, a letter that discusses the potential sales and market segment. And all of these with a 10 page sample or a 30 page sample or a three chapter sample or a one chapter sample or a ten thousand word sample or a five thousand word sample. I am not kidding. Some agents like PDF files, some like word files, some like double spaced, some like 1.5. And this is just meeting the specific requirements of agents; that doesn't even start on their soft requirements like 'we really want to hear about X part of the story and who would like it'.

And these are not random fly-by-night google fodder. These are people I all found in the W&A Yearbook. That's the only source I trust, and all of them ask for a different thing. There has been literally zero submissions where I was able to even mostly copy and paste. Every single time I've had to sit and re-write something based on what they told me to send them, even if I was just trying to play up to their claimed love for complex stories or clever writing instead of an actually good book.

 

I recently re read "the Hellbound Heart" and Clive Barker just wrote chapter one and then in chapter two it implies right away that ch 1 took place years before. I thought it worked out well. then again I never minded a good prologue in the first place.

 

99% of the manuscripts you get sent written in English are probably shit too; should you stop reading any manuscript written in English? Or do we think that the correlation here is probably pretty weak?

That's the point here. The majority of all books of all types agents get sent suck. It's not the prologue that makes the books bad, it's that they have bad ideas or bad writing or both. And, unlike a prologue, actually taking the time to look at the idea or the plot, instead of the existence or not of a prologue, you can tell if the book is something people might buy.

 

I wonder if we could do with a stickied "Let Off Steam About The Author-Agent Power Dynamic" thread. A lot of good threads seem to devolve into that.

 

Wonder why that might be...

 

Bitterness and frustration. I've been there.

 

Yeah well you've joined the agent-bourgeoisie. When the literary proletariat rise up you'll be up against the wall with them.

 

Are you in the UK? Sounds like things are different there.

Maybe you could try some US agents - I think they're more standardized (they certainly were a few years ago).

 

Because that would be a filter that's too aggressive. And you already know this, because it's obvious to everyone with better critical thinking skills than a teacup.

Look, I get this is irritating. I'd love it if agents had the time to read every MS they were sent in full and make a considered choice about every one. But they don't. Their time is limited, and you, and me, and every other individual wannabe author out there just isn't very important to them, because they're the ones in demand.

That's the game. Play it if you want to. If you don't, that's why CreateSpace exists.

 

I made a fred for moaning about agents: https://www.writingforums.org/threads/let-off-steam-about-the-author-agent-power-dynamic.145762/

Last thing I'll say here is UK agents are a different breed to US/Canadian. I know which I prefer. *cough US/Canadian cough*

 

If you don't even have time to read a single paragraph from each submission you get, and are instead forced to judge them by font and chapter name for reasons of time alone; then why the cocking hell are you taking open submissions from anyone who will send them to you?

 

They're not forced.

We're not forced.

Nobody is forced, here. I know it's frustrating, but I'm not sure it's quite this frustrating...

 

You think American agents would be interested books set in contemporary Britain in very British English with jokes that don't make sense unless you are British? I mean, I'm open to doing it but I really don't know what our cousins would feel about that kind of work that's very strongly rooted in this place and time. It doesn't help that going across the water would add a lot of statutory rape to my work that's really not intended.

 

Of course you want to make the reader curious. However, you may wish to make the reader curious about what happens next—rather than making them curious about what happened before. That's where a prologue can help.

Just as a sample plot: a child of ten years old watches his parents die in an earthquake, and blames himself because he didn't warn them in time. Thirty years later, he watches a builder get crushed by a falling piece of masonry, and he goes uncontrollably crazy and gets sectioned.

You could handle this two different ways.

1) You might start the story in the present day with Chapter One, where the builder gets crushed and a passer-by (the protagonist) goes crazy and gets sectioned. Your reader will be curious as to why this extreme reaction has happened, and will spend the rest of the story gradually discovering why the accident has affected the protagonist the way it did. The story will be about discovering the protagonist's deep secret and uncovering his guilt. It will be something of a challenge to figure this out. (The writer will probably reveal the trauma in little flashbacks until the whole picture becomes clear.)

or

2) You can give us the earthquake scene as a prologue, then jump ahead to Chapter One, in the present day. Chapter One will show us the scene where the builder gets crushed and the protagonist, who is just passing by, goes crazy and gets sectioned—but of course we already know why he is so badly affected by this accident. There is no mystery to solve. Instead, we are curious about how or if he will work his way through the difficult guilt and trauma of his past. We are curious about how (or if) he will manage to regain his sanity. We wonder what might cause a breakthrough, and whether he will finally accept that he could not have prevented his parents' death. Or maybe that he could have prevented the deaths, but should forgive himself because he didn't mean for the bad stuff to happen. We also wonder what his life will be like afterwards.

That's the difference a prologue can make. It simply gives you another way to focus your story.

 

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

 

Why not date it instead of calling it a prologue?

1801 New York
[untitled prologue]
1820 Thomas
[chapter one]

 

You can certainly do that. But it's not necessary. You can also call it a Prologue. Or put a date on it and call it a Prologue.

The title "Prologue" means when people first start reading, they will know this chapter is different from the others. If you just stick a date on it, people won't know that they're reading something that happens way before the rest of the story. For example, if they're reading about a child in the prologue ...then suddenly in Chapter Two, the child is an adult with grandchildren? If they've been expecting the child to grow up gradually before their eyes, this will come as a shock. If it's called a Prologue, though, the reader will be ready for some kind of change to happen.

Nobody says you have to use a prologue. But give every writer a chance to organise their story the way that works best.

Surely that's not too much to ask of a reader?

 

Because they do have time to read the ones that get through the filtering system.

 

There's a continuing problem with how the whole world seems to expect numbered chapters of neatly similar lengths in every single book that I think is relevant here.

I don't number my chapters. I title them but I don't number them, mainly because my chapter breaks are where the flow of the book puts them even if that's 12k words away. One of my books is split into 5 'chapters' because it's broken into separate days of the narrative, nothing else. The second one is 12 chapters for 110k words because it's written to ape books of the bible which are typically quite self contained around the events they follow.

Now, luckily that means I don't face the 'prologue' problem really so that's something but equally it makes sending three chapter samples something of a challenge.