That is the perfect explanation. Excuse me if I quote that shamelessly in every prologue thread for the rest of eternity.
The potential responses from a reader who skipped your prologue and didn't understand your book because of it: A) wow, this book makes no sense. Maybe I should start reading prologues; B) wow, this book makes no sense. I'm not buying anymore crap by this author. I submit that response B) is far more likely. It always comes down to writing what you want versus sacrificing readers. I could write gibberish if I wanted, then no one would read it. A prologue will turn off some, but not all, readers, agents, etc. Given how the odds are already stacked against writers you just have to decide if this is an acceptable potential hurdle to include. If you include it, it goes without saying that it needs to be very well written. I do skip prologues, particularly if they're not engaging. If the book doesn't make sense, I don't go back and read the prologue that I skipped in the first place. The book goes in the trash. I've got so damned many books I want to read that frankly it won't bother me a bit to stop yours (using "yours" in a general sense to refer to authors generally) and never buy anything else you write. That's my reaction. If I'm alone, it's not going to matter much to an author. If there are enough readers like me, it could. If you are going the traditional route and there are enough agents or editors like me (and yes, there are at least some) then it could also matter.
^ That's pretty much my view as a writer. My ultimate goal is to be read and enjoyed by as many people as possible. There are some things I won't do in order to achieve that (like write a misogynistic alpha hero that many readers love) but each thing I do that turns off some readers is pushing me away from my goal. I choose my battles. An unnecessary prologue wouldn't be one I'd pick. So if your answer to "Is the prologue essential [does it matter if it's skipped]?" isn't a resounding "YES!"... ditch it. That's my take anyway.
Although I don't want to turn this thread into ANOTHER prologue thread (and you all know where I stand on that issue by now) I think writers need to take on board WHAT. A. PROLOGUE. IS. FOR. Not they are usually poorly written, or it's extraneous information I don't really need to convey, or do I want to read one, or it's not really the start of a story, or how could I do the same thing some other way, etc etc etc. Just ask yourself WHAT IS THE PROLOGUE FOR? If it's just an excuse to infodump, it's probably not a great idea, right enough. But a boring infodump hurts no matter where it appears in the story. The lesson should be 'try to avoid boring infodumps.' NOT try to avoid Prologues. Please, guys. Nobody is telling you that you should write a prologue. Why do I get the feeling that so many folks on here think we should NOT be writing prologues? Who is being dogmatic here? Why can't the choice be looked at for what it is? It's simply the way the writer chooses to structure their story. Like any other structural device. The excuses for insisting we shouldn't use them are getting pretty strange, from where I sit. Prologues exist. They have existed for a long time. They are a perfectly good way to start a story, provided they are well-written. Folks who want to write them should have a good reason for doing so, same as they should have a good reason for doing anything they write. Writers are free to not write prologues. Readers who want to skip them are free to do so as well. Why is all that so hard to accept? Anyway, I've said my piece, and I won't be returning to defend it. But geez....
Any time a writer is considering making a change to a story, he/she only needs to ask one question: If I make this change, am I serving the story? We're in the business of telling stories. We are obligated to tell stories as best we can in as clear a way as we can. We are not obligated to fit our stories into "criteria boxes" that publishers or lazy readers expect us to. There's already enough mass produced material available to the public that checks all of the usual boxes. If you believe your prologue is important to the story and makes it a better story or a clearer story, then you keep it. Simple.
Am I misreading the OP? It seems like this thread started as a prologue thread... not something anyone needs to turn it into... Again, unless I'm reading the OP, I think this is exactly the question that's being asked. No, but someone is asking us whether she should write a prologue... I'm not sure how we can attempt to offer opinions on this question without discussing what we see as the relative merits/disadvantages of the structure. Because people are expressing their honest opinions in response to the question being asked? I know it can be frustrating to have a minority view that few seem to agree with. But I'm not sure the answer to the frustration lies in telling people not to express their opinions...
Can you really determine what best serves the story without considering the likely readers of that story?
This is the key thing, I think. To me it's bizarre to completely set aside a tool just because it might be easy to misuse it. That's interesting. You'd skip a prologue that's not engaging but still read the book? I don't get why you wouldn't put the book down right there. Why give the prologue a pass on being boring but give the rest of the book a shot? How often do you skip a prologue but enjoy the rest?
Yeah, I never understood the hatred towards prologues either. It seems to come from a place of "know your audience, and if they don't want prologues don't include them", but it's hard to extrapolate from that to "never write a prologue, ever." Of course I'm also the type who takes some sort of perverse pleasure in reading introductions, author's notes, editor's notes, translator's notes, etc. so maybe I'm the weird one.
I think these are rules you can break. Frankly some things need to be told and frankly some prologues are very good. Are they necessary? of course not because there are a bunch of ways to go about a back story beside using a prologue. I think they are okay if you have a length first half and you want to get the reader excited about the rest of the book. I have never attempted to use one with success though
I don't have a blanket objection to prologues without exception. I do object to: 1) Big chunks of backstory rather than story. 2) Asking the reader to get absorbed in one character and set of events, and then breaking off and expecting them to try to get absorbed in another character and set of events 3) Setting a low level for required reader interest and engagement for any reason, and especially at the beginning of a novel where you're most at risk of losing the reader forever. Prologues quite often fail on all three grounds. The only prologue that I've ever seen that didn't fail on any of these grounds was the prologue for In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden. @Catrin Lewis, I think that you're better off communicating this information AFTER your reader is invested in your character. Whether that means a flashback, the character telling a story, or (my preferred option) bleeding the information out bit by bit in context.
Well, I said I wasn't going to come back, but I'm changing my mind. I'll try again. I don't want people to keep their views to themselves. However I feel entitled to express mine as well, and point out what I think are flaws in their arguments, same as they do to me. What really bothers me about this prologues issue is the notion that because writing a prologue requires effort to get it right—we should just dump them. Readers don't like prologues because they think they're not necessary or will be bad. Agents don't like them because they've read bad ones. So don't bother trying to write good ones. Just do the easy, crowd-pleasing stuff that the 'majority' wants (according to some, anyway.) Just call it Chapter One, and the bad writing will disappear. If folks can't see how this attitude forces writers into an increasingly small box ...well, I don't know what else to say, really. Unless you refuse to read or write prologues on any grounds—in which case, fair enough, your loss—why not focus on what makes a good prologue? There are bad ones out there, no mistake. But writers should learn to avoid the pitfalls and learn to write good ones and apply them appropriately—just like they learn about any other aspect of writing. I really don't see why anyone should have an issue with that. There seems to be a tendency right now to chuck any writing tool that folks perceive as difficult to master. A string of adjectives dilutes meaning ...so let's not use any. Adverbs are annoying if they're overused, so let's cut them out entirely. In fact, dump all -ly words, just to be on the safe side. Dialogue attributions are sometimes melodramatic and silly, so we either won't use any at all, or we'll just use 'said.' Passive voice is terrible, so we'll go through with our word search programme and eliminate all instances of 'was.' Some prologues are boring infodumps and some aren't even needed at all, so let's not write prologues. If folks don't see what I'm driving at, I kind of despair here. We need to learn to write well, not dump tools till we're left with a pair of blunt scissors, a stubby pencil and a Spongebob Squarepants sharpener. That's the bottom line. For me anyway. Don't write bad prologues. Write good ones.
But for me, as a reader, even a good prologue (ie. a well-written one conveying important information in a vibrant way) is bad, because I find it too jarring to get absorbed in this tiny little bit of story and then get jerked into a whole different time/place/set of characters in Chapter One. To some extent, the better the prologue, the more annoying I find it because it's really interesting and then it just ends and I have to leave it without a satisfying ending. I'm not really sure how someone could write a prologue that wouldn't annoy me for that reason. I'm not really a rule-following writer, but I do really try to write what I'd like to read. And I don't like reading that includes prologues. Not because they're badly written, but because they're prologues.
More often than not, I put the book back on the shelf. In the past, I've skipped more and gone ahead and read the book. If I still have any of those books, I will be able to provide an example. I read the first couple of pages of a book in the store. There have been times when a book that looks otherwise interesting has a prologue that I don't like for one reason or another. On more than a few occasions, I've flipped through to chapter 1 in the store and read the first couple of pages. If those pages sold me on the book, I'd go ahead and buy it and just skip straight to the first chapter when I got the book home. There have probably been more times when I've put a book back on the shelf. This is an issues primarily, but not exclusively, in fantasy. I'll read any genre of book, and there are some genres in which I rarely encounter prologues. Those authors manage to write their stories without one. For some reasons, fantasy writers seem to feel an almost compulsive need to have a prologue, and the reasons that most fantasy writers seem to want a prologue when so many others do not are precisely the reasons that lead to bad prologues (e.g. dumping backstory on the reader). Fantasy has been better about this in recent years - I'm finding more books that don't have a prologue, or that have an engaging scene of some kind (the latter of which could just as well have been chapter 1, but that's another debate)). Apart from infodumps, my disappointment with well-written, engaging prologues is, as @BayView said, that by the end of the prologue I'm interested in the events of the prologue and when the author shifts time/place/characters to Chapter 1 it's a let down. Alternatively, there may be an engaging prologue that then leads directly into the main story, in which case I wonder why the author didn't just call it Chapter 1. I do think, as people have said above, authors should write what they want to write. There is far too much out there for me to read everything. Prologues are one of a few ways I pass over a book early on. It's a culling process that keeps my to-read list to a realistic level. It's a way to skip past works that I know from past experience I may not enjoy as much as something else. Do I miss good books that way? I'm sure I do. But there are so many good books I'm OK with that.
Yes. There was one book a few years back (and this is anecdotal; n=1), and I can't remember the name of it, where the prologue was actually very well done and engaging and I was so disappointed when it ended and the author jumped a few hundred years into the future and continued with other characters that I put the book down and read something else instead. I ultimately went back to it, I think, but it was many months later. I remember thinking that the prologue was this intriguing, absorbing promise by the writer that went out the window in Chapter 1. The author never picked the prologue up again - it was basically just a dramatized scene of backstory, but so well done that I wanted to continue that story and not the one the author was switching to in chapter 1.
Well, my issue is that sometimes when you look at difficulty and utility, the difficulty is so high, and the utility is so low, that I just can't stop saying, "Why not do something else?" As I said, I've seen precisely one prologue that earned its keep. OK, let's look at the one and only one that I thought was worthwhile. In This House of Brede is about a woman who was once a very successful business person, and who gave up that life to join a convent. The prologue depicts the last week of her business-person life, and shows us several people that are, and will remain, important to her. They're either important as individuals--specific friends--or sort of as a representative of a category--a young woman struggling with her life and her ambitions and her domineering husband. Then the first chapter starts several years later, after the woman has settled in to convent life. This prologue doesn't fail any of my requirements above: 1) It's not backstory. If I visualize the story flow, this is the logical beginning of that story flow. And it's not presented as backstory--it's scene, movement, dialogue--it "feels" just like the rest of the book. The POV is the same, the voice is the same. 2) It's about the same POV character that we will follow in the rest of the book, and the rest of the events of the book follow, clearly and obviously, from the events of the prologue. So we're not ripped away from one story and asked to re-attach, still bleeding, to another story. 3) It is interesting, engaging, eminently readable. There is not the faintest vibe of, "Just bear with us and we'll get to the story eventually, after you've read this and taken the quiz." Nor is there a vibe of, "OK, the opening of the story is pretty boring, so here are some fireworks to get you past the boring bits." I should have included that as the mirror image of my third issue--a prologue is sometimes a boring bit to get out of the way, or an exciting bit because the writer knows that the beginning of the main book is boring. On the question of backstory, I want to mention that the book does have a HUGE chunk of backstory. It's part of what motivated the woman to join the convent, and it's something that affects her all through the story. And that backstory isn't handed to us, neatly sliced and displayed, on a plate. It's not presented in a prologue, so that we can lean back in our Godlike extra-informed state and smile at all the characters running around, from our distance above the story. It's discovered, and we're right inside the story while that happens. Edited to add: Part of the effect of that prologue not failing any of my requirements is that that prologue doesn't seem like a prologue to me. It seems like Chapter One, or maybe "Chapter Zero." So maybe I'm fine with prologues that could just be Chapter Zero.
Whatever you write, it should be good, no doubt about it. However, in these debates I always feel a sense of entitlement to have one's works read. Maybe that's not the best word for it, but you understand my meaning I think. As a writer, yes you and I should write what we want to and follow our vision for the story. We don't have to cater to readers. As a reader, I don't have to cater to writers. If I don't ever want to read another prologue in my life, that's my business. I don't owe any author my time. From a business perspective, you want to know as much as possible about your market. If there are readers, including agents or editors, who hate prologues, that's useful information (and indeed these people do exist). That doesn't mean you don't use a prologue if you really want to, but no one should go blithely forward not understanding how some readers will react. Understanding why they react that way will help you write a better prologue, I suppose, but there are some readers, including editors, for whom a prologue is a non-starter. That should go into a writer's analysis when writing a book. It may be that it goes into your analysis and you say to hell with them and write the prologue anyway, but I don't see any benefit in pretending the sentiment against prologues doesn't exist.
@ChickenFreak I've read prologues like that and was left wondering why it was a prologue. If it meets all of your requirements, above, couldn't it just as easily be Chapter 1?
Well you've just given a reason for not liking a certain kind of prologue that makes perfect sense. Fair enough. That's not what all kinds of prologues do, but I can understand if those kind annoy you. Many prologues (including mine, and the one the OP was discussing) give personal backstory about the main character that is necessary for the reader to know about at the start. In fact, it's the foundation of the whole story (in her case and in mine.) So you shouldn't be disappointed and left dangling with that kind of a prologue, as you'll be picking up with the characters later on in the story. I think you're referring to the kind of prologue I've often read in sci-fi series, where something happens to a bunch of characters 200 years before the present story begins, I can understand why you might feel this is disappointing. Maybe that's where prequels come in!
My view is that it's incredibly difficult to make a prologue interesting. So a writer that has failed in that skill might very well succeed in writing an interesting book. One of my usual strategies for judging a book is the "first paragraph test"--I see if the first paragraph makes me want to keep reading. I never, ever, use this test on the prologue--I use it on the beginning of the first chapter. If a book does quite well on the first paragraph test, and if the price of continuing to read is low (that is, the book is discounted, used, or at the library) I may go on and read the first couple of chapters to get myself immersed, return and chew drearily through the prologue, and then keep reading from where I left off. Usually the prologue ends up having been a waste of space, irrespective of whether the rest of the book is good or bad. Edited to add: And once I've learned that an author that indulges in prologues is good, I may pay full price for their books. But I'll still usually roll my eyes at the prologue.
Yep, it could. And that's why I struggle with what a prologue-that-feels-like-a-prologue, but is still good, would look like. I've never seen one.
I've never yet read backstory like that that wouldn't be better trickled out in the story. Do you have an example of a book that I either might have read or might easily get my hands on, that works this way? As a data point, I think that the Hagrid prologue to Harry Potter would have been better left out.
Jannert's is a good prologue and that's because to me (sorry @jannert as I know you'll hate this) it's not really a prologue, but Part 1 of the book. It's something like 40k words (J?) and is a satisfying story in itself. Not a complete story, but definitely not a few-thousand-word snippet that leaves me frustrated and annoyed at ending abruptly and thrusting me into a completely new story. This is why I've talked before about calling "prologues" Chapter 1. Not because it "makes bad writing go away" but because good prologues often are chapter 1, or part 1, or whatever.
Yes. My objection isn't to naming the first part of the story 'prologue' because it has some distance from the next point where the story resumes. My objection is to writing something that isn't even part of the story at all, and using the word "prologue" as an excuse for tacking it on to the story. This makes me think of stories that have several jumps--Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, etc. If a book is structured like that, except it only has a smallish Part 1 and a really big Part 2 and that's the end of the Parts, then it might make sense to call Part 1 "prologue". I wouldn't do it, but in that case, that name isn't a way to patch over a problem with the book.
