Prologues - various questions

[Denise Tanaka]

Hey, I've been there. I wrote a "prologue" that was a whole separate tragic event that happened to my main character when he was a small boy. BOOM, chapter 1 was a huge leap ahead to when he is grown up, and eventually the unresolved threads of that tragedy from his youth come back to a big finale. Well, the prologue ballooned up into 26K by the time I realized it was its own novella. So I've broken it off and the story is none the worse for it. A few flashbacks sprinkled here and there. The mystery of what tragic event in his youth still haunts this man.... It works better without it. Now I just need a market for this cool novella!

I agree that 11K is way too much to call it a prologue. What if you call it "Part I" instead, and divide the book into Part I, Part II, etc.

 

[Droflet]

Great advice from my learned colleagues. Bottom line Brian, is it interesting? Will it hold my attention and make me want to read on. Sorry, but I have to go with the majority on this. 11k would have to be absolutely word perfect and riveting. Maybe it is? Good luck.

 

[millymollymo]

There's a lot of internet out there that will inform you how much agents despise ' The Prologue.'
Yet there are a lot of books out there suggesting Prologue has its place.
11k is anything up to 5 chapters for me, I wouldn't read it.

Keep in mind a sizeable proportion of readers skip the prologue. Even though it's not "CHAPTER" anything. It's still got to work just as hard as that first one.

Can the information in your prologue be conveyed through view point or dialogue within the "Chapter" sections of your book? If so, you don't need that dead weight at the start.

Prologues aren't a bad thing, they merely get abused. Good luck.

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

I suggest you finish your second draft with the prologue in place, polish it all up until it's shiny, then cut out the prologue (saving as a separate file). Give the rest of the novel to someone who reads the genre but hasn't read any of it before or heard anything about the plot, world, or characters from you.

If they come back to you totally confused, then you need some of the info from the prologue in there, but see if you can't drip - feed it into the main story as memories or legend.

Repeat the process until you've got the book clear enough for people to read without the prologue and THEN go back to those original 11k words and decide if they're still necessary.

I have a feeling most of them won't be, and maybe you'll either rewrite it as a better prologue that will convince even the most jaded of agents to love you or, more likely, bin it.

Btw, I speak as a fellow prologue - addict here! Many if the books I enjoy most have prologues.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Some novels are entirely character based, some more plot based, both are fine. My feeling is that 11k is way, way too long. A prologue of three or four pages would be quite long...

 

[Brian Rogers]

I suggest you finish your second draft with the prologue in place, polish it all up until it's shiny, then cut out the prologue (saving as a separate file). Give the rest of the novel to someone who reads the genre but hasn't read any of it before or heard anything about the plot, world, or characters from you.

If they come back to you totally confused, then you need some of the info from the prologue in there, but see if you can't drip - feed it into the main story as memories or legend.

Repeat the process until you've got the book clear enough for people to read without the prologue and THEN go back to those original 11k words and decide if they're still necessary.

Very intriguing idea - I think I might do just this, but I will certainly be revising the prologue as recommended by about half the Chrons in existence to include more in flashbacks throughout the main story and only a certain needed POV for plot hints and mystery to grab the reader.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Very intriguing idea - I think I might do just this, but I will certainly be revising the prologue as recommended by about half the Chrons in existence to include more in flashbacks throughout the main story and only a certain needed POV for plot hints and mystery to grab the reader.

I think it is about distilling it. See your prologue as the sales teaser - I've had quite a few sales on the back of my very short prologue (not sure how many words but a reading of it takes about 6 minutes.) think, too, what are the points you want to get across? For Abendau's Heir I had three key things to get across:

The unusual parentage of the main character
That his father was a seer and his visions were, at least at the moment of the Seering, accurate
What the possible futures were.

Once I distilled that it was easy to get the scene down in words and give it high impact. Prior to distilling that, I had a bloated one full of backstory and all sorts of fascinating - to me, anyhow - world facts. But I still knew prologues were frowned on (and have removed the one from my second book, as it happens, and used it as a free short for marketing), so why did I keep it?

1. Betas - well, mainly @Hex - liked the scene
2. It was needed. Genuinely. It was part of the story, it just happened to be a scene which happened before the main action - although not a whole lot more.
3. The father's pov (which the prologue is in) starts the main story, so it was a useful intro to him.

Therefore, i felt if anyone asked the question of did i need it and did it do what a prologue should, I could say, hand on heart, yes, it did.