Prologues: Yes, You Need To Read Them
Been a lot of talk about prologues, recently, and how readers often skip them because they ‘don’t add anything.’
Prologues matter. As a big believer in their ability to foreshadow, I’m wading in, boots on, to throw my weight behind their defence.
A prologue, we all know, is a shorter block of text that precedes the first chapter of a book (and not the same thing as a preface or foreword). It’s a single scene, invariably very concise, that catches the reader’s attention, leaves them curious, and that (hopefully) flows naturally into the first chapter.
A prologue is there to set a tone. Sometimes, this can be the tone for the whole story, and sometimes this can be a tone in and of itself, which may get picked up again, or reflected, later in the book. A prologue can be told from a single PoV, and can be there to set up a person, item, or occurrence. A prologue can be hard action, or high tension. It can be a ‘film trailer’, throwing the reader right in at the deep end and grabbing their attention from the start. Sometimes, a prologue can take the form of a letter, or journal entry, providing the reader with not only the PoV of the journal’s creator, but also of the person reading it, and hence of their unfolding relationship.
In short, it’s a glimpse.
Prologues come with many tips and tricks and types, but every one gives the reader a critical fragment of background, something that they can keep on file, and in the back of their mind. It’s the laying of a thread, of a theme, and can sometimes be picked up in similar, related scenes, as the narrative goes on. Whatever form it takes, however, it’s a critical hint of the later ‘reveal’ and if the reader skips it, they can miss out on a book's real emotional impact, and on something critically important.
As an aside: Many years ago, my Agent asked me specifically to add a prologue to Children of Artifice. It was a framing device, there to set up the whole of the rest of the story. In later years, many readers came back to me, as the story circled back to that opening scene, and they realised what the prologue meant and why it was there.
I remember one reader saying it gave them' goosebumps’.
So, please, don’t dismiss it. Don’t ‘not be bothered, as it doesn’t add anything’. Authors, agents and editors spend a very long time, building with words, paragraphs and scenes, and if someone mises a chunk, it's like whole wall has come down, because it’s foundations are suddenly not there anymore.
Prologues are there for a reason. They're part of the building. Please don’t skip them, or you'll miss out!
Reading: The Mercies, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Her first adult novel, and absolutely compelling, telling the tale of a group of Nordic women, bereft of their menfolk when the men all die in a storm. They struggle, finding their strength and independence, only to have the Church arrive, be suitably appalled by their heresy, and try to take that strength away again. I’m halfway through it and it’s very powerful and very evocative (and yes, it has a prologue).
Watching: A re-watch of LOTR (still sensational) and then onto The Hobbit, which suffers very much from not being the child’s charming riddle-book that the blessed Prof had written. It has moments, where the book still comes through, but they’re interspersed with Jackson going Off On One, and it all getting very tedious. And, much as I like the combatant woman thing (duh), you can take Tauriel and drop somewhere very dark indeed.
Playing: Our Al-Qadim adventure has quested out to sea, heading for somewhere that may or may not be the Great Library of Alexandria. We didn’t do too well with the water-hag (she made rather a mess of the party), but, in a weird moment of meta-gaming, there’s still a bundle of characters, left over from a very old White Wolf campaign (played back in Norwich and thirty years ago), occupying the same space and time.
But no, I’m not going to write another mash-up book.
At least, not right now.