To Prologue or not to Prologue

Q: I’ve read lately that prologues shouldn’t be used. The author should just start at Chapter one. Why do you have a prologue?

Thanks for the question. I first became aware of the disdain for prologues years ago so I went back and changed my prologue to chapter one. The next four books I read had prologues. Needless to say, this resolved nothing for me.

When a group of writers gather there is always the risk that the topic of prologues will come up. If that happens, I try to switch the discussion to current politics or whether the Catholic church is a cult to prevent discussions from getting heated.

Why is there so much push-back on prologues? Possibly because so many writers use them for the wrong reasons. Ideally, a prologue contains something mysterious or suspenseful that makes the reader think, I need to find out why this happened.

Years ago, author Sue Coletta (See the acknowledgement section in my book) listed some reasons for correctly using a prologue.

• Provide the reader with important background information without the need to stage flashbacks, build dialogue or recount memories that might be cumbersome and slow the pace of the story. Not to be construed as an excuse for info dumps. An incident that occurs at a different time or place from the main story line,
  

• Inform the reader of information that can’t be gleaned from the text, or that the character won’t learn until later,
  

• Foreshadow a future event where the prologue is used to set-up/explain an important milestone,
  

• It’s needed to raise a story question relevant to the main plot so the reader is eager to learn the answer.
  

Reasons for using a prologue are not;

• To make the author feel more literary,
  

• Your favorite author uses them
  

• You want a ‘warm-up act’ to get the reader in the mood to read farther,
  

• To compensate for a weak chapter one,
  

• Realizing during final edit that important information is missing from your story so you decide to dump it in a prologue,
  

• Force conflict or tension by inserting a scene that doesn’t advance the plot.
  

Do I really care one way or the other about using prologues? Until recently I didn’t think so.

Speaking solely from my experience as a reader, the primary justification for using a prologue is to improve the reader’s enjoyment of the story. Which, of course, echoes the reasons for anything done in constructing a manuscript. Regardless of what CMOS suggests concerning formatting, punctuation, incomplete sentences, etc., I will deviate if I think it will make the scene clearer/more enjoyable for the reader. I’d like to suggest that using a prologue has nothing to do with the mechanics of writing but is a matter of your story structure. Use it if it helps you tell a better story.

Consider a mystery where present day murders are linked by similarities to a string of murders in 1940s New Orleans. Rather than inserting a scene to have a detective remember it and notice the link (or have someone remember it for him) and have to describe it to the team, etc. and stop the action, those long-ago murders might be a candidate for a prologue. The prologue does not necessarily have to include your lead character or any recurring character for that matter. But at some point it does have to provide insight into your main story. A prologue needs to have a purpose for being there just like every other part of a story.

Where does that leave us? Just shut-up and call it chapter one? If the prologue was written for the wrong reasons, that may be the best advice. As a reader, seeing the title prologue, when used properly, alerts me (remember the bit above about reader enjoyment) that this is a special part of the text and should be considered in a different manner. Simply labeling it chapter one might rob the reader of that opportunity.

Some readers claim they never read prologues because they are often poorly written. That might be true. But if the prologue is poorly written, I’d suspect that the rest of the novel is trash-can worthy as well. I’m considering poor writing to be a different case than a justification for not using it. Some don’t read prologues because they’re not considered part of the real story. If that’s your experience, you be you. I’m not going to force you to like cauliflower either.

Given this, it’s entirely reasonable to accept that, if the majority of prologues a reader has encountered were done without valid justification, they may have developed a negative opinion of them. If the converse was the case, the reader may believe prologues have their place.

To simply say that a section of text beneath the heading, prologue, is bad, without considering its content, while allowing that same text would be somehow acceptable if the heading had been chapter one, indicates a personal bias and not a well-reasoned understanding of writing.

Comments welcome.