The Prologue is Past?
By Dave King | January 17, 2023 |
One of the more famous prologues, courtesy of Star Wars.
I’m all for retiring outdated storytelling techniques. I don’t miss the puzzle mysteries of the teens and twenties, where the characters were little more than props in complicated, contrived, often implausible mysteries. Second person narration died with Bright Lights, Big City, and that’s fine. And, naturally, a lot fewer people are writing epistolary novels now that a lot fewer people are writing epistles.
But it’s too soon to give up on prologues, as a recent client wanted to do. He had a storytelling situation – a bit of critical action that took place well before the main story started – that cried out for one. But he’d heard (probably from Elmore Leonard, who made this a rule) that prologues were forbidden. So he took what was really a prologue and labeled it Chapter 1. And my client’s not alone in this. The first chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is essentially a mislabeled prologue.
There’s a reason writers sneak prologues into their stories under other names – they’re incredibly handy. They’re essentially a separate, free-floating, storytelling bubble that lets you show your readers some critical information or character background that you can’t work into the main story. Most often, this involves one isolated scene that happened in the past – as with the opening chapter of the Harry Potter book.
It may be that what you need to show your readers involves a very minor character. If you weave them into the story, readers are going to assume they’re more important than they are. Or, if your story is focused on one particular perspective – if the whole story is told from the point of view of a single character, for instance, or within a single setting – the set-apart nature of prologues lets you give your readers a glimpse outside that perspective.
You can also use prologues to whet your readers appetite for the main story. Years ago, I worked on a mystery that had to establish a lot of motivations and interconnections before the first body dropped. So the author put the discovery of the body at the bottom of a cliff in a prologue. This let readers know what was coming, and because he didn’t reveal the identity of the body, and because there were several possible candidates for being tossed off a cliff, readers were kept on edge until the story caught up with the prologue.
Prologues are a good place to introduce a frame story, either an older version of the narrator looking back on the main story or some outside investigator explaining how they got involved. Frame stories are another outdated technique that can still prove useful for giving a story verisimilitude or a different perspective. They’re especially effective when followed up by an epilogue.
Finally, that separate storytelling bubble is a good place to introduce your readers to your characters apart from the rush and flow of the story. Dick Francis does this well in Whip Hand, were we meet the main character, former jockey Sid Halley, when he has a dream of racing, then wakes to the crushing memory that he will never race again. We still don’t know why (he’d lost a hand in a racing accident) or even who he is (a detective working in the racing community). But that shared moment of grief bonds readers to him before the story begins.
I really have no idea why the writing world turned against prologues. In fact, if you have any guesses, feel free to share them in the comments. But they are far too useful for too many things to retire quite yet.
Dave King has been editing for nearly 40 years now. He is co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a former contributing editor to Writer’s Digest, and has contributed more than 100 articles over the last 12 years to Writer Unboxed. He lives on 25 acres in rural Massachusetts with his business partner and wife, Ruth Julian, who also edits his work. His other day job, at least on Sundays, is as the organist at a Lutheran church in Greenfield, Mass.
[coffee]
Oh, I have to weigh in here! As one who has slogged through countless clumsy prologues—and the “Chapter 1” trick doesn’t help—I can say with conviction that prologues rarely work.
Why not? Because they mostly lack critical elements that pull us into a story, just the opposite. The focus on past events, set up or characters other than a protagonist tends to diminish narrative voice and character appeal.
Atmosphere and mood are the main purpose, and I get that—the wildly over-used “menace” opening in thrillers is an example—but then what is the reason to keep reading? I often find myself wondering during a prologue, why do I care?
On top of that, there seems to be a belief that with the reader “hooked” by the prologue, the opening chapter, then, needs to do little narrative work. A day-in-the-life approach is sufficient, which it’s not.
It may seem to an author that a prologue will provide information necessary to the operation of the story, but I ask this: Is the prologue actually telling the story or delaying it? I appreciate your spirited defense of a longtime literary technique, Dave, but I find there are challenges to prologues than by and large defeat them.
And then there are the the ones that work! When they do, why? That’s worth further discussion and maybe commenters today will mention some favorite examples?
I have to weigh in on top of your weigh-in! I wrote about this very myth right here on WU, with reference to several noteworthy, best-selling books that used a prologue quite effectively. See: Something That Might Not Actually Be True: https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2022/02/16/something-that-might-not-actually-be-true/
It’s all about why and how the author uses it, and whether it really is the “best” choice or simply a way to avoid the hard work of setting up a story. In Maynard’s “Count the Ways,” for example, the prologue (a scene out of chronological order) introduces the cork people who become a kind of symbol that is woven throughout the story. In other words, her prologue isn’t just dropped in there; it sets up a motif and through-line.
As in everything: it depends.
Barbara makes a key point here–in the example she cites, the prologue sets up a motif and through-line.
The prologue has to serve a purpose beyond just shoehorning in backstory. I’ve used the device twice, both in my People of the Martiniere Legacy series. In Broken Angel: The Lost Years of Gabriel Martiniere, the forebodings of Gabe’s mother at his birth set the stage for the rest of the book. We don’t need to see what happens in between that very short incident and the events of Chapter One, because that’s not the story being told.
In The Heritage of Michael Martiniere, the prologue covers the major turning point in Michael’s life, and sets up the theme that despite being the clone of a much-despised family member, he is still loved–and returns that love with loyalty.
My take is that if said prologues run longer than 1000 words, you need to stop and think about a.) whether they’re necessary, b.) are you starting the story in the right place?, and c.) what purpose is this prologue serving and can it actually be fed to the reader through breadcrumbs and short flashbacks more effectively?
I’ve participated in far too many convention critiques where the writer believes that the entire backstory leading up to the main event of the book needs to be shoved into a ten or twenty page prologue. Nope.
Thanks, Joyce.
In trying to distinguish between prologues that set up the main story and create tension and those that dump unnecessary information on readers, the length of the prologue is a good yardstick. And having to accomplish everything you want to do in just 1000 words also emphasizes how much you need short story skills to pull an effective prologue off.
That’s another really good point, Dave. Good prologues should function like short stories–actually, no, more like flash fiction. Keep it short, keep it sweet, and get on to the main story.
Barbara, thanks for the examples from your article. And you may be right that the prologue is sometimes a way to avoid the hard work of getting into the story. I go into this in a bit more detail in my response to Don.
I will never understand the widespread antipathy for prologues – but I acknowledge that it exists. And not just among agents and other publishing pros. I’ve seen WAY too many people blithely say things like, “Oh, I never read the prologue. It’s never worth bothering, so I skip straight to the story.”
That thinking baffles me. I mean, I figure the author put every single word into their book for a reason, so it would never occur to me to skip something just because of what it was called. But I know plenty of people who do.
So I’ll admit to using the Chapter One trick. I don’t want anybody to consider ANY part of my book disposable – or skippable. Which might be a word.
Donald asks for strong examples of prologues. To date, my favorite is in Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. It’s action-packed, but leaves out one very crucial piece of information. Near the end of the book she repeats the scene almost verbatim, but this time with the missing piece inserted – and with the reader’s understanding of the situation far more informed. It’s a jaw-droppingly good piece of sleight of hand – I hope to write something half that good someday.
A lovely example, Keith.
As Don points our, prologues can be hard, and often run aground because they aren’t skillfully executed. That may be behind the antipathy.
I’m also with you on never skipping a prologue. It kind of feels like the readers are in a hurry to get the book over with. If so, why read?
Ha ha. The prologue in Water for Elephants is my primary example of why I hate to read prologues. It seemed to me manipulative in a lazy way: oh, let me cut and paste a bit of climax up front. Good example of YMMV. I say, grab me with the story, not a trick. Other prologues I’ve disliked either were stuffed with backstory or an excuse to show off poetic prose that didn’t match the rest of the story.
I’ll add that I have read prologues that have worked, and I’m grateful for all the info in Dave’s post and the comments that give reasons why.
And I will add that there’s another reason to use a prologue: I have a three-book series going, all narrated by the MC. If I decide to use a prologue to the third book, it will necessarily be set half a world away, in the form of a chance conversation between two other characters. It will provide the impetus for the plot, connect the book to the previous one, and set a new tone that is not quite like that of the previous stories. I know I could SOMEHOW work all the details into the body of the book, but why? I can spare the reader a whole bunch of scenes that are only there to allow my MC to discover the same information.
Don, you are always welcome to jump in and comment. I often find the discussions even more interesting than the articles, and you always bring intelligence and experience to the mix.
I agree with you about the ways that prologues often go off the rails. Thing is, most of the prologue mistakes you describe are not unique to prologues alone. I’ve seen a lot of first chapters where the writer, desperate to come up with a tremendously dramatic hook, overplays their hand and then falls back into routine storytelling for the next couple chapters.
You’re absolutely right that prologues often establish backstory or character points that don’t have to be established. But one of the hardest things for a maturing writer to learn is how their writing comes across. They’re bound to dump too much exposition or backstory on readers until they learn to trust their writing. Prologues are only one way to do it. Especially given the bubble nature of prologues — a little chunk of writing separate from the main story.
So, yeah, there are reasons to be wary of prologues. But I suspect that the problem usually runs deeper than the prologue form itself.
My take on the ones that work do so because they manage to create compelling characters in very little space — see the Dick Francis example. But creating a compelling character that quickly is pretty high-level, kids-don’t-try-this-at-home writing. All four of the examples in the article Barbara links to below are from writers with serious chops. Essentially, prologues may involve an advanced short story skill that many novelists never develop.
Again, thanks for jumping in. And jump-starting an interesting discussion.
Thanks for writing this, Dave. And Donald… you sound almost like you’re blaming the prologue idea itself, but there’s no question too many writers have used it badly.
Prologues do seem like an easy gimmick. Bundle some background into the beginning and you’ll hook readers like Tolkien did, right? Or put some kind of quirky or exciting or heartfelt scene there and you can have two openings for the price of one?
No. Picking a book’s first scene is a complex, subtle, and hugely important writing skill — and some writers think prologues let them bypass that.
When prologues work, they can work beautifully. But they work because they still pull their weight as an opening scene, and *also* because the best first impression that story can make is the contrast between the prologue and the regular first scene that follows. It’s when the story ideally shouldn’t begin with the regular character or time that will be Chapter One, and it needs to make a first point as a prologue and then jump on.
An example? *Up.*
It’s some of the most beautiful minutes ever put on film, watching Carl meet and grow up with Ellie, and watching her die. The whole story is driven by his love for her, but it needs that bit of contrast to keep their years separate from his reaction afterward — opening the story at her funeral and then flowing on to what Carol does then would have been a very different opening. Pixar uses a lot of prologues, and they’re all worth studying.
Or horror. How many horror stories do we all know that start with someone eaten by the monster? It promises how deadly things will get, even though the protagonist still has a slow-build journey to understand it himself. (Plus, those prologues have the advantage that their temporary character gets killed off, so the reader never wonders if they’ll stay in the spotlight.)
Prologues need to be done well, and they need to be used because they and Chapter One make the right one-two punch to start the story. That’s not easy to write, and it’s all the harder when so many lazy writers have given prologues a bad name. (I still see writers in fantasy wondering “You have to have a prologue–” No you don’t.)
But the times they’re worth taking out of our toolbox are treasures.
Okay, UP, while not technically a novel, is a lovely example. I’d also add [SPOILER ALERT] that it works because of the callback later in the story, which actually reinterprets what the prologue originally meant. That is high-level storytelling.
“High” level indeed. (Did you think that’d go over my head?)
Excellent point. I think of the *Up* prologue as a perfect example of how to isolate one thing (Carl’s life with Ellie) for contrast with the next thing and the rest of the story… but when you have a vital clue or theme to plant, it’s also the perfect place to put it. Because again, just the fact that it’s a prologue puts the ultimate spotlight on it, and also on how things shift to the main story. It’s not a spotlight to waste.
As I read this post, I wondered if Don Maass would weigh in. I specifically remember him railing against prologues in his class. Then there he was, first comment! Ha!
As for me, I love a well written prologue. Whether mislabeled or clearly titled, prologues draw me in, whet my appetite for what’s coming. Even in non-fiction. Currently reading SPARE, by Prince Harry, and he definitely used a prologue, but didn’t title it as such. Looks like Random House wasn’t opposed.
I find it kind of intriguing that Harry used a prologue in non-fiction.
Prologues are always a hot topic! Successful ones I see seem to raise a genre-related question about what is “within limits” in the potentially “hard-to-buy” story to come, which starts in a realistic world. Examples: In THE COTTINGLEY SECRET by Hazel Gaynor we leave the character’s first-person testimony in the prologue believing in the possibility of fairies, while the story is largely about a fraud. Or in the convincing “people disappear all the time” 3rd-person omniscient prologue for Diana Gabaldon’s OUTLANDER which ends, “Disappearances, after all, have explanations. Usually.”
Interesting story from 2019, when Bryan Reardon, NYT bestselling author of FINDING JAKE, was turning in his third novel, THE PERFECT PLAN, described as “a tense, twisting story about two brothers locked in a dangerous game—and an unforgettable tale of a family’s dark secrets.” Bryan told me that after reading the manuscript, his editor (at Dutton, PRH) told him, “This feels like it needs a prologue.” Bryan had one ready because it was already written. He’d removed it on the advice of advance readers, who kept telling him that the editor wouldn’t go for it! The prologue is set in the past, in the same first-person voice of the younger brother that will be used to deliver the story of the iconic older brother, a politician. The prologue captures the brothers’ youthful innocence as the younger follows the older into the woods, ending with the older brother saying he’ll always look out for his younger brother—and then teaching him to tie his shoes. It’s a nice touch, especially since the flap copy gives away the novel’s adult themes. (Do we ever truly arrive at a novel’s opening innocent of its contents anymore?)
Lovely examples, Katherine, particularly the Reardon story. I note that the prologues you cite do seem to play against the main story., either in outlook (belief in fairies vs. fraud) or tone (youthful innocence vs. older and more jaded). That kind of contrast between the prologue and the opening chapters may be one of the keys to the success of a prologue. To draw readers in, that contrast has to be apparent almost immediately.
Thank you, Dave, Donald, and all the commenters for your thoughts about prologues. No doubt some prologues are appropriate to the story, but when pitching, I’ve had agents cut me off at the knees the minute I said the word prologue. Not an iota of interest, even if said prologue is relevant and necessary to the story. They don’t even want to hear how it fits in. Maybe well-published authors can use prologues, but for a first-timer, getting an agent by writing a book with a prologue seems to be impossible.
Which is why it’s a good idea to dive into that learning curve of self publishing and marketing. Options have exploded for writers. Perfect your craft, put the control in your own hands. Book covers, titles, prologues. And you will make more than a buck a book.
Pamela, I realize that self-publishing works for a lot of writers — including some of my clients. But it has its own perils.
I agree. But it’s not going away, Davie. As the industry makes it more difficult to traditionally publish, writers will find other avenues to get their books out there. Like it or not.
That apparent prejudice against prologues is one reason I wrote this article. Though to be fair, Don is right that prologues can often be an excuse for lazy writing. I can understand why agents may be suspicious of them.
Still, dismissing them out of hand goes too far.
Evidently quite a few people have had your experience with prologues and agents. I’m hoping that the blanket rejection of prologues is itself a fad that will pass.
The battle of the prologue goes on endlessly these days. Thank you, Dave, for an important perspective on this. Agents and editors are frequently shouting don’t open your story with a prologue. Nonsense, I say. This is about the readers, not what agents or editors claim is unnecessary. As a reader, I love a prologue. I agree with Pamela. And I know a lot of readers who enjoy the invitation into the story, the setup, the peek into the emotional or storytelling landscape, the arousal. A prologue is a literary device like any other and is worthy of its place in creative writing. Instead of trying to kill the prologue, why not spend time instructing on how to write one brilliantly?
Thanks. Though Don does have a point that prologues can often be an excuse for bland, even problematic writing.
The trick is to do them well. There may be another article on this.
I pressed what I believed was the like button and got a message that I unliked it, the opposite of what I wanted to express. What did I do wrong?
I have long wondered about this caveat against prologues. One example of a book where it works just as Dave suggests in this post is Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild. The reader catches her at a point of crisis, with just enough detail on how she got herself to a cliff in the Pacific Crest Trail wilderness with her hiking boot sailing over the edge, how she had pitched herself over the edge of a metaphorical cliff in the years preceding this moment. We get some critical detail which she then expands upon in the body of the story. The book would work well without the prologue; the first chapter describing how she got to the beginning of her adventure is tight. But the prologue brilliantly sets up both her physical and emotional challenges.
I’ll be honest: I have never understood the rage against prologues. I mean, I *get* it when it’s poorly written or not needed, but just in general, I quite often see a “Prologue?!?? HOW DARE YOU GOOD SIR/MADAM” and I do. not. get. that.
It’s especially jarring when it’s used as gatekeeping by agents or publishers. Yes, I get that you must “hook the reader” in the first three letters of the first word or else. (/sarcasm) But it’s really frustrating as a writer when you’re inserting it there on purpose — give us credit, we understand that it needs to be there for a reason, and *it is* there for a reason other than It’s Cool, so trust us — and the person at the transom sees The P Word and stamps a big NOPE on it.
Yeah, this argument has been a big bugbear for me. ;)
(That said, I will always be amused by the fact that ‘A True Novel’ by Minae Mizumura starts off with a prologue that lasts 170 some-odd pages. And it works!)
Well said, Jon. I agree with your “give us credit.”
Okay, I believe 170pp may be a record. But, yes, I share your bafflement at the automatic dismissal of prologues.
Great discussion. One of my unpublished novels has a prologue…prose that reveals the pain of a past event in the MC’s life. Yes, that storyline could be placed somewhere else in the novel, but I feel it creates intrigue and also introduces the character and her challenges and flaws. Great post and all answers and opinions worth reading and studying.
It is a good discussion. In fact, I’m a little surprised at the passion that prologues have generated.
1) I notice that those defending prologues often do so from the reader’s perspective. Meaning we’re responding to prologues that have passed muster in some way.
Don’s argument stems from his experience as an agent, reviewing how many thousands of manuscripts that don’t make the cut. But is that the fault of the technique itself or poor execution?
It’s been my experience that whenever agents and editors assert an iron-clad rule about any aspect of writing it’s because they’ve encountered far too many manuscripts that poorly executed the technique in question.
Which brings me to:
2) Don thought we should discuss prologues that do work, and a number of the comments do just that. I’d add Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News (the prologue recounts the experience of a young girl whose dog and entire family are murdered during a summer outing; the character as an adult returns in the later narrative in a fascinating way.) Richard Price’s Samaritan (the prologue is the main character telling his thirteen-year-old daughter stories from his childhood in the Hopewell Projects to which he’s returned after being away for decades–coming home now because his career as a writer has ended.) David Benioff’s City of Thieves has a prologue in which the author is confronted by his grandparents who wonder why he’s never asked what they did during WWII. The rest of the book is the answer to that question. (They were Russian teenagers fighting the Nazis.)
I don’t think there’s a formula for a successful prologue, except I think it works best when it’s a scene, not narration. Shorter is better. And great prose doesn’t hurt.
3) I’m noticing that most of the discussion of prologues concerns backstory. What about foreshadowing prologues? Craig Clevenger does this in The Contortionist’s Handbook: he lifts a scene from the end of Act II where tension is highest and a crucial decision has to be made, then in Chapter One begins the story of how we’ll get there.
The same technique is used in the film Michael Clayton, which I regard as a perfect script. (Megan Abbott says everything you need to know about screenwriting you can learn from it.) And Tony Gilroy admitted in an interview he used the technique because the first third of the movie moves more slowly than some moviegoers would tolerate without a promise of forthcoming action.
I realize Don thinks this technique (the foreshadowing prologue) is an attempt to get the reader to buy in to an action scene and then, in Chapter One, just resort to a (lazy) day-in-the-life. But that’s not what happens in either of the cases I’ve cited.
So as Barbara so aptly and succinctly points out above: It all depends. The only rule is there are no rules.
But I also agree with Millie that if you’re in search of an agent, best avoid a prologue, because it will be judged not on its merits but on the basis of so many others that didn’t work.
Excellent points and examples, David, and thanks — particularly the distinction between the prologues other commentators have suggested (the successful ones) vs. the ones Don’s talking about (the duds).
You’re also right that the foreshadowing prologue hasn’t been given much love, yet. Perhaps because this is one of the most common refuges of lazy writing. Also, to keep from spoilers, a foreshadowing prologue means including at least some ambiguity — giving your readers a scene that they can’t possibly fully understand yet. Some readers are cool waiting for a hundred or to pages before they can understand the prologue. Others aren’t, and you risk alienating them by using one.
Still, sometimes foreshadowing is the only reasonable storytelling tool.
Hi Dave. I’m glad you used a post to defend the prologue. In my latest mystery, Colder, with Snow, I use a prologue to give the story an action-oriented start, establish a context related to college students, and describe one of them being killed several days before the novel-proper begins. Could I do all these things without a prologue? Maybe, but using one just felt right, and saved me a lot of grief. As always, thanks for your post.
Hey, Barry,
Intriguing example. Could you tell us a bit more? For instance, does the killing go undiscovered for some time, so readers are aware there’s another body out there that the protagonist doesn’t know about? Is the killing in a point of view different from the main story?
Thanks.
I too love a good prologue, but am keenly aware of the ease of committing the prologue sins Don mentions. I wrote about them a year ago, https://southernwritersmagazine.blogspot.com/2022/01/to-prologue-or-not-to-prologue.html?spref=bl , identifying several purposes they can serve. The best serve more than one, as in the opening to The Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline (quoted in the blog post), which sets a tone and theme, in a short, poetic style. I thought about prologues a lot, searching for examples I liked, after my editor for Bitterroot Lake told me we had to see the car crash 25 years earlier that tore our main characters apart. “I know some readers hate prologues,” she said, “and I don’t care. This book needs one.” It’s barely a page long, with mood, , foreshadowing, and an introduction of the central conflict. And thank goodness, not one reader has complained!
Have to agree with you: done right, it is a wonderful technique; done wrong, a bore. Mine, for a mainstream trilogy which is a single story, is an outside layer which happens AFTER the story, is presented as a tiny prologue for each of the volumes, with a very short epilogue after the third volume, and ties the whole together from the view of a New Yorker article by a journalist who thinks she knows the ‘real’ story. It isn’t – but it should pull the reader in, and, by the end, the reader will know which parts are true, and which parts are the characters ‘controlling the narrative.’
More of an experimental device, and everything is clearly dated so the reader can tell if they pay the slightest attention, but it gives them a reason to live through the interesting bits in the first volume – knowing a bit of what might be coming.
I think it works really well; readers of the first two volumes have only mentioned that the teaser has not yet been satisfied by the end of the first volume. But I write about writers and actors and Hollywood, and the gossip rags ARE part of the story, a part included in some of the other epigraphs throughout the trilogy – and the readers who get what I’m doing love it.
Alicia, just the little bit you told us intrigued me!
You can see both prologues in the Look Inside feature on Amazon for each book (I only have the two, working on the third).
As so often happens, the comments section has sparked a discussion that may be more interesting than the article itself. I’d urge you to go back and follow the thread Don Maass started at the beginning.
I pulled out the first three books on my bookshelf that contained prologues. All were books that I remembered reading and enjoying. The prologues in the first two, 1980s fantasies, were extraneous backstory. If that is what I’d had to make my book buying decision on, it would have been thumbs down. The prologue of the third, a 2000s fantasy detective story, confused me. The events in the prologue happen after the events in Chapter One. It felt like the author was trying to game the system by putting excitement up front. So, I agree with Mr. Maass. There’s nothing inherently wrong with prologues, most of them aren’t useful.
Dave, a great topic and helpful comments on the pros and cons of prologues. I came across two historical books with prologues and epilogues that, for me, worked.
Adriana Trigiani’s THE GOOD LEFT UNDONE, starts with a Prologue in Karur, India – Long, Long Ago and ends with an Epilogue in Karu, India – Now. Clever to start with a story about an elephant and a mine with precious gems in it.The story was told to the main character by her grandfather. The first chapter starts with the main character, in old age, who couldn’t remember what happened to the elephant. The Epilogue is about a young boy who digs in the earth and uncovers a ruby. When one boy finds a ruby, the whole village shares the yield equally. “When they share the yield, they eat.”
Kristen Hannah’s, THE FOUR WINDS, starts with a half page Prologue. A first person account of the main character’s journey to the West (1921). Her search for a better life, didn’t go that way. It included “a man.” “It was always about the men.” Even though the women, cared for the kids, cooked and “toiled on wheat farms.” The Epilogue 1940, is about the daughter of the main character and how she remembers “Her” – the mother. Around 3 pages how she says goodbye to her mother.
Both books, of course, are best sellers. I doubt they had opposition from agents or publishers. The Ps and Es were good. The only time I contemplated writing a Prologue was – A letter written by the main character about her finishing a long treatment for a serious illness. At the end she wrote that she was a patient for so long, that as a person, she even forgot what her dreams were. The Epilogue – The Funeral would have been the main character’s best friend remembering her dreams and choosing one she would be able to do for her. In her honor. If I ever write the book, I’d certainly give a Prologue and Epilogue a go. I’m writing a sequel to the first book at the moment. Christine 📚
Agreed. Both brilliant novels. Thanks for bringing those up.
Oh man! Coming from a classics background, I love a good proem.
(What’s a proem? The invocation to a god that comes at the start of an epic. You know it. Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles…)
Contrary to a lot of prologues, they tend to be short. And they transition seamlessly with the start of the story. For example, the proem of the Iliad?
Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles,
Which gave the Achaeans the willies,
And sent down to Hades
The numberless shad-es
Of heroes laid under the lilies…
(Not my original translation, sadly.)
The original is only seven lines. And if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss the transition–
[Begin] from the point at which these two stood apart in strife,
Atreides the lord of men, and brilliant Achilles.
Who, then, of the gods set them to fight in strife?
The son of Zeus and Leto: That one, angry at the king,
Sent upon the army a vile plague, and it was destroying the army…
Two lines later– a total of eleven lines– we’re into the action, with the priest venturing to the Achaean camp to free his daughter. By line 17, we’re into direct speech.
But the first seven lines are some of the most memorable of the Iliad, to the point that people can half-quote them without even knowing the rest of the story.
Hesiod has some amazing proems, too, but they’re along different lines, and truly a subject for another day.