One of the most common pieces of advice you’re likely to hear at seminars, workshops, conventions, and writing groups is that publishers and agents do not want to see prologs. This is a true statement that is often countered by pointing to numerous books that currently sit on shelves with prologs. Of course, as a counter example that is not a very good argument because it suffers from survivor bias, the only books that sit on booksellers’ shelving are the book that were published a tiny fraction of the novel written and a tiny fraction of those submitted for consideration to agents and publishers.
Why is there such an often-repeated suggestion to omit your prolog? It is because far too many prologs are nothing more than either world building or backstory establishment where authors fearful that the readers will be lost create to explain the opening situation and there in a single word is why these prologs are weak openings, ‘explain.’
When you start your novel you have a very limited window to grab the reader’s attention and starting out with an explanation tends to lack dramatic tension. Agents and editors, people with little time and a very tall stack of things to read will smell an obvious explanation focused opening and from that deduce that the writer is unlikely to handle the rest of the story well and stop reading. Casual readers may give you more space but aside from self-publishing you must first survived the fires of the agents and editors to reach that larger audience.
I have a novel coming out next month, Vulcan’s Forge and to much amusement from members of my writers’ group it has a prolog. However, when I first wrote the novel it did not. After the first round of beta readers one of the more common comments centered of confusion about events that had happened prior to the start of the story. Because Vulcan’s Forge is written in a first-person point of view, I had two options to fix the issue. I could have characters that were there tell the point of view character what happened much like how a detective in some novels will gather everyone together for the resolution of the mystery, or I could show the events in a prolog. Clearly, I went with the prolog and clearly it did not cause my editor to bounce the manuscript, but I think there were a couple of factors that helped my novel survive the issue around having a prolog.
To start with the prolog is presented in third person. This cleanly breaks it away from the rest of the novel setting the tone that there is much that the main character is unaware of and that presents a danger to him. Next the prolog itself is a scene of dramatic tension with a viewpoint character that faces a tribulation and suffers its resolution. The vital information that my beta readers felt was missing is presented in the context of characters in conflict and not direct exposition. And finally, the prolog ends with a dramatic hook that leads directly into the opening scene of the novel so that the reader but not the character is aware of the importance of the story opening sequence.
Prologs can work but you must understand the purpose of your prolog and you must always wrap it in dramatic narrative if it is to be seen as essential to your piece.
