Prisimpad: A Guide to Wattpad, Writing, and Whatever

ON WRITING: To Prologue or not to Prologue

The great debate. Ask any author and they're probably on one side of the debate or the other. They either hate prologue's or they can't live without them. I'm going to start by saying I'm not the biggest fan of them. Most of the time, when I see a prologue, I'll give it one paragraph to catch my attention and show me it isn't pointless before I'll skip to the first chapter. A prologue can be a useful tool, but it can also be the worst thing you can do to your story because it's so easy to do it wrong.

Let me start first with explaining what a prologue is. It's basically an introduction of sorts to your story. It is knowledge that is vital to the world you've crafted and the reader can't live without it. But despite it being vital, it can't fit anywhere else within the novel itself.

There are agents who will never read a prologue, no matter how vital the information will be. Often time's agents and publishers will completely discard a prologue if it's submitted with the MS for consideration. Many will swear up and down that a prologue is lazy writing. In many ways, I agree with that. In other ways, I don't. For my writing, I tend to not have a prologue. If I don't like reading them, why should I write them? But that doesn't mean I won't use them if I feel it's truly needed for the story.

I will say this, if you do have a prologue and are submitting to the agent never include it unless they say it's okay. Go straight to your first chapter and send whatever page or word count they asked for. You're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't. Some agents will specifically say don't send a prologue.

Back to the topic, I have used them before. In Ewah, the chapter called Child of the Stars is an unofficial prologue. I call it unofficial because it didn't start out as a prologue. Originally, I wasn't going to have a sequel to Freelander, let alone two. I wrote Freelander and then Josh's story started chirping in my ear. Because of that, I wrote that chapter as a kind of stand-alone one shot. Then I wrote one for book 3. When I decided to make them sequels, making it a trilogy, I kept those chapters around mostly so I wouldn't waste the writing. I'm not sure yet if they'll make the final draft or not. If I get to rewriting Ewah I'll seriously have to debate its usefulness.

How do you decide if a prologue is right for you? Before you write a prologue to your story, ask yourself questions. Do not write a prologue just to have one. That's why you ask these questions, to make sure it is in fact needed.

First, do you absolutely need that information in order for the story to make sense?

If the answer is no, or even maybe, then you don't need the prologue. So don't have the prologue.

If the answer is yes, ask this next question.

Can that information be placed anywhere else in the story? Either gradually or as a chapter on its own.

If the answer is yes, put that information there and don't have a prologue.

If the answer is no, there is no place to put it, then write the prologue.

If your prologue is just a sneak peak at a scene happening later in the book, delete it. Do not have a scene the reader is going to be reading a second time. I don't care if you did it only for the "coming soon" stuff, that can be deleted once the book actually launches it doesn't need to remain once it's live. I don't care if you were trying to draw in the people who like the sexy talk by putting a naughty teaser in the prologue. If the reader is going to read it later, it's a useless prologue.

If your prologue is just a poem or song...delete it. Delete it so fast it'll make your head spin. If you must have the song or poem, then put it before the first chapter starts. It doesn't need to have it's own chapter.

The prologue is supposed to reveal information that you can't reveal later in the story. For fantasy books, or even scifi, they usually talk about the history of the world that isn't vital to the plot, but is vital to setting the scene of the world. It must contribute to the readers view of your world. If it doesn't then it's useless.

Prologues run the very dangerous line of info dumping (I'll go into that topic shortly, I'm the queen of those) so you really have to be careful with them. Stop and think if you truly need that information. If you have to, read published books (not Wattpad books) with prologues. Read several of them. Ask yourself which prologue worked and which didn't. How many times did you get bored reading them? Did they simply paste a scene from later in the book and call it a prologue? Could the writer simply have renamed it "Chapter One" and the book still make sense?

Several prologues actually don't include anything about the MC. We don't even meet him or her in them. Don't use a prologue if it's just to hook your reader. Why can't that be done in the first chapter?

For the record, if you have a prologue you do not have to have an epilogue as well. You can have one or the other or you can have both. It's up to you. They don't automatically come hand in hand. I'm not going to go into a chapter on what an epilogue is, there's not really a debate on if they're needed or not, unless people really want me to discuss them. In which case I'll be happy to go into that topic.

For that first draft, if you really feel you have to have that prologue go ahead and put it. But when you get to the final draft try to take that prologue out and see if the story still makes sense without it. If it does, delete it in your final draft. Try passing the MS, without the prologue, to beta readers and see what they say. If they can understand the book without it, then delete it.