Please help me out. Thanks again for your time.
-Bryan-
My general rule is that I don't like prologues that aren't in narrative form. If you just want to infodump, I think it's best to mix it into the body of the story. If you have a scene of the story that you want to show which is substantially different from the rest for some reason, that's what I think makes a good prologue.
When you use a prologue you have to have two hooks: one for the prologue and one for the novel itself. This means that the prologue needs to be interesting in its own right, and not just because we're awestruck at the mind that could have created this fascinating world. As with chapter 1, we have to care about or fear something. In suspense novels, a prologue is often in the bad guys POV. e're not meant to like the character, but we are meant to fear what they might do to everyone else. That's the hook. Of course, in chapter 1 you have to hook us gain and IMHO, a prologue should not be a necessary read. You should be able to read a bok without having to read a prologue, although it may add to or enrich the story.
I'm writing a suspense novel right now. (I am in line for the March 1st Wizards of the Coast deadline....yay me!) I keep struggling with whether or not to put in a prologue. In this case, I finally decided to let the publisher decide. The prologue is a short story, complete from start to finish, that I am currently shopping around separately. It takes place a year and a half before the start of the rest of the story and describes an incident that is significant in the main character's decision to make changes in her life. (This is heavily a character story.) The reason I want it as a prologue is because it happens so long before the rest of the story and is only loosely connected by means of providing motivation to the main character, and yet it's interesting and I do end up having a small flashback to describe those events later on. Here's the thing, when I wrote the story such that I didn't need to have the reader read the flashback, it still works. I'll still let a publisher decide to put it in, but I'm ok with it either way.
It's exciting to be put in a new world. Take me straight there.
"Clark took a hovercar..." OK, we're in a futuristic world.
"Clark forgot to adjust his materialization, and found he was walking through furniture."
"'Haven't you fixed the replicator _yet_?' Lois said."
No info dump necessary.
That said, I think a prolog is useful if taking it out would make the book less exciting.
[This message has been edited by wbriggs (edited February 11, 2005).]
The purpose of a prologue isn't really to set the milieu so much as to set up the audience's expectations for the story in certain ways. For instance, the "Antagonists POV" prologue is to set us up to expect that the protagonist will eventually have to face off against this villain somehow, while the "Ancient prophecy" prologue and highly similar "Secret War" prologue both set us up to expect that the protagonist will eventually become entangled in the ancient prophecy/secret war. There are important varients, like the "Villain as a cute/horrid/abused little kid" prologue, which sets us up not only to expect the villain to show up but also primes us to read the story as a meditation on the question of why this person became the villain and, in the more generall sense, why villains occur at all.
And so on and so forth. In a sense, since the prologue is set off from the text proper and is intended to influence the reader's perceptions of later events rather than make them comprehensible, it is both a bad idea to use it as a milieu establishing section and a good idea to consider how a reader that skips it is going to recieve the rest of the story.
I think that it could be kind of a fun experiment to read a story without the prologue and then read it with the prologue, but usually a well written text lets the astute reader understand how the later events of the narrative would have seemed without the prologue.
Anyway, a good story doesn't need the prologue, the prologue is a bonus for the reader who already enjoys your text enough to go back and read any previously skipped parts.