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I have a beginning worked out to a point, and I'm a little stuck as how to start it. (Not Olympus Uprising) This is the beginning of my superhero story. I want to inform the reader that the universe that my story is in, isn't ours, it's an alternate one. So the real question I have right now is this: Is a prologue a bad place to set background info on how things work in your story or is it ok, depending on how it's handled?
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I would just include that information in the regular narrative. It doesn't take much--all you have to do is to refer to things that flat-out contradict what everyone knows really happened in this universe. ("After JFK finished his second term, he continued to meet with Marvo-Man every other week for three years.")
Posts: 932 | Registered: Jul 2001
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The only time I've ever written a prologue was to show the start of a story that occurred in an entirely different POV to the rest of the story. I was using 3rd limited, 1 viewpoint character per 'part' -- MC, MC's sister, back to MC -- but I had about 500 words that I wanted to put in at the beginning from the POV of the villain. I made it a prologue because it didn't seem to fit as chapter 1. I also ended up with an epilogue from the same character's viewpoint, both for symmetry and 'cause it gave a nice hint that there'd be a sequel.
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.
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If you're reading a sci fi/fantasy novel you expect things to be different anyway. Part of the fun of reading those genres is encountering those differences in the narrative and sort of finding your feet. Posts: 64 | Registered: Dec 2003
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The thing about prolgoues is you can't info dump there, either. So if the reason you want to use a prologue is to tell (rather than show) the read all about your universe, don't do it. Instead, struggle as the rest of us do with how best to weave the information in to your narrative. Exposition is the most difficult part of science fiction and fantasy, but to be blunt, I won't read a prologue that's an info dump.
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.
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The other option is to do it the way terry pratchett does with his discworld books, same every book, swimming through space on the back of a turtle, on the shoulders of four elephants etc.....
Posts: 27 | Registered: Jan 2005
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Yeah, establishing an alternate reality milieu is no differnt from establishing any other milieu (including contemporary milieux).
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.
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