Fantasy with Friends – hosted by Pages Unbound – poses questions each Monday about fantasy, either as a genre as a whole or individual works.
I really enjoy these discussion posts – they often make me consider things I have plenty of thoughts about, but don’t often dig too deep. Prologues is definitely one of those areas, and I’m excited to see what comes out of today’s post!
Fantasy with Friends
Prologues
There has been ongoing discussion on social media about whether readers actually read or enjoy prologues. Do you think prologues add value to a story, or do you wish the story just started with chapter one? Are there good and bad ways for an author to utilize a prologue in a fantasy novel?
Like most things in books, prologues are one of those things that when done well can really work. There has to be a solid reason for it to exist, beyond just giving the reader a short scene of the MC’s backstory, or showing something that won’t have an impact until the last third of the novel, at which point the reader has likely forgotten key details.
They can be useful if there’s a huge shift between the prologue and Chapter 1, or can be used to give the reader a glimpse of the ending and make us wonder how the characters got there. By ‘shift’, it might be that there’s something crucial that happened 100 years before the start of the novel, or a completely different character, or something the character saw when they were young that has an impact on the events of the book and the reader needs to be aware of them. As wishy-washy as it sounds, prologues add value to a story when they add value. There’s no blanket rule, and prologues in fantasy can especially be useful.
I’ve touched on it above but there are absolutely good and bad ways to utilise prologues in fantasy. It can’t just be a prologue for the sake of being a prologue, because the books the author takes inspiration from have prologues. There needs to a solid reason for one, and it should be clear to the reader why we’re starting at a prologue and not Chapter 1. Consider the way some TV shows have a cold open – often something that leads into that week’s main episode, but not necessarily directly, clearly linked. It might be more focused on characterisation than plot, and that’s fine. But a prologue for the sake of a prologue just doesn’t work.
Like most things in writing, there’s no absolute answers. But I do think writers need to carefully consider if a prologue is required for the story or not, and think over what it adds to have it there before deciding whether to keep it or scrap it in favour of starting at Chapter 1. What do you think? Do you tend to like prologues, or wish the writer got us straight into the main part of the story?
Unwrapping Words 