by Stephanie Morrill
Stephanie writes young adult contemporary novels and is the creator of GoTeenWriters.com. Her novels include The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series (Revell) and the Ellie Sweet books (Playlist). You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and check out samples of her work on her author website including the free novella, Throwing Stones.
You will find—or perhaps have already discovered—that the use of prologues in stories is a surprisingly controversial issue. Some writers are so strong in their anti-prologue beliefs that in my early novel writing days, I once walked away from a class thinking, “I will never be a lazy writer who uses a prologue!”
But that’s crazy talk. A prologue is a storytelling tool in your tool box. Can it be used ineffectively? Absolutely. But I don’t think that’s a reason to throw them out entirely.
The info dump: I frequently hear contest judges talk about how many fantasy submissions start with a prologue where the writer explains the story world and the history of the people. If you’re a fantasy writer and you’ve started your story this way, I would advise that you cut that prologue and paste it into a, “Just for me” document. It’s great information to know, but it’s not the best way to start a story.
I understand the temptation to write this way. After all, many of the fairy tales we’re raised with start with an info dumpy style opening, including a ton of Disney movies. Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Tangled, and Frozen are the ones that immediately pop to mind.
Because you want the readers to “get” your storyworld, it seems like you need to tell them a lot of information. Think about The Hunger Games, though, and the way it drops us right into the story, feeding us bits of information at a time.
Cheater openings: This is when the prologue is actually a scene from the middle or end-ish of the book, but the author has put it up front. While it’s certainly attention grabbing, this can also be a signal that your chapter one is snooze-worthy.
For example, the movie Mission Impossible III opens with a scene between Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), the villain (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), and Ethan’s wife (Michelle Monaghan). The villain is torturing Ethan Hunt by way of torturing his wife, and just as the scene climaxes, we cut away to the “real” beginning of the story.
The opening scene with Ethan Hunt, the villain, and Ethan’s wife is actually the climax of the movie. After the flash forward, they take us back to Ethan and Julia’s engagement party. Why did they make that choice?My best guess is that they felt an engagement party had too ordinary a vibe for a Mission Impossible movie. They wanted a different tone.
My opinion is that robbing your climax just so you don’t have to come up with a bang of a way to start your story is a bit lazy. But I like the movie, and it did very well in the box office, so the cheater opening is forgivable.
In the novel Twilight, Stephenie Meyer did something similar. She robs from the climax (though in a subtle way, seeing as she doesn’t simply cut and paste) and opens her story like this, “I’d never given much thought to how I would die—though I’d had reason enough in the last few months—but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.”
That’s an excellent opening line, isn’t it? It raises so many questions about this character. Much better than the first line of chapter one: “My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down.”
For a novel about vampires, the prologue Stephenie Meyer uses is much more effective at setting the tone than the opening of chapter one, which details Bella’s farewell to her mother and introduces us to the rainy town of Forks, Washington. Since her prologue is only half a page long, and since it’s sold a gazillion copies, again, the cheater opening is forgivable.