Breshly News

Today’s post is by author Maryka Biaggio.

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Many authors and industry professionals have cautioned writers against using prologues, perhaps because they’ve seen them done poorly—as information dumps, meandering attempts to provide background, or vehicles to show off research. But prologues do have a place in some novels. Done well, they can intrigue readers and ignite interest in the story to come. Several different types of prologues are reviewed here, along with examples of effective ones.

Prologues That Foreshadow or Set Up the Mystery

Perhaps the most common use of the prologue is to foreshadow events to come or to set up a mystery, thereby prodding readers to embark on the journey of solving the mystery. Some of the best prologues tell or hint at the end of the story, leaving readers eager to see how the character gets from Point A to B.

One of my favorite examples of this type of prologue is from Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait. We learn on the first page that:

Lucrezia is…sixteen years old…not quite a year into her marriage…. They have travelled most of the day…. He had brought her here, to this stone fortress, to murder her.

My interest was immediately piqued: Her husband plans to murder her, and she knows it? I was primed to dive into the story of their marriage and learn why in the world her husband wants to be rid of her. It’s a risky gambit O’Farrell is using here: revealing what appears to be the end of the story, this young woman’s murder. But it worked for me and, judging by the book’s popularity, for other readers as well. I found myself hoping at every turn that Lucrezia could somehow save herself from her husband’s diabolical plan.

Another good use of the foreshadowing prologue is found in The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron:

Jacquotte Delahaye was alone. The prison cell was small and dark…. [S]oon she would be nothing more than a corpse dangling from a rope…. “Before us stands a woman condemned…Jacquotte Delahaye, notorious pirate captain.”

Again, readers learn of the main character’s demise right at the beginning. However, numerous questions are raised by this prologue. Jacquotte is a woman pirate? How did she come to be a notorious pirate and pirate captain, and what crimes has she committed that have led to her conviction?

Prologues That Work as a Catalyst

The prologue can also serve as a catalyst for the events to come. Often an event that happens prior to the timeline of the central story sets the novel in motion. For instance, a prologue might reveal a crime being committed before the story begins, a crime that will be solved in the narrative, or a precipitating event that will resonate throughout the novel.

All Our Yesterdays, a prequel to Shakespeare’s play Macbeth by Joel H. Morris, begins with such a prologue:

In my husband’s eyes I see a hunger. In their gleam is a longing to know. We lie together, pale in the milky half-light, half ourselves, half each other’s. It is our wedding night.

Then, in a clever nod to Shakespeare’s play, her husband tells her:

“Your face, my Lady, is as a play. Rehearsed. And you perform what you wish others to see. The audience believes they are seeing behind the curtains, but they see only the curtains themselves.”

We all know the story of Macbeth from Shakespeare’s famous play. In Morris’s prequel to that story, we see the couple on their wedding night. It’s a masterful scene in which we glimpse the dance of intimacy and secrecy between the recently wed couple who will go on to brazenly murder in order to attain the throne.

This use of the prologue works best if the catalyst is somewhat removed in time or place from the actual beginning of the story. If this is not the case, the writer should ask if what is being called a prologue might simply be best considered the first chapter of the work.

Prologues That Provide Background

A similar type of prologue can be used to provide backstory or background information, especially if it occurs well outside the timeline of the story to come. One of the most famous such prologues is the sonnet at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It not only provides background but also reveals the tragedy to come:

Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

This beautifully rendered prologue sets the scene by revealing the longstanding feud between the Montagues and Capulets.

This type of prologue is perhaps the most difficult for the author to successfully employ. Rather than revealing a chunk of backstory at the beginning, most good novels weave pertinent backstory into the narrative as it moves along, and for good reason: Readers can easily become bored with content that lacks tension or immediacy. It’s thus a risky ploy, especially since contemporary readers expect to be immediately pulled into the action of the story. But it can work if there’s something unique about the backstory, for instance, if it’s being recounted by a fascinating character who is not a part of the story or even by an omniscient narrator with a flair for canny expression. However, the background information in a prologue should be on a strictly need-to-know basis and should have a clear connection to or impact on the central conflict.

Prologues That Show Character Motivation

Some prologues focus on portraying a key or main character’s motivation. For instance, a prologue might show some traumatic or formative event in a character’s childhood which will inform his/her behavior during the story. The Emancipation of Evan Walls by Jeffrey Blount provides just such a beginning:

To say that I did not like my childhood would be a monstrous understatement. For that portion of my life, I was a cornered and wounded animal fighting for survival. And even though I endured, I cannot look back on those days without feeling a deep-seated ache throughout my bones…. I thought all the cruelty inflicted on blacks was done by whites, but I was young and had a lot to learn.

Blount’s novel tells the story of a young Black man married to a white woman who has just given birth to their first child. This event forces the young man to reckon with his past—for he worries what kind of life his child will have. The prologue prepares us for the revelations to follow as the young man tells his story to his wife.

When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman begins with a prologue set about twenty years before the main events of the novel:

Stephen was never to forget his fifth birthday, for that was the day he lost his father. In actual fact, that was not precisely so. But childhood memories are not woven from facts alone, and that was how he would remember it.

This novel tells the story of the 12th-century struggle between Maude and Stephen for England’s throne. The prologue gives us a glimpse of an emotionally powerful vignette in which we see the child Stephen facing the death of his father. This revelation sets up clear motivations for Stephen’s actions later in life, laying the groundwork for the type of man he becomes, his ideals, his insecurities, his goals, and his flaws. Because we were there with him during that childhood trauma, all of those qualities become quite visceral and ring more true for readers.

Prologues That Set Up Dramatic Irony

Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth opens with the public hanging of a character who doesn’t appear again in the story but whose fate drives the rest of the plot. In addition to recounting an event that will have a seismic effect on the story, the prologue creates a vivid portrait of 12th-century England.

The small boys came early to the hanging. It was still dark when the first three or four of them sidled out of the hovels, quiet as cats in their felt boots…. They picked their way through the huddled wooden huts and along the streets of frozen mud to the silent marketplace, where the gallows stood waiting.

This prologue also sets up a mystery readers will want to unravel. When readers later encounter characters from the prologue, they’re drawn more strongly into the plot, since they remember glimpsing these characters in the prologue and now wondering how they fit into the wider story. Moreover, this prologue has set up dramatic irony, as various point-of-view characters in later chapters witness other characters reacting to each other in odd ways that don’t make sense. But readers understand why because they have information that the characters do not, which is a classic form of dramatic irony.

Prologues That Introduce a Character

This is particularly common in first-person novels in which the narrator has a distinct voice and/or perspective. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things:

Alma Whitaker, born with the century, slid into our world on the fifth of January, 1800. Swiftly—nearly immediately—opinions began to form around her.

Readers then learn about how various members of the Whitaker household—including the mother, the midwife, the head housekeeper, and the father—view the newborn and her prospects in life. In this way, readers are quickly introduced to the household and key characters, while at the same time learning that this birth is an auspicious one.

In my novel The Model Spy, a prologue establishes the background of the central character, Toto Koopman, and concludes with:

Yes, there was much I didn’t understand then—much I would not only learn, but fathom the weighty import of: that by a stroke of fate I’d inherited the sleepy-lidded eyes of my mother, the slender uprightness of my father, and the glistening blue-black hair of my grandmother; that I was blessed with the certitude of forebears who had lived long and well enough to pass on their legends and wisdom; that the eyes of men and women would follow me, often with wonder, sometimes with envy, when I walked down Paris’s runways; and that all my gifts wouldn’t be enough to shield me from the horrors and brutality of war.

I intended here to give readers a glimpse of Toto’s unusual background and also to hint at the horrors she was to experience during World War II. It is a brief prologue, but one that I used as a vehicle to quickly introduce this most unusual woman.

Prologues That Provide a Unique Perspective

Another use of the prologue is to provide a unique or minor character’s perspective. This could be someone who won’t be a key player but who can offer insight about the main character or conflict. Or it could be a character who does not thereafter recur as a point of view character. This type of prologue allows the author to convey critical information to readers that the point of view character(s) might not know and thus couldn’t convey during the story. Such a prologue may also set up dramatic irony, for instance, by heightening the tension in a subsequent chapter because readers know more than the characters do.

George R.R. Martin frequently employs this use of prologues in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Here are the opening lines of the prologue to A Game of Thrones:

“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.

“The wildlings are dead.”

“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile.

Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had seen the lordlings come and go. “Dead is dead,” he said. “We have no business with the dead.”

“Are they dead?” Royce asked softly. “What proof have we?”

The two characters here are not central characters, but they hint that there are mysteries in the offing.

Prologues That Set the Tone

A prologue might be used to set the tone and/or point to themes in the novel to follow. Ideally, such a prologue shouldn’t be used solely to set the tone, as the first chapter can certainly do that. However, even if it’s pointing to themes, its tone should be consistent with the text that follows.

Joyce Carol Oates begins Blonde with a prologue that sets the tone and is dated the day of Marilyn Monroe’s death. This prologue also hints at a mystery: Who is delivering death to Marilyn Monroe?

There came Death hurtling along the Boulevard in waning sepia light…. There came Death unerring, Death not to be dissuaded…. There came Death unexpectedly into Brentwood…. There came, in the early evening of August 3, 1962, Death ringing the doorbell at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive with a package…weighing only a few ounces.

Death rang the doorbell a second time, pressing hard. And this time, the door was opened. From Death’s hand I accepted the gift. I knew what it was, I think. Who it was from. Seeing the name and address I laughed and signed without hesitation.

Parting thoughts

This list of ways to use the prologue isn’t exhaustive, and prologues can certainly accomplish more than one goal. Still, the prologue should not be there to please the author but to intrigue or draw readers in. If it accomplishes the latter, it stays; if it’s only there for the author, it should go.

There are some reasons not to use a prologue: to provide detailed information about the setting (and only that); to recap a character’s backstory but without indicating any inciting incident for the story to come; or to drop readers into the time and place without information that drives the story forward.

Authors considering the prologue should ask: 

• What work does the prologue do, and what might be sacrificed by adding a prologue instead of jumping right into the story? The best prologues are brief and compelling.
• Does this content need to be a prologue, or is it simply the first chapter mislabeled as a prologue? If the prologue is only a means to provide backstory, then perhaps that information can simply be conveyed through other techniques in the narrative.
• Does the prologue do things that a chapter can’t do as effectively?
• Will the prologue create an effect that thereafter enhances or colors the chapters that follow?

Prologues should serve a clear purpose: They should whet readers’ appetite for the story to come; they should set up questions in readers’ minds; and they should be brief and concise. Used well, they can be quite inviting.