I’m soliciting opinions:
How do you feel about prologues in fantasy novels?
Do you love ‘em or hate ‘em?
If you hate ‘em, would you rather get the backstory as flashbacks, dreams, and dialogue, or in some other manner?
If you love ‘em, do you have any suggestions for making them more interesting and less annoying?
One of the stories I’m working on has a back story that spans roughly forty years. My prologue for it is relatively brief and succinct [currently only eleven manuscript pages], and it mentions only that which is of great importance to the story. It sets the tone; it shows pivotal ‘historical’ events; it introduces crucial characters; and it lets the reader in on some vital, personal information that one of the primary characters is struggling to keep secret from the rest of the world.
If I omit the backstory-prologue then the tone will build slowly, the character with the secret will have to begin without the reader-sympathy that the prologue would hopefully provoke [and that character's behavior would be frustratingly confusing instead of intriguing], and all those really nifty teasers would be lost.
This prologue is important to me as a writer as it would eliminate most of the perils of the Infamous Info-Dump, and I’m trying so hard to avoid that evil altogether.
Tell me your take on prologues. The floor is open,….
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Sunday May 20, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Bruce Byfield
It’s hard to say, in the abstract. The only real question is: does it work?
One thing that doesn’t work in a prologue for me is a description of events that is deliberately left mysterious by not mentioning the names of characters or anything that can identify them. That doesn’t seem to play fair with the reader, not unless the prologue is told from the point of view of a character who isn’t in a position to know.
Sunday May 20, 2007 at 6:05 pm
R.
Will it work? I sure hope so –
As it currently stands, the prologue is an omniscient, third-person narrative, some of if from the POV of the character with the secret. The reader will be witness to that secret, and watch as the character begins to deal with it. It triggers one of the more important plot lines of the story.
All active characters [most especially the character with the secret] within the prologue are identified and named, as this is their introduction to the reader.