To Prologue or not to Prologue

When your meal arrives in a restaurant, do you admire the look of it? Inhale the smell before you pick up your cutlery? My teenagers don’t do that with a meal I’ve cooked for them at home! I wouldn’t expect them to.

But restaurants want diners to admire the food; they put time and effort into the presentation (I definitely don't do that at home!). They want to build anticipation and maybe prompt a photo or two. The title, cover and blurb of a book work in a similar way, tempting the reader with what's on offer. 

Yet however good food looks and smells, I think the main test is that first mouthful. From that you can tell the taste, the temperature, the texture. If they're not right, it's going to be hard to keep eating. 

The opening of the piece of writing needs to have a similar effect to that first mouthful of a delicious-looking meal. It needs to please, to pique the reader’s interest with characters or events or questions that make it almost impossible not to read on.

The problem is, there’s also a lot of information to communicate at the beginning of a piece of writing. The setting, the purpose, some backstory or explanation. And it can be hard to make that intriguing. Hence the prologue.

A prologue gives you a chance to relate an exciting incident from the middle of the story, or an illustration to a point made further on in the book. It’s there to titillate. You don’t have to work out how to balance entertainment and information, or action and backstory. You just have to captivate the reader.

Most preachers will start a sermon with a story or anecdote, rather than diving straight into biblical exegesis. Similarly Philip Yancey, Phil Moore, they often start books or chapters with a real life story, the relevance of which will become clear later on.

It’s common in crime writing too. Susan Hill in The Various Haunts of Men (the first of her Simon Serrailler crime novels) starts with an unknown person speaking to an unknown audience. It establishes a mystery that the book sets out to solve.

But sometimes a prologue can feel like a cop out. A section from later on in the writing dumped at the beginning purely because it grabs attention. An incident that becomes relevant so much later, you’ve forgotten all about it by then. Or even worse, something that isn’t necessary to the story at all.

I can understand why publishers and readers don’t always like prologues. No one wants to be manipulated or misled by a piece of writing that quickly changes when the prologue ends. Nor do readers like it when they move from prologue to first chapter and feel that they’re starting the book all over again. And readers aren’t stupid; they can tell when the writer is being lazy and using a prologue because they can’t work out how to make the beginning of the story attractive enough.

I’ve been guilty of that: moving an exciting scene to the top of the page because the actual beginning is a bit prosaic. I have to remind myself that even the most attention-grabbing prologue needs a deeper purpose.

And maybe it would be better to scrap the prologue and improve the start of the story itself.