One of the most common questions I get from new authors is whether using a prologue is a good choice for a particular novel. The short answer is that it depends, but probably not.

That’s not to say that prologues can’t be good; actually, some of my favorite books have prologues, and some even benefit from them. However, I usually steer authors — especially new and upcoming authors — away from using prologues, because generally they don’t add anything to the story that the reader will appreciate. I suspect the main reason why prologues are so attractive is that many of the best books out there, the ones that shaped our perception of good stories, use prologues. Some of them even benefited from it.

Unfortunately, prologues have a reputation as extended infodumps, and because of that most readers will normally skip over a prologue. Thanks to that, a prologue typically serves as a bad introduction to your story. There are, however, some ways to judge whether your prologue can stand on its own.

The best prologues I’ve seen do the following:

  • Give information that cannot be more easily given in the normal narrative before it can benefit that same narrative.
  • Give information that is useful for the story, but not vital. This encourages your reader to read it, but doesn’t penalize skipping past it.
  • Is significantly and noticeably shorter than what the reader expects a chapter to be. If they start flipping past it and notice it’s short, many will reconsider because it’s not asking much commitment from them.
  • Gives an immediate opportunity for a hook.

If a prologue doesn’t fit all four of these guidelines, I strongly advise you to attempt to chuck it and see what else you can try. Experiment with what else you can do to deliver the information within the main body of the story, giving information as close as you can to when the audience needs it while still feeling natural.

It’s not that a prologue can’t be good without matching these four principles; there are very few rules to writing, after all, because we’re talking art rather than science. But it’s highly unlikely that the prologue will work — and if it happens to be that yours is the exception, then you should therefore make it the strongest exception possible by understanding what makes a good prologue work.

One of the best prologues I’ve ever read comes from my favorite novel, Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. It’s short (less than one page), gives an immediate hook, provides valuable background information useful but not vital for the first chapter, and ends with one of the strongest hooks in fiction. I strongly encourage you to read it (here’s an affiliate link to the novel), and for more reasons than the prologue. If I taught a college course on creative writing, this book would be a required text.

Another good example is in Romeo and Juliet, by some guy named Bill Shakespeare. This play gets a bad rap because of misconceptions I’ve talked about elsewhere and so I won’t rehash it here, but suffice to say that it has a prologue precisely because the titular characters have a real, genuine romance — for about five seconds, anyway. Go to that link for why, and how it quickly starts to become a tragedy. Today, if you started this story cold, with no idea of the tragic ending, you would expect it to be a story about how the two lovers conquer the obstacles in their way. Shakespeare’s audience was no different, because people love stories about love.

So Shakespeare put in a short prologue to effectively say, “Just so you know, this story doesn’t have a happy ending, so don’t expect one.”

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.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which, if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

I have, of course, added some emphases in there to stress that Shakespeare literally spoiled the plot of his own play because this is vital information. The point of a tragedy is to see the trainwreck coming. If the audience didn’t know that the main characters would die by the end, then they’d have treated it as a broken promise, a bait-and-switch that left them feeling cheated. This is a point we can easily miss today, since everyone and their cousin (as my mother would say) understands it doesn’t end well; but to that first audience, it wouldn’t have been so obvious. So they got a short prologue with important but not vital information with several hooks in it to grab attention.

In contrast, one of the weakest prologues I’ve read (at least in a book that I still liked) is in Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings. As a first read, it is too long, doesn’t provide vital information, doesn’t give strong hooks, and doesn’t even entertain the audience enough to justify its own existence. Though note I qualified it with “as a first read” — the prologue is great if you already know the story, and that’s its biggest problem. Personally I think the prologue should have been in the fifth book, not the first, after the reader has already gained the context necessary for the contrast in style. But don’t let that keep you from reading a fantastic series that shaped my concept of what epic fantasy should be. David Eddings, through this series, was more influential on me than any other single author. (Mind you, I’m nostalgic for the original, very 80s covers I had as a child.)

Beyond studying what makes existing prologues work or fail, it’s important (and not just for prologues) to study infodumping and its more artful twin, incluing. I have an old article on that topic, and ten years later my opinions haven’t changed. Once you know how to identify when you’re giving information to the reader without first drawing them in, you’ll be in a far better position to judge whether your own prologue can justify its own existence.