The Problem with Prologues
What Brain Science Says about Writing with Story Structures #2

The insights from cognitive psychology can help us understand the effects and usefulness of story structures, and this is what I break down in this series. In these articles on story structure elements, I dive into the effects of story on readers and how these structures play a part in that. I also offer suggestions for what writers can do to have the best of both worlds — both the joy of just writing and creating a tale readers will want to read.

Three Problems with Prologues (According to Brain Science)

Let me give you a little sneak peek into my life as a book editor:

It’s early in the day. I’ve gotten a new editing request from a fantasy author two days prior. She sent in her new client application, and it suggested we’d be a good fit to work together. I requested a sample of her manuscript’s opening to get a feel for her story and style, and the file hits my inbox with a ping.

I haven’t yet dug into my current project for the week, so I decide to click “download” and take a quick look at the sample. I’m impressed! The author introduces some solid conflict and the main character has a motivation upon entering the story in chapter one. It could certainly use a bit more massaging to bring the tension front and center to engage the reader in the first few lines. But the pieces are mostly there, and I am confident I can help her make this story shine.

Not being able to help myself, I start diving right in. I make a few suggestions and move a few lines with Word’s “track changes” on. Already, I can see the difference even those few sample tweaks are making.

Satisfied that I’ve provided enough in my feedback to show the author the kinds of suggestions I can offer and the gems I can help her uncover, I send the sample back with my recommendation and follow it up with my quote.

Flash forward:

The author has accepted my quote and signed the contract. Our project start date arrives, and the author sends her complete manuscript file.

Eager to see what she’s done with my bit of sample feedback, I open the document. But to my dismay, rather than seeing Chapter One on the first page, I see the header I have grown to dread so much: Prologue.

She may have added a prologue between the sample edit and the project’s starting date, but I’ve seen it too many times to believe each author I go through this same sequence with decides to do so while waiting for my next availability. No, what has happened is what often happens—the author sent me the first pages of her first chapter instead of the manuscript’s true opening and very first pages. (Side note: I have since been more explicit in my requests of authors’ samples so that I’m not so often surprised, finding that the opening I was sent wasn’t really the opening. However, plenty of openings still come in the form of prologues in science fiction and fantasy.)

While this is perhaps not that big of a deal for simply needing to see a sample of her writing, my feedback was based on the assumption that those paragraphs were the first ones readers would see. And that difference is a big deal for readers. According to how our brains work when we read, we need a few key pieces to work together from the very first sentence to become invested in the story. Prologues rarely deliver.

So what do I do? Almost always, I give the same advice:

Cut the prologue.

Why? What did a prologue ever do to me to deserve the axe? A few things.

1. The prologue didn’t start with the main character.

A prologue often doesn't start with the main character. If it did, the author would usually just call it “chapter one.” Instead, the prologue is used so that the author can introduce a different perspective from the rest of the story (which also doesn’t set up a very accurate promise for readers, but we’ll get into that more in the next point!). Perhaps it’s from the point of view (POV) of a character on the outside looking in at the main character. Maybe it’s a villain’s POV to establish the plot conflict. Or maybe it’s used for a framing device or a more omniscient narrator to set the scene.

Why are these strategies unsuitable to open a story? They fail to make readers care. Possibly, a prologue might make readers care about the wrong character if it opens well for establishing a different character, but then readers might find it difficult or undesirable to switch to the true main character in chapter one.

At the opening of a story, the learning curve can be steep for readers even if the author does everything well and is careful not to infodump. So it’s best to remove all barriers to entry as much as possible.

Emotion invests readers, but that emotion needs to be grounded in something—the main character. The main character is the viewpoint for readers, and therefore emotion needs to be connected to that character so that readers know why they should care (because, ideally, they’ll know why the main character cares). Bringing this back to prologues, that means a prologue that doesn’t help readers get to deeply know the main character quickly runs the risk of losing readers right at the start.

2. The prologue established inaccurate promises.

Gaining readers’ trust is crucial to convincing them to invest their time in the story. If the prologue is set off as such because of a distinct difference from the actual story, it could potentially confuse readers about the target audience, genre, or even the type of story the blurb, title, or cover promised. For example, a prologue may start the story in a different time period, from the point of view of a different character age category, or from a different (non-main) character’s point of view. While these are all valid reasons for setting the section off as something separate from the main storyline, this could be a hard ask for readers.

Consider that a young adult reader may go into the story expecting a teenage perspective. But when he opens to the prologue and starts reading a six-year-old’s perspective (such as in a dramatized flashback of the teenaged main character in the rest of the story), he has to pause, double-check the type of book he thought he was browsing, or even flip ahead to check that this is, in fact, the story he meant to try. He is therefore taken out of the story. The same age category confusion is especially problematic if it presents the opposite and an adult perspective begins the story in a novel that is intended for middle grader readers—especially for agents or publishers looking for clear marketability. Of course, I’m not saying all readers have short attention spans or wouldn’t give the author the benefit of the doubt. Yet readers have a lot of stories to choose from, and for marketing purposes, I like to keep the initial experience as smooth as possible.

A prologue with a different time period might similarly confuse genre. Readers expecting a contemporary setting might get the wrong impression from an opening set in the 1800s. On the other hand, some readers may absolutely relish starting in such a setting. Or they may get invested in the prologue character’s point of view because it’s written so well with great inner character conflict and intriguing stakes. But then they inevitably reach chapter one and everything changes. The character the readers got invested in is no longer a POV character. The setting switches to modern London instead of the moody Victorian London that set up such a mysterious atmosphere that helped to hook the reader in the first place. Readers have to completely reorient when they were just acclimating to the elements presented in the prologue.

While I have no doubt that authors playing with these differences in their prologues use them to expertly set up a deeply layered story by making the prologue scenes integral to understanding the main storyline, these prologues still set up false promises to readers. Perhaps expectations can be established well enough in the marketing blurbs and jacket copy that readers will know that a different main story is coming, but even so, entering a new story and learning enough to become fully immersed in the story can be hard enough for readers without having to do so twice for the same novel. Whatever the difference from the main storyline, the promises and expectations set up by the prologue may not be able to be fulfilled by the main storyline. The promise of the character age, the setting, the time period, or the perspective itself was only used for the prologue—or, in the instance of a framing device, perhaps in a prologue and epilogue. While it may provide good setup or background information, it can’t fulfill the expectations it started the novel with.

3. The prologue was used to present prophecy and/or infodump.

I think it’s well-established that no one appreciates an infodump. While backstory is necessary, dumping it on readers all at once by calling it a prologue is certainly not a great way to engage readers. Mostly, it’s because infodumps don’t get into the character deeply enough or maybe not even at all. And, once again, character is key to making most readers care.

But an infodump is also an excellent way to make readers check out. Being hit with too much new information at once about the world (especially in speculative genres), setting, or situation becomes merely static. The presentation isn’t conducive to learning, and therefore readers won’t care—in fact, they probably can’t care yet if they don’t know how a character cares about such information or how it affects the character.

The other prologue usage I frequently see in fantasy genres are for prophecies. Now, this one hurts my tween/teen writer soul. I thought I was so clever to include a verse-like, cryptic prophecy in a prologue for what would someday be my epic fantasy. But the more matured editor in me understands how little this mysterious prophecy can mean to readers just entering my new, epic world. (It doesn’t mean this realization doesn’t still hurt a little bit. I really enjoyed coming up with those prophecies!) The effect is essentially the same as an infodump. It’s not integrated enough into the main story or connected enough to a character’s perspective to tip off a reader about the importance and weight it actually carries—or what it even means for the characters in the story. And that meaning is what readers are looking for. Otherwise all those clever phrases are just a jumble of words on a page.

So have I ever had an author send me a story with a prologue that couldn’t be cut? I can’t say I have. A few authors have come close. But together we found ways to creatively re-weave the information, the flashback, the historical setup, or other character’s perspective into the main storylines, and the novels were much stronger for it. Readers learned organically about the epic fantasy world. They uncovered the mystery of the character’s past exciting reveal after exciting reveal. They puzzled over the prophecy along with the main character and read intertwining timelines that built parallel to one another.

“But,” I hear authors objecting, “look at all the prologues these big-name authors use!”

Can prologues be used well? Of course. Not all prologues are evil, and not all prologues deserve to be cut.

Yet, I reply, “Great for them! They already have loyal fanbases and can get away with prologues because their readers trust them as authors. Readers know the authors will deliver on their promises and the usual quality of their work.”

Or, I offer my other usual response: “Well, yeah. It’s [insert ridiculously popular and talented author(s) here], whose books print money and whose publisher doesn’t have to worry about marketability.”

Jokes aside, some authors do find legitimate reasons to use prologues to hook readers without breaking any promises later on rather than starting at chapter one. Perhaps there is a time break, but it avoids confusing reader expectations. Or maybe the author uses the prologue to establish the narrator telling the story, yet it carefully avoids any infodumps and is integral to the story’s style.

So, yes. There are always exceptions. But in many cases, even these jokes still hold some truth. If you or any other author wrote as well as these greats, I’m fairly certain it would still be difficult to sell a book with a prologue to a publisher as a debut author. Prologues have simply fallen out of favor, for the most part, and I suspect it is due to these easy pitfalls that most prologues fall into. Seeing the word “Prologue” sets many editors and agents on guard. But I think this trend away from prologues is coming from a productive place—from the reality of how readers experience story and what brain science helps us understand about what readers need when and how the information is processed.

More and more I’m seeing writing craft advice swinging toward character-centered planning to infuse stories with meaning. I see this happening even with craft experts who don’t take the findings of cognitive neuroscience into account. It’s as if many more people in the industry are coming to these same conclusions regardless. And, to me, that’s a good thing! It means more good stories and deep exploration of the world, human struggles, and truth. It means more stories that will stick with us and keep us thinking. But it also means that prologues as we usually know them probably aren’t effective enough to rely on for enchanting readers.

But if you want to take this as a challenge, be my guest! I can’t wait to see your creativity flourish as you give it some helpful boundaries to avoid these prologue problems in your own story’s prologue. Take a stab at it with your pen, and if you can’t quite pierce through all the prologue problems or if you’re not sure whether or not your prologue does slip into any of the pitfalls, let me provide suggestions to work around them for your unique reader enchantment.

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