Prologues in fantasy

LeftyWriter said:

See, in my story. It takes place in the future but electricity doesn't work anymore so people have had to revert back to horse drawn carriages and living in villages in stuff. It feels sort of medieval in a way. I didn't want people to get confused because it takes place in the future but feels like the past. The prologue explains what happened and how the world works now, since it technically isn't in a fantasy world but our world.

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Is there a reason you think our world can not be a fantasy world? It has been used in fantasies very successfully time and time again. It is not so unusual a circumstance that a reader would be thrown by the concept. The future being less advanced than the past has also been done a number of times. I doubt a reader is going to be confused unless the story telling is sub-par.

I personally don't like prologues. I tend to skip prologues unless they are very short and sometimes even then, depending on my mood. Unless it is an unusual prologue with poetry, songs or some other gadget like a prophecy to get my attention. Those I read 100% of the time. If the prologue actually contains information that I need to understand that first chapter, then I get irritated at the author for making me go back and read it. Unless the author redeems themselves with a superior story after that, they don't get another chance. It is my belief as a reader that the book starts with the first word in the first chapter. Throw history at me and I am likely to throw the book to the side and not finish it, as I am not a fan of history. I may, if the author has given me an enjoyable story, go back and read the prologue once I am finished with the book. That is occasionally entertaining.

I have tons of back-story on my current WIP. I know events that happened thousands of years in the past on the planet the story takes place on as well as elsewhere in the galaxy. I have names for groups of people that will never be seen in the finished book. Plants, animals, geography, atmospherics, politics--anything and everything I come up with for why the people react the way they do and how the world works I write down and put in a file. As an author I need to know how my world works and why. But the reader doesn't need my research notes. They need the best story told about the tiny fraction of the world they are seeing at that moment in time.

You are overthinking this, imo. And by doing so, not writing. It's easy to do, worry over this and worry over that and soon you have gone months without so much as writing down a word. I've done it. It won't get your story finished. I highly recommend you sit down and write. Just write. Tell the story as best as you can. Tell it until it is finished. Then you can go back and edit it and decide if you need that bit in the very beginning to lead into the story and explain what is going on to your reader. My guess is that you will find that you don't. But for now, write.

Good luck.

LeftyWriter said:

I do get what you are saying. However, I don't explain exactly why the power went out because nobody knows (I do). My prologue is under 300 words. It basically tells the year, what doesn't work anymore, that there are sorcerers and how society has had to change their way of living, just to give people an idea what things are like now. I don't go into this long history or explain everything about how the power went out--they find that out much later.

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So, if no one in the story knows why the power went out, is there a reason why the reader has to know? Maybe somewhere early on someone could reference the "great blackout" and the return of magic, and move on from there. At some point, maybe you could show the largely abandoned hulk of a once-great city that couldn't survive without electricity.

Trying to explain the why of something like that might actually invite readers to question the logic of it, especially since it's fantasy and not SF.

This is my two cents worth, of course. And I'll admit I enjoy it when writers drop hints about how the world works. If it's important to the plot, of course, the reader can learn more as the story progresses.

I don't hate all prologues, but I greatly prefer the ones that are part of the narrative and are meant to show an inciting event for this particular story (not the reason the world is the way it is, but the thing that sets the stage for the protagonist). I want to read like stories, not information. I guess I've just encountered too many unnecessary and boring ones over the years--history or archaeology lessons, stuff written like it's out of some dry, stilted religious text, explanations of some future technology, birth of the chosen one, some old codger spouting prophecy, someone who isn't going to be part of the story dying because of the incredibly important artifact our hero must find.

The advice to just write the story and to try to work the necessary information into the novel is sound, I think. If your test readers feel that more information is needed, you can always put your short intro back in.

For me, a good prologue shows a scene that is separate from the main story in some way. It could have happened a long time ago, or maybe it happens with a character who is not involved with main cast. By showing a scene that gives us the history instead of telling us about it, you make the prologue more interesting. Usually, if I see a prologue that is explaining the world's history to me, I'm probably going to skip that prologue.

I wrote a fantasy book about the power going out. Love, Death and Tea - down there in my sig.

I didn't explain how the power stopped working. I didn't include a prologue. Instead I showed it through the eyes of my main characters. These are the characters that readers empathise with. If something is worth showing, it is worth showing through the main characters' perspective.

We have a big problem when we write science fiction and fantasy, or at least we think we do. We are writing about a world which is, by definition, different to the real world. So we feel a need to explain those differences. Several mechanisms have been tried - the prologue, the exposition character, the prophecy, the young apprentice being taught the mysteries by an older master, two characters explaining things to each other that they really ought to know.

There are countless science fiction stories which involve a character from the present day being frozen or transported or somehow hand-waved technologically into the future. That way, the future can be explained to this character and to us, the reader.

The problem with all of these techniques is that they can be very clunky. They are all easy to write, but the reader can feel as if they are being spoon-fed a nasty medicine. We are pausing the action to make the reader stare at a page from Wikipedia.

Over time, writers discovered how to do away with many of these clunky techniques by throwing the reader into the action and letting them work it out for themselves. It's our old friend "show don't tell". Show me that your world doesn't have electricity. Show me dragons. Show me a hero being heroic and not acting out yet another bloody prophecy.

But here is a funny thing. Those of us who write science fiction and fantasy like to think that we are special. I know I do. We think that we have a licence to write prologues because we are inventing worlds.

Well, yes, but ... every writer invents worlds, or at the very least invents characters. Every time we introduce a new character into a story we need to tell the reader who this character is. Backstory. Lineage. Personality. It would be awfully clunky if we explained all our characters before we meet them. Instead we (usually) allow characters to introduce themselves. We don't tell the reader that Ethelraed is brave - we show him fighting a monster.

Your prologue doesn't explain why the power stops working. That is explained later. That's great. Now can you apply that same technique to the rest of the prologue. Do you really need it?

Like Once said - your reader only really needs to know what your MC or viewpoint character or characters know.

My fantasy is from the POV of a naive teen so I was able to get away with just showing a lot of things and not really explaining them too much.

Once! said:

We have a big problem when we write science fiction and fantasy, or at least we think we do. We are writing about a world which is, by definition, different to the real world. So we feel a need to explain those differences. Several mechanisms have been tried - the prologue, the exposition character, the prophecy, the young apprentice being taught the mysteries by an older master, two characters explaining things to each other that they really ought to know...

Well, yes, but ... every writer invents worlds, or at the very least invents characters. Every time we introduce a new character into a story we need to tell the reader who this character is. Backstory. Lineage. Personality. It would be awfully clunky if we explained all our characters before we meet them. Instead we (usually) allow characters to introduce themselves. We don't tell the reader that Ethelraed is brave - we show him fighting a monster.

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To expand on this: Imagine you are a present day American reading a book set in present day Saudi Arabia. Or a present day Englishman reading a book set in Mughal India. Or a present day Japanese person reading a book set in ancient Mesopotamia.

In all these cases, the writer is effectively asking the reader to step into a world as different from the one they are used to as any fantasy or sci-fi land.

And generally, most readers are able to cope with this. They can get their heads around The Three Musketeers without necessarily needing the wikipedia page for "Musketeers of the Guard" bolted onto the front.

Pretty much any good setting, real or imagined, will exist in some kind of complicated historical context which one could follow back and back and back into the beginning of time. So no matter how much you explain, there's going to be a bit before that you could maybe stand to explain as well. Writers tend to be more interested in world-building information than the majority of readers, especially sci-fi and fantasy fans, because coming up with world-building embellishments is what we do. But most readers are able to get by with surprisingly little information, provided the emotional stakes and the personalities of the main characters are clear.

Which isn't to say that there aren't good prologues which do good world building. But often, these prologues are as much about setting an evocative tone and creating an atmosphere as they are about actually providing information. For instance, the prologue to Robert Reed's Marrow provides the backstory of the Great Ship and its scavenger passengers, but it does so from the perspective of the Great Ship itself. As the only part of the story told from the Ship's perspective, it has a lyrical, faintly ominous tone which lends an interesting undercurrent to the rest of the book.

That's not a prologue, it's an infodump. If you're CJ Cherryh, you can get away with that. If you're not, you probably can't.

A prologue conveys something important to the story that's still not included after the whole rest of the book is complete, and has nowhere to go within the story. This is why I insist that prologues should be written LAST. Prologues are not there to introduce us to anything; that notion is possibly why so many people skip them (I don't, but I read everything).

By all means do write an appendix (or a whole series of 'em) -- a scholarly article about your created world, its culture, language, peoples, magic, environment, whatever. Use it as your Story Bible; include it for readers who are interested (me, I read any appendices first). But as far as possible, work the same info into the story so it happens naturally.

Let me repeat Kalli's excellent insight:

No one ever reads the manual. They just want to dive in and figure the damn thing out for themselves.

We want to read stories, not manuals.

Reziac said:

That's not a prologue, it's an infodump. If you're CJ Cherryh, you can get away with that. If you're not, you probably can't.

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And she doesn't do this in her more recent novels either. If there's a prologue now, she writes it as a scene that happens before the main story to establish context, not as telly history.

I think there was a time when it was more fashionable to have world building information in a prologue for SF and F. There were different ways of doing it. Asimov had his Encyclopedia Galactica entries at the beginnings of some chapters, for instance, which presented it in short, intriguing chunks, while other writers simply had history excerpts (McCaffrey did this with her Pern books too). But I haven't read a newer novel that does that type of prologue. Maybe some still exist, and I'm just not reading them because they're not my taste? But all the prologues I've read lately (as in, books published in the past ten years or so) that have prologues (and many don't) have them written as scenes written where there is action, dialog, characters and so on, not a distant summary of past events.

I can only think of one infodump style prologue in anything I've read that was published in the last ten years, and that was in Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. It worked, though, because it was actually interesting, and it was really short.

rwm4768 said:

I can only think of one infodump style prologue in anything I've read that was published in the last ten years, and that was in Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. It worked, though, because it was actually interesting, and it was really short.

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Haha, not to mention most of books he's written, which is fine by me. He's got a license for rule breaking by this point.

shortstorymachinist said:

Haha, not to mention most of books he's written, which is fine by me. He's got a license for rule breaking by this point.

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His other prologues aren't really the infodump style. They show scenes from the past. Only Elantris has the infodump prologue, and ironically enough, that was his first published book.

When I'm talking about infodumps, I'm referring to prologues like David Eddings used in the Belgariad. It's like you're reading a textbook of the world's history.

I never mind prologues.

According to agents, they're a tricky thing to write and should be necessary to the story. I used to have a prologue, but then I did away with it because I didn't want to offput agents and because I realized it wasn't that necessary.

Maxinquaye said:

Many new writers want to write prologues because they want to do an info-dump.

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And many new or aspiring Fantasy writers want to write prologues because they think every Fantasy novel needs to have one.

caw

blacbird said:

And many new or aspiring Fantasy writers want to write prologues because they think every Fantasy novel needs to have one.

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It was kind of a style thing, for sure -- in the early days every Fantasy book I picked up had one, as did a lot of SF. What the rest of the world was doing, I dunno.

LeftyWriter said:

So, I have a quick question. In fantasy, do you like it when there is a Prologue/Intro at the beginning to explain how the world works and what happened in the past that made the world the way it is today so that you get a general understanding of what this world is like, how it works up front and so you know what you're getting yourself into, or do you like it when it's left vague and you slowly learn about stuff, albeit being slightly confused until the info in revealed throughout the story? Thanks!

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Real prologues are good and wonderful things, necessary to set up the current story. What you're describing, however, doesn't sound like a prologue at all. A prologue, a real prologue, is story, just as action packed as chapter one. It is not an info dump, and it is not something you use because you don't know how to get information about the world across quickly in the opening chapters.

I hate prologues. The only situation in which I don't mind prologues are when they are incredibly short, as in less than two pages. Three is pushing it. Anything more is unnecessary, and makes it read more boring and drawn-out than a George Martin novel.

LeftyWriter said:

See, in my story. It takes place in the future but electricity doesn't work anymore so people have had to revert back to horse drawn carriages and living in villages in stuff. It feels sort of medieval in a way. I didn't want people to get confused because it takes place in the future but feels like the past. The prologue explains what happened and how the world works now, since it technically isn't in a fantasy world but our world.

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The Dark Tower and the Rojan Dizon books beginning with Fade to Black (written by an AW member, btw) both begin like this. Arguably, the story I am Legend does too. None of them have or need prologues.