 |
| What is past is prologue. -- William Shakespeare |
The first chapter of my WIP
isn’t the first chapter at all. It turned
out to be a prologue instead. The first
2,153 words account for events that happened 42 years before the protagonist
enters the scene in chapter one. Most of
the advice given to unpublished writers is to omit the prologue if we want to
avoid the slush pile. The mere mention
of the slush pile evokes shivers in most writers, me included.
From what I understand,
prologues have gone “out of style”, and to write one now-a-days is just as bad
as using clichés. One of the reasons is
that the information given in the prologue can just as easily be incorporated
into the story. Another reason is that writers
who use them only do so as a form of padding to add word count, and when
removed do not affect the story at all.
The genre I’m working with
is Fantasy and it’s important to explain what happened in the past, so that it’s
clear to the reader why the protagonist experiences certain events in her
timeline. Although still viewed critically
by agents, rules over prologues are a bit more relaxed in the Fantasy and
Science Fiction genres. Agents and
publishers understand that with all the world building taking place, which of
course differs so greatly from our reality, readers would get lost without
proper explanation.
Even so, I’ve been rethinking
my prologue and trying to find ways of cutting it out, by having another
character explain the back story in dialogue.
But it’s not so easy to do without the information dump being an obvious
information dump. The prologue does
provide a lot of background info that is definitely important to the story but
it’s not all of it. I already planned on
having a character provide the extra info and if I were to cut out the prologue
that would be too much info dumping.
I’m
still working on my first draft so I have some time to decide whether to cut
out the prologue or not. But I’m really
attached to it, so I hope it survives the re-write.