Often your main character does not appear in your prologue. Think of it this way, you have an opportunity in a prologue to build suspense for the reader. The reader is privy to information that the main character doesn’t know.
Use a prologue to share something that’s important to the plot that happens before the meat of your story.
You can foreshadow something as well as make sure that the tone of your prologue matches your genre – thriller, mystery, romance, etc.
My favorite prologue is in Julie Czerneda’s Species Imperative book 1. Surival It’s two pages and it’s powerful.
In Julie Czerneda’s book, you see that something somewhere is destroying planets – melting the plants and animals and drinking it up and it’s hungry for more.
Then the story starts about a week later when a scientist is enlisted to help figure out what’s killing planets. No one knows, they assume it’s some type of weapon, but we the reader know that it’s something more organic than that and that it’s something that works quickly.
What you don’t want to do is use a prologue to info dump. If you’ve written an initial chapter of your book that spends the whole time explaining why things are the way they are you probably need to delete that chapter or copy it into your research files because it’s going to bore your reader.
Or take that chapter and intersperse the information throughout the story when the reader needs it.
I think that there’s a lot of argument over whether you should have a prologue because some authors will use it as an info dump. And if you can’t tell if it’s an info dump, give it to your review group to tell you where the real story starts.
I know often I’ll find that the real story doesn’t start for a few paragraphs or a chapter beyond where I actually have it start.
And, don’t feel bad if you have info dumped when writing a prologue. It’s pretty normal. I find myself doing that less and less as I recognize when I’m info dumping.
Show Notes:
Julie Czerneda’s Species Imperative #1 – Survival.
Find Amy Rivers book, Stumble and Fall here: