Questions tagged [prologues]
This tag should be used for questions about a prologue in a written piece of work. A prologue, like an epilogue, is a section of a book that stands outside the narrative, as a kind of commentary or supplementary addition. For questions about the beginning of a book, use [openings]. Also see [epilogue].
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Prologues with no protagonist - How can they work?
It is my understanding that novels should generally start right off with the protagonist. The story is about the protagonist, after all, not something else (This obviously changes a bit if the PoV is ...
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I'm writing a prologue from the POV of a non-English-speaking character. How should I write the dialogue?
Picturing this in movie form would be easy. I would have the character speak their native language in the scene and place subtitles. But I do not have this luxury in writing.
It would be weird to ...
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When is a prologue useful?
Prologues tend to get a bad rap on the internet, and sometimes for good reason. They're often used by as an excuse to start a novel with an info-dump. However, it seems to me that people often ...
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How long can a prologue be, and what should you not do?
A while back I wrote a prologue about the beginning of time and space and all that. One thing I noticed later is that between the prologue and the story itself, the prologue ate out the chapters not ...
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Flash-forward as Prologue and then Flashbacks too complicated?
Chronologically, the story begins with the protagonist as a child and description of her world, which is important to the plot.
Since I thought "girl abandoned by parents meets a man who explains how ...
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Translating worldbuilding into an interesting opening
I've once heard there are 2 types of writers, and I am definitively an architect. I can write down a few hundred pages of worldbuilding and characters, but I scrap most of my stories after the first ...
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Should I make my prologue chapter 1?
My prologue is set 17 years before the main story arc. I am reflecting on the discussion here, which was asked by another SE contributor. I'm trying to decide what to do with my prologue. Building a ...
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Is This a Bad Infodump?
I’m kind of in a dilemma. If I was to write a prologue to a fantasy story about the history of the kingdom and the political scope of what is happening there, is it necessarily a bad infodump? All of ...
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Elmore Leonard said Avoid Prologues... Why?
I've just spent the better half of a month writing and perfecting my prologue. It sets the tone for the rest of the story with an event which kickstarts the main narrative of the book.
Why should I ...
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My protagonist being needed for my story is a life changing event, does that mean the event needs to be in my story?
My protagonist is a first-generation native on a colony world. The general culture of the colony makes it clear that everyone must contribute to the colony in a meaningful way. But instead of ...
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What's the most natural way to show a passage of time between the prologue and chapter one?
In my current novel, the protagonist is driven forward throughout the plot by events that happened to him in the past. The reader needs to know these events, so I'd like to include them in a prologue. ...