Tag Info

I think that a properly used prologue can be an incredibly powerful tool. The Wheel of Time series begins with a prologue for every book - some of them are great, some you pretty much just have to plow through as fast as possible to get to the main story (they're info-dumps). However, I think that the best prologue I've ever read is for The Eye of the World ...

I would use a prologue when: trying to bring up to speed readers who haven't read previous books in a series, while staying out of the way of the real beginning of the book for those who have been following the series all along offering context that would be of most interest on second and subsequent readings, but not important to the sort of surface ...

Say you write a story about an employee of Best Buy who accidentally kills his girlfriend by pushing her off a cliff whilst the two of them are dancing about like idiots stoned out of their gourd. Would you really expect Best Buy to sue you because you painted a picture of a Best Buy employee getting stoned and committing manslaughter? The disclaimer is ...

One Monkey and Shan are right, that there are tons of novels/movies where entities like the CIA are the bad guys. Unlikely that someone will sue you, or even can. Right of free expression and stuff like that. But, because both gave the advice "write what you like and only care about the individuals", I have to step in. That could be bad advice. Especially ...

Most big organisations like the CIA, NSA, if they were to sue anyone who wrote anything bad about them, would have to spend their entire yearly budget every month just suing people. Besides, in a democracy, they can't really silence you unless you are writing something that affects national security, and in many cases, not even then. As @One Monkey mentions, ...

Prologues are all about "laying pipe:" explaining the back story and how the novel's world works. However, if you read agents' blogs, you can see that agents are very anti-prologue these days, so I always advise writers to get right into the story and reveal back story and rules of the world slowly, over time. Of course this is easier said than done. ...