Anonymous asked:
Hiii, could you help me with how to write an interesting and catchy prologue?

Prologues are boring for 3 reasons:

  1. Recitation of facts. The prologue is nothing more than a series of bland explanations of events that happened years upon years ago. 
  2. Not Relevant. The prologue is important to the story, but its importance is not revealed until much, much later in the story - at which point the audience has forgotten what the prologue contains and they don’t understand what’s going on. Some authors attempt to rectify this problem by using #3.
  3. Redundancy. Everything you explain in the prologue you also explain later in the story. 

Sooo here’s the fix for all three

  1. Give the prologue a plot arc. Beginning, middle, end. Tell a story. Hook the audience from the beginning by drawing them into the story within the first pages. Give the audience something they want to follow. A little story is enticing. The entire history of your conworld up to this point is not. Perhaps you could figure on one aspect of your conworld’s history or show what your character’s past was through a scene instead of a recitation.
  2. Relevance. Whatever information you have in your prologue should be relevant to the rest of your story as quickly as possible. If you’re going to tell a story that happened to your hero’s father twenty years ago, you need to bring that story back into the picture early in the story so the readers can link information from the prologue to the story overall.
  3. Skip the explanation. So you’ve explained that the hero’s sister illegally eloped with a Russian missing two front teeth because they were star-crossed lovers until this, this, and this happened, etc. etc. Anyway, you did that in the prologue. The hero never met his sister, but 128 pages later, you need to explain the hero’s sister’s story … which you already explained in extreme detail in the prologue. Don’t rehash everything. Make it short and sweet:

Ishmael explained what had happened to his sister all those years ago. At the end, he sat, shocked and awed, at his sister’s defiance.

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