Should your novel have a prologue?

Until I started doing development editing, I didn’t fully understand how many feelings people have about prologues. Agents have feelings! Readers have feelings! Writers most definitely have feelings!

As a freelance editor, my job is to provide advice; it is the job of the authors I work with to decide whether or not to take it. To help you make that decision, let’s walk through the benefits and drawbacks of prologues in general and then turn to this month’s Novel Study book, N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, to analyze one prologue in detail.

Problems with prologues

Let’s start with the potential weaknesses of prologues. I think the biggest is that they often slow down the start of the book and prevent readers from becoming immediately engaged with your protagonist and encountering the all-important plot hook that will make them keep reading.

This is a particular problem for first-in-series books from debut authors. You are asking readers to commit hours of their attention to your series. If you’ve managed to win their attention through your book description or a recommendation or savvy marketing, you want to make sure that your first pages deliver on what the book promises.

Authors often want to include a prologue that is set long before the main action of the book and/or is told from the point of view of a character who isn’t one of the main point-of-view characters of the book. Prologues like these often contain backstory information that is important for understanding the motivations or challenges of the protagonist. The problem isn’t with the material itself, usually, but with its placement. It’s often better to introduce us to your protagonist first and show us the problem they are going to have to solve over the course of the narrative and then deliver this backstory element, but from that character’s perspective. In other words, deliver the what before the why. If you start with the why, you require readers to carry that material forward with them into the narrative until they can make sense of it.

These kinds of prologues are very tempting! If you are working with a point-of-view character that isn’t going to feature in your main narrative, this might feel (rightly!) like the only place you can get readers into that character’s head. That backstory character is like a siren for authors, pleading for their feelings to have a chance to shine, for their motivations to be revealed. In many cases, exploring this material can help you fully understand your story world and your characters, and yet often it’s better to put the material aside and consider it as exploratory writing rather than part of your final manuscript.

Another reason authors might start with a prologue is to introduce readers to a broader conflict or theme that undergirds the book or perhaps even carries across an entire multi-book series. This strategy can often be successful, especially for books in action-oriented genres. For example, George R. R. Martin starts the Game of Thrones series with a scene featuring the white walkers, introducing the “winter is coming” element that drives the big-picture conflicts across the series as a whole. And Jemisin, as we’ll see, does the same in The City We Became.

Both writers, however, are careful to inject plenty of suspense and action into their prologues. If a prologue in a manuscript isn’t working, it’s often because it’s big on atmospherics and lacking in drama. Authors often want to offer up small clues but hold back bigger revelations until later in the narrative. That’s often the right choice for the main plot but, again, can make for a prologue that is static and slow. It can be hard for an author who has been living with this story world for months or years to judge how a reader will process the information given to them in a prologue. What seems to you like a bright flashing beacon of a clue might be forgotten immediately by a reader who is looking for a character to latch onto.

Possibilities of prologues

Let’s turn now to a closer look at a prologue that works and find out why and how it functions. In my last post, I talked about the questions Jemisin’s title opens up: Who is the “we” and how does a city “become”? Her prologue answers the second question and partially answers the first. By the end of the prologue we understand the underlying premise of the whole series: that great cities are literally alive. After centuries of gestation they have a chance to be born as an entity with agency and power, but that moment of birth is also a time of great vulnerability as “the Enemy” is waiting to attack. (The prologue also answers a smaller question raised by the illustration we looked at in our last post: New Orleans and Port au Prince are crossed off because they have been stillborn, defeated by the Enemy before they had a real chance to thrive.)

Jemisin, however, dramatizes this premise in her prologue. In other words, she shows it rather than tells it. The point-of-view character of the prologue turns out to be the avatar of New York City—a role that he himself doesn’t know he inhabits at the beginning of the prologue. Readers are along for the ride as he learns what this means and confronts the Enemy’s initial attacks.

The prologue as a whole operates as a story, with a beginning, middle, and end—in fact, it initially appeared as a standalone short story on Tor.com. We see the avatar, a young Black street kid, at first ignore the call to action presented to him by his guide Paulo (the avatar of São Paulo, the last city to have been born) until his instincts teach him that he is indeed part of something bigger.

We watch him run from the Enemy (personified here by two cops that merge into one “Mega Cop”) and defeat its first attack by leading it into the traffic of the FDR drive, nimbly navigating through the cars, letting the city to do the work of smashing the creature to smithereens. Right after that dramatic battle comes the labor scene as the avatar both births the city and becomes one with it, then immediately re-engages with the Enemy and seems to defeat it with his newfound power. Paulo arrives to congratulate him, to admire “all the bright light and bluster” of the city and its avatar.

In the short story version, we then jump forward in time fifty years and see New York’s avatar in LA, preparing to assist with that city’s birth just as Paulo did for him. But—and this is a crucial but!—in the novel version we instead get dropped off a new roller-coaster of suspense, sending us hurtling into the novel proper. These are the last words of the prologue:

I live the city. It thrives and it is mine. I am its worthy avatar, and together? We will

never be

afr—

oh shit

something’s wrong.

This brief snippet gives you a sense of another attraction of this prologue: Jemisin pulls out all the stops when it comes to the writing. The avatar channels the voice of New York: sharp, informal, profane, funny. Here, for example, is how our narrator delivers the underlying premise of the whole series:

This is the lesson: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.

Duh, right? Everyone who’s visited a real city feels that, one way or another. All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like… like black holes, maybe. Yeah. (I go to museums sometimes. They’re cool inside, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is hot.)

I’m going to talk more about voice in future posts, but this passage is a good example of what people mean when they use the term. The rhythms of the sentence, the word choices, the references all feel distinctive. The avatar also has a different register—one that is lyrical and metaphorical, deliberately evoking Walt Whitman’s great poem “I Sing the Body Electric” in the very first line of the prologue, “I sing the city,” which is echoed in later lines—“I paint the city” and “I run the city” and, finally, after the birth, “I live the city.”

Let’s also admire and enjoy the way Jemisin uses stream-of-consciousness narration to bring us right into the climactic moment when the avatar defeats the Mega Cop:

Behind me, the Mega Cop utters a wet, tumid hough, like it’s clearing its throat for swallowing. I go

over the barrier and through the grass into fucking hell I go one lane silver car two lanes horns horns horns three lanes SEMI WHAT’S A FUCKING SEMI DOING ON THE FDR IT’S TOO TALL YOU STUPID UPSTATE HICK screaming four lanes GREEN TAXI screaming Smart Car hahaha cute five lanes moving truck six lanes and the blue Lexus actually brushes up against my clothes as it blares past screaming screaming screaming

screaming

screaming metal and tires as reality stretches, and nothing stops for the Mega Cop; it does not belong here and the FDR is an artery, vital with the movement of nutrients and strength and attitude and adrenaline, the cars are white blood cells and the thing is an irritant, an infection, an invader to whom the city gives no consideration and no quarter

screaming, as the Mega Cop is torn to pieces by the semi and the taxi and the Lexus and even that adorable Smart Car, which actually swerves a little to run over an extra-wiggly piece.

Do you see how the repeated word “screaming” anchors the sections of the passage and keeps us oriented amidst the deluge of details and metaphors?

In future posts, I’ll dive further into this rich novel, paying attention to how Jemisin controls suspense in her plot and how she manages multiple points-of-view. But let’s sum up what we’ve learned about prologues in our analysis thus far.

Takeaways

Questions to ask yourself if you’ve included a prologue in your manuscript:

• Does your prologue introduce backstory that will be more effectively introduced after your readers have met your point-of-view characters and understood their conflict?

• Does your prologue center on a character that will be less attractive to readers than your main point-of-view characters? (Ask the same question of setting.)

• Does your prologue introduce a larger conflict that is going to carry across an entire series? If so, can you introduce this conflict just as effectively through your initial point-of-view character?

• Is your prologue suspenseful? Does it introduce one or more story questions that will pull readers into the story?

• If you had to get rid of your prologue, how else could you convey the material within the framework of your novel? Even if you are sure that your prologue is necessary, it’s worth considering an alternate strategy.

• Similarly, if your prologue had to center a different moment in your story world, what would you choose?

If, after working through these questions, you’ve decided to remove your prologue from your manuscript, what can you do with the material? First, look for places where you can work the best details into the main strand of the plot. Can it become backstory? Can a character discuss the events of the prologue with another character, in a way that has emotional charge and relevance to the primary plot? Second, save the original prologue as a reader bonus or extra you can feature on your website or include in a blog post or newsletter. Readers who become fans love seeing cut scenes of this sort, especially if they are from the point of view of a character not featured in the novel itself.