Fixed

if your prologue is more like a short chapter than treat it as a chapter and call it chapter one
otherwise if it is an info dump then call it a prologue but it better be interesting otherwise I'll skip it

__________________
You've just been Fixed

kenewbie

Prologues have a use in my opinion. Off the top of my head, consider a story set in a future police state:

<begin pulp>
Prologue

2001. On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. The hijackers crashed two of the airliners into the World Trade Center in New York City. 3000 people where killed.

2001. September 20th. The United States Homeland Security Department (HSD) is established to coordinate security efforts.

2007. January 1st. Eight terrorists break into the Vancouver, Washington water reservoir and add recin to the water through the central refinery. 1000 people are killed, 25.000 hospitalized. The HSD are widely criticized.

2007. January 3rd. A Bill is passed that gives the HSD unlimited access to gather information about the United States Citizens. Civil right groups are in an uproar.

2007. January 20th. The HSD foil a coordinated attempt to release a military grade strain of the ebola virus in all major american cities. Hezbollah is thought responsible. The information that led to the breakthrough was gathered using previously illegal wiretaps. The The civil right movements loose support.

2009. March 15th. A group of 5 "Americans sympathetic to Hezbollah" is killed during a HSD raid in Los Angeles. HSD release information that prove the people in question to be Hezbollahs main source of information.

2009. December 30th. A story breaks simultaniously in The New York Times and Washington Post claiming that the americans killed on March 15th was infact a Civil rights group with previously unreleased information about HSD involvement in the hezbollah attack.

2009. December 31th. Civil unrest break out in all major american cities.

2010. January 1st. 60 Minutes feature footage of civil protestors at the US senate clashing with the police. 2 people are killed.

2010. January 3rd. In spite of assurences by the administration, civil unrest escalate.

2010. January 4th. Marshal Law is declared.

</end pulp>

(Please excuse the grammar et al, I'm norwegian and dont really write in english.)

I have no objection to people writing something like that. It sets the mood for the story quickly and allows for tie-ins with characters (que "my mother was killed in the december 30th assasinations" and other cheap ways to give a character some "background"). It establishes a lot of things right away and lets you focus on your story, rather than your stage.

k

Aguirre

In my opinion, I don't understand why prologues simply can't be Chapter 1.

Fixed

I'm sorry but this is an appendix/glossary and not a prologue, so if it was in a book this is what I would call it

__________________
You've just been Fixed

kenewbie

Huh? A glossary is a list of terms which are not commond knowledge for the intended audience. An appendix follows after the main text and is generally used for reference material.

How can you call that anything but a prologue?

k

Hero

The first prologue I wrote isn't something I'm too proud of, as it contains blech and blah with barely any character develpment or information. It's also relaly short.

The second one is the one for Silvestrue that I posted up here. It's amazingly long (In my oppinion, 14 pages in word seems a bit much) but reveals information in little tidbits through conversation and narration, while it doesn't really rotate on truly informing the reader and plays out more as a first chapter that merely takes place a bit longer before the rest of the chapters (save for the last section of the prologue).

If people really skip over a prologue, I really don't understand why (unless in their experience preludes are, as said, long, boring and just information with nothing else,) people would consider them as a writer's weakness or skippable. I feel a prologue is neccesary for a style of writing, not neccesary but it sometimes just feels right to give the reader a backstory on what the world is and how it came to be. If you skip that and read the first chapter, its like you've gone into a war with a feather. For instance, my Silvestrue prologue contains a key piece that if skipped over would seem odd if you went on to chapter 2 (where the prologue leaves off, chapter one is like intermission).

I don't understand prologues all to well, though, I've written them only twice with the first being not too hot and the second being a hell of an improvement.

__________________