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Death to All Prologues

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I’ve been hearing all of the agents and editors talk about how much they hate prologues.Why did I care? Well, my WIP has a prologue.

I couldn’t imagine how my story would work without that preamble, so I kept it. I thought about calling it Chapter 1 so the entire prologue problem would be avoided. I mean, the events in the prologue take place only five days before the events in the main novel. Chapter 2 can just begin with italic text: Five days later… Right?

Then, at the Willamette Writers Conference, Charlotte Cook led attendees through the first page of potential submissions. She described everything that she doesn’t like about prologues, and dammit, all of those elements described my stupid prologue. Whether I called it Prologue or Chapter 1, it had everything Cook said was wrong with prologues.

So, finally, someone convinced me of the evils of prologues. What was I going to do now? The central crime of my novel is described in the prologue. Would the rest of the story even work without that?

I’m still working on that, but I’ve come up with some ideas that I hope will elevate the tension and make the novel better in the long run.

The lesson here is not just that agents and editors (and ultimately readers) are anti-prologue. The real lesson is that sometimes we can’t allow our love for our prose to blind us to what our stories need.

You may love the names you selected for your characters, but you may find that they are too similar and your readers are confused. Unless you intend to follow every copy of your published novel to their new homes to explain that Lisa and Lauren are not the same person, well, you better change at least one of the names. (Yes, this, too, is an example from my WIP.)

You may absolutely adore a character who your beta readers find extraneous and stupid. Your story may be better if you completely expunge that character from it.

And, yes, you may love your 3,500-word prologue so much that you would marry it, but if your readers will just skip over it so they can get to what they perceive as the actual story, you are doing your novel a disservice by keeping it.

Ultimately, you may have to kill your darlings to save your story. And that’s okay.

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