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Fantasy with Friends: Prologues?

Briana and Krysta at Pages Unbound are hosting a fantasy discussion meme this year called Fantasy with Friends. Since fantasy is my favorite genre, I thought it would be fun to take part. This week, their question is:

There has been ongoing discussion on social media about whether readers actually read or enjoy prologues. Do you think prologues add value to a story, or do you wish the story just started with chapter one? Are there good and bad ways for an author to utilize a prologue in a fantasy novel?

Honestly, there’s a bit of a debate on prologues in the publishing world, too. Should authors include them? Do they add anything? Will it be jarring when readers get to Chapter 1? Is there something in the prologue that’s necessary for understanding Chapter 1, or can it be shifted to some other point in the story? Ultimately, I tend to not write prologues because I kind of like to start in on the action right away. If I have to spend forever writing the boring stuff to get to the good stuff, I’ll never get there because I’ll be bored.

As a reader, my opinion is only slightly different. I don’t mind prologues. The Wheel of Time books, in my opinion, did prologues very well. They featured very minor characters or something that occurred before the whole story started, but I liked them because they eased me back into the story and the world, and they helped reorient me.

When prologues are done well, when Chapter 1 isn’t made to sound jarring after it, when it adds something to the story, I love prologues. Having a prologue just to have one, though? No, thanks. I love it when there’s some nugget in the prologue that becomes important later on but there’s no other good place to put it. I usually find this in mysteries, which can be fun when the prologue is from the culprit’s point of view. My favorite cozy mystery series does this, and it just catapults me into the first chapter.

I have, perhaps, a different approach to prologues in fantasy as both a reader and writer of fantasy.

As a very novice writer way back in my teens, when I was also reading a lot of 80s and 90s adult fantasy in an age of limited Internet and no such thing as review sites that I, as a child, would be allowed to access by my parents (if there were any. This was over 20 years ago now), I tended to write prologues. But mostly just to get a lot of world building out of the way. I can’t remember if there were any books I read that did that, but it made sense in my teen brain. Why not write an entire prologue that documents the history of the world or explains the magic? Then I can get to the juicy parts of the story and all the miserable things I was going to put my characters through. Eventually, I realized this was stupid and wouldn’t ever get published. So I stopped, learned how to weave things together, and never really looked back. As a writer, I don’t see the point of a prologue. I’d rather utilize memories and flashbacks or interstitials.

On the other hand, as a reader, as long as the prologue is useful and only adds something important that the story would lose without it do I think they should be included. In fantasy, I don’t think I actually see it too often. At least, the books I’ve picked up lately haven’t usually held one.

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