I’m a huge fan of PBS mysteries (though when they’re on late in the evening, I’ve been known to very frustratingly fall asleep shortly before the reveal of the whodunit!).  One thing I learned quite some time ago is never to miss the short scene that appears before the opening credits.  If I have to run in and out doing chores or work on fixing dinner while watching my show, I wait until after that opening.  Why?  Because that scene nearly always reveals significant details, either about the murder being investigated in the episode, or something that happened years earlier that’s crucial to understanding the crime.

It occurred to me recently that prologues in fiction can be just the same.  However, there exists a surprisingly widespread prejudice against prologues, with many people saying they skim them or skip them, and perhaps come back and read them only after they reach the end of the book—or never read them at all.  The explanation usually given for this is that many prologues are badly done ‘infodumps’ or scenes that attempt to hook the reader in a gimmicky way.  But a badly written prologue is almost invariably part of a badly written book, so why should the poor prologue take the blame?

Ironically, I first became aware of the extent of this prejudice (via a writer’s forum) shortly after I had written the prologue for The Heart of Elebfar.  (That story didn’t initially have a prologue, but the idea came to me as part of a fairly substantial restructuring of the plot of the novel.)  I was not amused; here I had just written this prologue—which I knew from the beginning was one of those special gifts from the muse (I dubbed it the T.A.P. for ‘Totally Awesome Prologue’)—only to see a bunch of folks on the forum saying that most prologues are lousy and they don’t read them, and talking about how much literary agents and editors hate them.

Since it’s been a while and I still haven’t come across any reason for ‘prologue prejudice’ that holds up under further scrutiny, I’m not that worried about it now.  And of course I am absolutely not taking that prologue out—not for love nor money.  (There would be no place else in the novel to put it, and it wouldn’t work as a standalone short story.)  What’s more, I’ve come to the realization that the T.A.P. is very much like those opening scenes in mystery programs.  

Perhaps because I’m very visual, I’ve always loved to picture my stories as films.  That’s why it surprised me when I read Le Guin’s essay titled “Working on the ‘Lathe‘” about the filming of The Lathe of Heaven; she said that when the filmmaker asked her to select one of her books to turn into a movie, she picked Lathe because it was the only one she’d “ever enjoyed imagining as a film”.  (I was puzzled to see that in an interview many years later, Le Guin said the filmmaker had picked Lathe himself, prompting her to say, “How are you going to do that?!”  Most likely the essay—written soon after the experience—has the accurate version of the tale; she was elderly at the time of that interview, so perhaps she misremembered who said what during the discussions that must have gone on between them regarding the difficulties of conveying all that happens in that story in a TV film with a small budget.)

But the key point is that when I visualize T.H.O.E as a movie, the prologue becomes that significant short scene before the opening credits—which some full-length films also have.  After that scene, the credits begin while the camera pans over the intricately carved door that we see at the beginning of chapter one.  Near the end of the opening credits, the camera zooms backwards, showing the house the door is on, the cliff the house is on, and then the landscape around it, before panning back in to show the figure of our young hero on the hillside, coming closer until he fills the screen as the credits end and the film begins.

In the opening page of the first chapter, I exactly mirror this cinematic approach. I’d like to think that even in the medium of a novel, the resulting way the scene unfolds is effective. As it seems to successfully convey that imaginary film opening, I’d say it accomplishes what I was going for.  It also seems appropriate because the story takes place on an exotic world with no human characters, so seeing where we are is important, and the book being written in the omniscient POV means we have the scope that allows the reader to see that larger scene, not just what the characters themselves are experiencing. 

As for the novel’s prologue, while it would certainly make an intense opening scene in a movie, I’m confident that in written form it’s also very powerful.  It’s something readers would definitely not want to skip—and it contains elements that are important to the entire novel.  So l would suggest that anyone out there who habitually avoids reading prologues might want to rethink their reasons for doing so. 😊