What is a prologue?

[radraccoon]

What makes a prologue a prologue as opposed to just chapter 1?

 

[LunaSoltaer]

On mobile right now so quick synopsis:

A prologue is generally a lore dump or a story hook separated enough from the events of your book that you could really skip a prologue if you want and a lot of people do.

In short, a lot of readers expect chapter 1 to be an exciting immediate hook and a lot of writers want to set the stage before their characters tear it to shreds so simple, throw the setup in prologue and the boom in Ch1

 

[kokiboki]

What makes a prologue a prologue as opposed to just chapter 1?

A prologue is typically used to provide background information or to set the stage for the story, while chapter 1 is where the actual story begins. A prologue may contain information that is important to understanding the story and may introduce characters or events that influence the rest of the story, but it is not part of the main narrative. Additionally, a prologue is often set apart from the rest of the chapters, either by being labeled as such, or by having a different tone or style.

 

[LostLibrarian]

When you sell your story, you make a promise to the reader to reach something. Either a specific event, or a specific atmosphere, or a specific topic. The prologue would be background information that sets the stage. Or it could be "in media res" to use dramatic irony. Or it could be something that happens on the other side of the world that will affect the MC later on. It's a piece of information that enhances the promise of your blurb/synopsis/title/cover/etc.

In general, prologues are different in either time or place (and sometimes also POV) from your normal chapters.
And it's just there to hook the readers with either information or style you won't be able to display at the start but you want your reader to know so that they keep reading through the beginning.

And while it's true that a lot of people put the lore dump in the prologue, that shouldn't be its usage. No reader wants to start and read everything about the 82 gods and their 300 wars and bla bla bla. The goal of a prologue is to enhance the first experience of the reader in some way...

 

[greyblob]

a waste of time

 

[CapitaoCaverna]

A prologue is something that enhances your story, but isn't the start of it.

Basically, something that happens before the story trully starts.

It can be something that happened in the past and shaped the MC, something hapenning in a completely different location that shaped the world or something that will eventually affect the MC, making the readers interested in finding out how.

A lot of the times, authors don't know how to use prologues, making them simple info dumps or boring, but a good prologue is both interesting and very important for the story.

While a prologue can be from a different POV, that's kind of risky, since you start a story with a POV and, often, the reader may not enjoy the change to a different one, finding the main story's POV worst.

They may also have liked the MC, but got turned off by the prologue's POV and you lost a reader.

Think about the game and now TV series, "The Last of US" the start of that is a prologue and, after, there's a very large time jump.

The story itself starts years after the Zombie Apocalypse, but seeing what happens when it just started shapes the MC, it completely changes how one sees the rest of the story, making everything different and, dare I say, better.

If your prologue isn't intersting, has a very different tone than the Main Story or is told from a different POV, you may want to put it into a flashback or something.

Just consider how it will effect the story itself, will the prologue make it better or just dump a lot of information? If it's the latter, you may want to drop it or leave it for another time, try to weave it into the story and make it interesting instead.

Don't start a story with something boring or completely different in tone if it's not gonna make the story better in some way.

 

[avaseofpeonies]

When you sell your story, you make a promise to the reader to reach something. Either a specific event, or a specific atmosphere, or a specific topic. The prologue would be background information that sets the stage. Or it could be "in media res" to use dramatic irony. Or it could be something that happens on the other side of the world that will affect the MC later on. It's a piece of information that enhances the promise of your blurb/synopsis/title/cover/etc.

In general, prologues are different in either time or place (and sometimes also POV) from your normal chapters.
And it's just there to hook the readers with either information or style you won't be able to display at the start but you want your reader to know so that they keep reading through the beginning.

And while it's true that a lot of people put the lore dump in the prologue, that shouldn't be its usage. No reader wants to start and read everything about the 82 gods and their 300 wars and bla bla bla. The goal of a prologue is to enhance the first experience of the reader in some way...

All of this.

Examples of effective prologues include murder mysteries where the murder happens in a prologue, then ch. 1 introduces the MC detective, or monster of the week shows that open on said monster committing monstrosity before cutting to MC having a life before hearing about the hot monster in their area.

So the prologue should not involve the MC, but show an event that the MC will have to do something about later. Backstory and world-building can be folded into regular chapters.

 

[TotallyHuman]

Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics

 

[K5Rakitan]

This is what AI art spat out:

 

[Hanne]

prologue is your backup save.

if you screw up and forget to tell an important thing early in the story, rather than editing and bloating up chapter 1, you could use a prologue.

 

[ACertainPassingUser]

What makes a prologue a prologue as opposed to just chapter 1?

A good problem to have