That moment, the music screeched to a halt. There was an ungodly collision of brass, reed, and percussion—trombones and piccolos skidded into cacophony, a tuba farted, and the hollow clang of a cymbal wavered out of the big top, over our heads and into oblivion.

Grady froze, crouched over his burger with his pinkies extended and lips spread wide.
I looked from side to side. No one moved a muscle—all eyes were directed at the big top. A few wisps of hay swirled lazily across the hard dirt.

"What is it? What's going on?" I said.

"Shh," Grady hissed.

The band started up again, playing "Stars and Stripes Forever."

"Oh Christ. Oh shit!" Grady tossed his food onto the table and leapt up, knocking over the bench.

"What? What is it?" I yelled, because he was already running away from me.

"The Disaster March!" he screamed over his shoulder. - Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen

THE PROLOGUE

Clever Literary Device or Info Dump?

The etymology of the word prologue is composed of two elements: pro (which means before) and logos (which means discourse or speech). A prologue is a separate introductory passage that comes before the main body of a poem, novel or play, and gives some sense of what is to come.

At its essence, the prologue introduces important information, such as background details or characters which have some connection to the main story, but whose relevance is not immediately obvious. There is much debate around prologues. Some readers are okay with them, while some will bypass them simply on principle. But most will agree that a prologue must be executed with skill or not at all.

To Prologue or Not To Prologue?

The first pages of a book are some of the most critical. It's important to hook your readers and ground them in the premise of your story long enough to care. If we bounce them backward, introducing cast members that might only make that one appearance, we need to do it carefully or our readers could become confused or disinterested. Let's look at some reasons you might want to include a prologue.

◾Boom! There it is: Throwing the reader into the action has the best chance of hooking them. Maybe it's the center of a bloody battlefield, or twisted in the sheets of an illicit love affair. Whatever it is, the reader is dropped into the action, setting up the promise of what's to come.

◾One shot POV: Sometimes it works to write a prologue from the POV of a character who doesn't have a POV in the story, like the antagonist. This could provide backstory and motive that either humanizes the character or exposes their evil intentions. Similarly, the prologue could also come from a character who doesn't play a role in the story at all. Perhaps, a long dead king who suffered from mental illness and passed the trait onto his kin.

◾A different time or place: Recounting a significant event that occured years before the story takes place, perhaps in another location, that shapes the story or the protagonist.

◾Central intelligence: A prologue can be used to convey a religion, a technology, or a philosophy within the protagonist's world that is central to the story and critical to the reader's comprehension.

Types of Prologues

🎬 The Teaser: In films, teaser trailers focus mostly on raw emotional appeal. They offer short snippets of plot without much context, enticing the audience to see the movie. Twilight by Stephanie Meyers offers a good example of a teaser prologue:

I'd never given much thought to how I would die — though I'd had reason enough in the last few months — but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.

I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me.

We don't get a lot of context, but the passage makes emotional (maybe even thematic) promises to the reader of what will be included in the story.

🎬 Theatrical: Different from the Teaser prologue, which preys on the reader's emotions, a theatrical prologue conveys the basic plot of the story through a clear and chronological setup. The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater provides us an example in this opening line:

Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she'd been told she'd kill her true love.

The prologue goes on to introduce us to the sorts of magic the book includes, which continues to come back to the same topic: If Blue kisses her true love, he will die. This gives us a sense of what this book series will be about.

🎬 Dual Openings: Some opening chapters make different promises to the readers than later chapters. In this case, a prologue can be used to offer a glimpse of what is to come.

The Greatest Showman starts with Barnum being a child. He doesn't even come up with the circus until a third into the movie. The opening (or prologue) offers the audience a glimpse of what they came to see - the circus, as well as the personal conflicts Barnum faces.

Use this prologue when some of the powerful appeal doesn't appear until later in the story. That way, readers get a glimpse right out of the gate.

🎬 A Different Viewpoint: For some stories, the reader would benefit from information or a perspective that the protagonist cannot give. In City of Ember, the characters don't have access to what the builders of the city knew. So the prologue is used to convey that:

When the city of Ember was just built and not yet inhabited, the Chief Builder and the Assistant Builder, both of them weary, sat down to speak of the future.

"They must not leave the city for at least two hundred years," said the Chief Builder. "Or perhaps two hundred and twenty."

"Is that long enough?" asked his Assistant.

"It should be. We can't know for sure."

Here, information and context is given to the reader that the main characters don't have.

🎬 Out of Time: When you need to include scenes that take place during a different time than the rest of the novel or is out of sequence with the rest of the story, a prologue can be used to provide context or foreshadowing. Usually this means that the prologue takes place in the past, but it can also mean future. And it may or may not have the same viewpoint character.

While it's not a prologue, the first chapter of Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone is a good example. The entire chapter takes place about a decade before the rest of the story, when Harry is a baby, and it is given in other viewpoints. It's out of sync with the rest of the novel and we don't meet Harry until the end. Perhaps, it was pitched to the publishers as a prologue, but the editors decided it would be better to disguise it as chapter one.

Prologue Do's and Don'ts

If you're trying to decide if you need a prologue, here are some do's and don'ts for pulling it off successfully.

Do Foreshadow. A prologue should foretell what the reader can expect from the story, be it a type of plot, the motives of a character, the mood or theme, or setting up the world.

Do Consider the Genre. Prologues are more common in some genres than others. You're likely to find an author using a prologue in a thriller, sci-fi, or fantasy novel as a device for setting up a complex story.

Do Keep it Short. You don't want to wait too long before launching into the main story and the hook. If readers become too invested in the prologue, they might feel jolted out when the story switches gears.

Do Provide Clarity. Prologues can be used effectively if the reader needs to know something about a character or their world in order to avoid confusion when the story begins.

Don't Use the Prologue as an Info Dump. This cannot be stated enough. If you realize the only reason you've chosen to write a prologue is to dump a bunch of information on your reader, it's time to rethink the reason for the prologue. It might be better to distribute the information throughout the story.

Don't Feed Readers False Information. Often called 'bait and switch', you don't want to write a prologue that sets up certain expectations then doesn't meet those expectations in the rest of the book.

Don't Include the Main Hook in the Prologue. Remember, some readers skip the prologue altogether. Even if you include a hook in the prologue, the story's main hook belongs in the first chapter or close to it.

📌REMINDER: The best advice to remember when including a prologue is to make it captivating - a scene as strong as any in your novel. Your prologue becomes your opener, carrying with it all the importance of the first chapter. This is not the place for narrative summary. Grab readers with an evocative scene that forces them to keep turning pages.