A great post on something I’ve been thinking about a lot.
Say hello to today’s guest blogger, Quincy Allen! You can find him here.
Don’t take this advice.
That’s the take-away you’ll have by the time you finish this blog. But you’ll have to read the whole thing to understand why you shouldn’t take this advice. It’s a sort of Catch-22, one that already has a smile on my face. Oh, and if you haven’t seen the movie or read the book Catch-22, stop what you’re doing right now and go absorb that data.
But I digress.
There isn’t a writer—aspiring or otherwise—who hasn’t been informed over and over again by sage experts about the dos and don’ts of writing. We’ve all heard them: “Avoid adverbs” (so sayeth the King); “Keep it under 100,000 words,” (so sayeth the publishers); “Never use a prologue,” (so sayeth the agents); “Third person omniscient is dead,” (so sayeth the critics).
In fact, in…
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disregard the prologue 
June 3rd, 2013 at 10:43 am
I really enjoyed that post, so thanks for the reblog here. I’ve also thought about the issues he brought up (especially the idea of prologues being bad–many established writers have those).
June 3rd, 2013 at 10:57 am
Yep. I understand the rule about avoiding the info-dump prologue; that just seems lazy in a lot of cases. But really, if chapter one is basically a prologue (different length, far in the past, slightly different tone, whatever) but you’re not allowed to call it that because people skip over prologues, that’s the reader’s problem. A good (ie interesting, relevant, suck-the-reader-in) prologue can add a lot to a story.
I’ll STILL torn on that one.
June 3rd, 2013 at 10:59 am
I love the one in here (should all be visible in the “Look Inside”). Totally doesn’t work as a chapter 1, but as a “12 years earlier” (so, a prologue), I thought it was brilliant.
June 3rd, 2013 at 12:42 pm
You know, I read this before!! This is exactly what I mean! Thanks for posting this. I know some people dislike the change in tone some prologues have. But some stories really need the prologue, especially if it provides information essential to the story.