Television figured this out decades ago. Before the opening credits, a show runs a cold open: two or three minutes of something strange, dangerous or funny that makes you stay through the theme song. A body on the beach. A phone ringing in an empty house. Then the titles roll, and the episode proper begins somewhere else entirely.
Nobody complains about cold opens, because a good one never explains itself. It hands you a question and walks away.
A prologue in a novel has the same job. Writers who get prologues wrong wrote a history lesson where a cold open belonged.
What is a prologue in a novel?
A prologue is a short section that comes before chapter one and stands apart from the main narrative. Time, place or point of view separates it from the main story. It can take place years before the story, at the very end of it, or follow a character the reader never sees again.
Fiction prologues are a different animal from the front matter of a nonfiction book. In nonfiction, a preface or introduction explains why the book exists and how to read it. I’ve covered that side in preface, prologue, foreword or introduction. In a novel, the prologue is part of the story. It just isn’t the start of the main line yet.
Why do so many writing teachers tell you to skip the prologue?
Because most prologues are backstory wearing a costume.
The writer knows the history of the kingdom, the war that ended two hundred years ago and the prophecy nobody remembers, and wants the reader to know it too before anything happens. So the book opens with three pages of exposition. The reader, who came for people and trouble, gets a lecture.
Elmore Leonard put prologues second on his list of writing rules for exactly this reason. He called a novel’s prologue backstory and said you can drop backstory in anywhere you want. Plenty of agents and editors say the same, and a lot of readers have trained themselves to flip past anything labeled “Prologue” to get to chapter one. I went through Leonard’s whole list in Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, and the prologue rule is one I break.
The complaint is fair about bad prologues. It’s wrong about prologues as a form.
A good prologue is a cold open. It hands the reader a question and walks away. A bad prologue is a history lecture before the story starts.Share on X
When does a prologue work in fiction?
A prologue belongs in the book when it does something chapter one can’t. Published novels show the main ways it happens.
It shows a viewpoint the rest of the book won’t. James S. A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes opens with Julie Mao aboard a captured ship, and the novel never returns to her point of view. Her few pages plant the mystery that the two main characters spend the whole book chasing. George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones does the same thing beyond the Wall, through the eyes of a man who doesn’t survive the prologue. The reader learns there’s something in the north that the characters in chapter one don’t believe in yet.
It starts at the end. Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants opens with a scene of chaos and violence from near the end of the story, then jumps back. Every chapter after that is the reader working out how things got there.
It shows the crime. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code opens with a museum curator shot inside the Louvre, then moves to the protagonist being woken by a phone call. The reader knows more than the hero from page one. That gap pulls them forward.
Notice what all of these have in common. None of them explains anything. Each one shows a scene, leaves a question open and gets out.
How I use prologues in my own novels
My prologues are teasers. They’re very short, and each one sets up something the reader won’t understand yet. Then the story starts, and the reader carries that question through the book waiting to find out what it meant. It fits how I open books in general. Virtually all my novels start with action. Something happens, something dramatic, and then I go back with a flashback and fill in how we got there. The prologue is the sharpest version of that move: the drama first and the explanation later.
The test I use is simple. If I could cut the prologue and the reader would never miss it, it goes. If cutting it would take away a question the reader carries for three hundred pages, it stays.
Can a novel have several prologues?
Yes, and Shield of Ashes has four of them.
Each one sets up a different plot line. They’re four cold opens in a row, each showing the reader a separate piece of the story, with no obvious connection between them. The reader goes into chapter one holding four questions and spends the book watching the threads move toward each other. By the time they meet, the reader has been waiting for it the whole way. I wrote about how that book came together in Behind the Book: Shield of Ashes.
Multiple prologues are a big ask, and they only work when every one of them is short and every one of them pays off. Four history lessons in a row would kill the book before it started. Four teasers can make a reader impatient in the best way.
How long should a prologue be?
Keep it to a few pages. A cold open runs a couple of minutes before the credits, and then the episode starts.
Length is the first warning sign. If your prologue runs as long as a full chapter, it’s probably carrying exposition the story could deliver later, in pieces, when the reader has a reason to want it. Leonard’s tenth rule applies here too: leave out the part readers skip. Readers skip lectures. They don’t skip a scene that makes them nervous.
What should a prologue never do?
It should never explain the world. Exposition about history, magic systems or politics belongs inside the story, delivered when a character needs it.
It shouldn’t repeat chapter one. If the opening chapter covers the same ground from the main character’s view, one of them is redundant. Cut the prologue first.
It shouldn’t be a dream or a fake-out that the next chapter cancels. Readers feel cheated when the dramatic opening turns out not to have happened.
And it shouldn’t exist only because the real first chapter is slow. If chapter one needs a prologue to hold attention, fix chapter one. I’ve written more about that in why your opening pages aren’t hooking anyone.
Should you call it a prologue at all?
Some writers drop the label and call the section chapter one, or give it a date and a place for a heading, so readers who skip prologues out of habit don’t skip it. That’s a fair trick. The label matters less than the job. If the section is a cold open, it’ll work under any heading. If it’s a lecture, renaming it won’t save it.
The same goes for every rule on prologues, including the ones I break. Writing rules exist for a reason, and the reason here is that readers come for people and trouble. I went into that larger argument in why writing rules exist, and when to break every single one.
The cold open
Before you keep a prologue, read it as if it were the cold open of a TV episode. Does it show something happening? Does it leave a question open? Does it get out before the credits? If it does all three, keep it, and don’t let anybody’s rule talk you out of it. If it explains, summarizes or lectures, cut it and feed that material into the story where the reader will want it.
The Writing Hub has the rest of my articles on structuring a novel. If you’re working on one and want a second set of eyes on how it opens, my book coaching service starts with a conversation.
Nobody remembers the theme song. They remember the body on the beach.
