Why Agents Hate (Most) Prologues
what makes a good prologue? and a huge shoutout to the prologue in riley sager’s THE ONLY ONE LEFT.
Agents don’t actually hate prologues. Sorry, I lied. But we do approach them with caution. That’s because we’ve been burned by many unnecessary or ineffective prologues before.
But I’m a glass-half-full kind of gal, so let’s instead talk about what makes a good prologue.
What makes a good prologue?
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on opening pages where I talked about what agents look for in your opening pages. If you haven’t already read it, this is a good time to do so. Your prologue is also part of your opening pages, so all the tips I offered on opening pages stand. But in this post, I’m going to focus more specifically on prologues.
Like your opening pages, your prologue is competing with people’s attention— more so than your later pages. The prologue or first couple chapters are the point where someone might put your book down and decide to scroll through Instagram or Hulu or some other form of entertainment instead.
This is why, if you’re going to have a prologue in your story, it better count. It needs to add something to your story that wouldn’t be there if you simply started from Chapter 1. A general rule of thumb is that if your book can stand to lose the prologue, then you don’t need it.
A good prologue gets us invested in your story before we even hit Chapter 1. Approach your prologue by asking yourself the following questions: Is this prologue necessary for the book? Does this hook my reader? Does it tease something about what’s to come in the following pages? Does it reveal something important?
I see a lot of prologues in my inbox that info-dump or aim to settle the reader into the background or context of the book. That does not make for good prologue, sadly. It’s usually a sign that the writer is using the prologue as a crutch, and they don’t actually know where to start the story.
Info-dumping is not fun or engaging for a reader at any point in your manuscript, let alone right at the start! If you’re finding yourself using your prologue as a dumping ground, ask yourself how you can integrate this information elsewhere in the manuscript, and where you can reveal it in snippets instead.
That said, a good prologue will still ground us in your book (without info-dumping!). This is the same groundedness we need from opening pages in general. A good prologue grounds us in your characters, in the conflict, in the crux of the story. Your prologue should be able to deliver that. If it’s not, then you need to revisit it again.
You also want your reader to be invested in your book after they read your prologue. For that to happen your prologue needs to be a) interesting, and b) crucial to your story. That means that you can’t bore us mundane action. Instead, think about how your prologue can set up the stakes and conflict so your reader is intrigued. Think about what action is being carried out in your prologue, and when you do, ask yourself if it’s necessary to the plot and the story.
What does an EFFECTIVE PROLOGUE look like?
When I talk about agents being critical of prologues, I’m really talking about prologues in the manuscripts that come into our inboxes. Generally, most published books have good prologues. They’ve already passed the inspecting eye of an editor and other industry professionals. But one example of a great prologue that I have been referencing recently is in The Only One Left, a gothic thriller by Riley Sager.
The premise of The Only One Left is as follows: Kit, a young caregiver is assigned to work for a woman accused of a Lizzie Borden-like massacre decades earlier. In 1983, Kit arrives at the decaying Hope mansion to care for Lenora Hope, who after a series of strokes that confined her to a wheelchair and rendered her mute, can only communicate by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. Lenora offers to tell Kit the story of the Hope family massacre that she’s been accused of committing. But as details about the former caregiver’s disappearance and the history of the Hope family come to light, Kit starts to suspect that Lenora might not be telling the truth.
The prologue places us in the middle of the story and drops us right into a scene between Kit, the narrator, and the elderly Lenora. Right away, we’re told that Lenora trusts the narrator and wants to tell her everything, but the narrator doesn’t trust Lenora. And then we have a transcript of Lenora's typed dialogue and what seems to be the beginning of her confession: what Lenora remembers is her blood-stained dress, the bloody knife in her hand, the knowledge that her parents are gone forever, her sister’s screams. And then Lenora asks the narrator the question that propels the book:
“But that’s not what you’re most curious about, is it?
You want to know if I’m as evil as everyone says I am. The answer is no.
And yes.”
In The Only One Left, the prologue not only grounds us in the tone and events of what’s to come next, but it also hooks and intrigues us. We’re left wondering: What does that mean? So she did kill them? Did they have it coming? Is she even telling the truth? We want to turn the page and find out.
And that’s exactly what an effective prologue does.
