Where the term comes from
Wikipedia defines a prologue as an opening to a story that establishes the context and gives background details, often an earlier story that ties into the main one. The word comes from the Ancient Greek prologos, from pro, "before", and logos, "speech", and the Greek term was wider than the modern meaning, closer to a preface.
Merriam-Webster explains that in ancient Greek drama the prologos was the opening portion of the play, before the chorus came on, sometimes spoken by a single actor, perhaps playing a god, who set the scene. The entry says that playwrights now often provide scene-setting through dialogue near the beginning, that films may use written text for the same purpose, and that novels rarely offer any introduction at all. It dates the word's first known use to the 14th century.
An example
Bastien Orlowe's fantasy novel opens with a prologue of four pages. Twenty years before the main story, a girl hides in a bell tower as soldiers burn the valley of Heskerwood, and she watches a stranger take the king's seal from the ashes. Then chapter one begins, and the reader meets Tamsin Vale, an adult courier who has never told anyone where she is from. Nothing in the prologue is explained. When Tamsin sees the same seal on a tax collector's ring in chapter seven, the reader knows what she does not say. The prologue works because it is short, has its own small drama and plants a question that the main story answers.
Common mistakes
- Using the prologue as an info dump about the world's history, with no characters or action.
- Writing it in a different style from the rest of the book, so readers feel they have started the wrong novel.
- Making it so mysterious or confusing that readers have to wait fifty pages to see why it matters.
- Including one when chapter one could do the same job. If the prologue could be the first chapter, it should be.
- Leaving it unconnected to the main story, so that it feels like a separate short story.
How to check your manuscript
Remove the prologue and read chapter one on its own. If the reader still understands what is at stake, you may not need it. If a key question disappears, look for the smallest version of the prologue that supplies it. Check also whether the prologue has a character, a decision and a result of its own. For related terms, see in medias res, flashback, inciting incident and cliffhanger.
In Musael, versions let you keep a named snapshot before you cut an opening, so you can try the book without the prologue and return to the old start with a click.