A Preface to the Prologue

Exercise Your InkTank

Traditionally, the prologue is an explanatory first act or scene. It gives the audience information (a bit of backstory, for example) as they enter the world of the story. But it can also do much more than that. Let’s take a look at a very famous prologue:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

The prologue of Act One of this play gives us the skinny on the Montague and Capulet feud (that’s the backstory) but it also summarizes the plot: It tells us that our young lovers are doomed and that their deaths will extinguish the ancient grudge between families. One might ask, Why see the play if you already know what will happen? And, in fact, that’s a frequent complaint lodged against prologues—that they stand needlessly between the audience and the story—but in this case, the prologue does more than just let the cat out of the bag. It generates interest and intrigue and it evokes the tonal darkness that will descend upon Verona. Besides, it’s just beautiful lyric writing, a stinging pleasure to experience. This is a prologue that does more than one job and does more than one job very well, and while we can’t all expect to be the Shakespeares of the day, we certainly can take this lesson from his work and bring it to our own.

Here’s a little ditty we like to call “Not Entirely Good Reasons to Write A Prologue.”
I’m not sure people will understand a word of my story, if I don’t explain it all to them first; I’m pretty sure no one will get past the boring first chapter/act so I have to attach something flashy and splashy to the start; I think prologues are pretty cool—everyone is doing them these days; My prologue is actually just my first chapter/act, I’m just calling it a prologue because they’re pretty cool; My story’s structure is so complex that no one will be able to follow it without a guide—that’s where the prologue comes in; I already have a first chapter/act, but I want to write what comes before that in the plot, so I’m calling it a prologue; the prologue seems like a good place to me to tell my audience a little something about myself/my wife/my dog/my take on the Darfur conflict; the really cool thing that happens on page 542 looks nice on page one too; I forgot about this one character, so I’m letting him narrate the prologue.

Bring It, Shakespeare
I’m going to give you a plot synopsis—you write the prologue for the story. You choose your own genre of storytelling and you choose the jobs you’d like your prologue to do and you choose the approach and level of