Saturday, April 19, 2025
Author Tips

Tips for writing a prologue

Similarly as a delight bouche plans café coffee shops for a dinner and offers a brief look at the culinary expert’s style, a prologue is an artistic gadget that excites the reader’s advantage and gives a trace of what’s to come.

Keen on adding a prologue to your book or play? Here are a few hints for composing an extraordinary prologue.

Present the principle character(s). Some 20th century plays have utilized prologues to extraordinary impact. In Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1944), the prologue acquaints the crowd with the play’s storyteller, Tom Wingfield, who clarifies that what the crowd is going to see is drawn from his own recollections. Tom tells the crowd: “I am the storyteller of the play, and furthermore a character in it. Different characters are my mom Amanda, my sister Laura, and a man of his word guest who shows up in the last scenes.”

Drop hints. Wrongdoing fiction and spine chillers often utilize prologues to allude to characters, areas, and the secret that is to come. Here and there, a prologue might be separate hundreds of years or miles from the book, and show up completely inconsequential; be that as it may, it will some way or another tie once more into the principle plot later in the novel.

Add just applicable subtleties. A prologue ought not be an “information dump”: a decent prologue improves your story, instead of clarifying it. The most ideal approach to choose what to remember for a prologue is to ask yourself: what does the reader totally need to know prior to beginning to read the fundamental story?

Eli Scott

Eli Scott is our resident social media expert. He also writes about tips for authors to boost their presence online.

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