The Business of Prologues

I was just talking about this over on AgentQuery Connect and thought, “Hey, you know, this is worth repeating on my blog.” And so, here it is. The cold, dirty, hard truth about prologues and querying literary agents.

Click on image to see another viewpoint on prologues

Agents generally “don’t like” prologues because many aspiring writers have given them a bad name. Why? They use them as a crutch (not to say everyone does–sometimes they are a fabulously executed device that is intrinsic to the story) to make up for their failings in areas such as building suspense, creating a good story question, setting up the story, setting, characters, etc. Instead of cutting the first 40 pages of ‘warm-up,’ writers create a prologue that sneaks the reader ahead in the story in hopes that it’ll keep them hooked and maintain them through the ‘getting there’ early stages of the story. Agents also find that, in many cases, prologues can be cut and avoided altogether. <Gasp!>

So, say you are going to query a literary agent and are wondering about your prologue. The submission guidelines say “the first chapter.” Is your prologue truly a chapter? Yes and no. If it is short (I’d say three pages or less) it really doesn’t count as a chapter and should be sent along with “chapter one.” However, if your prologue is regular chapter length (that being around the ten double-spaced pages mark or more) it very much is its own chapter and should be treated accordingly when submitting to agents. Tricky, isn’t it? (And those of you with prologues around 5 pages long are cursing me right now.)

But can you get away with sending off your first chapter without your prologue?

NO! Absolutely not. (And if you are sniffling about how it isn’t your best work, it doesn’t make sense, etc., etc., and you don’t want to send it as you don’t want it to represent your book, then CUT IT.)

You MUST submit your prologue when querying agents. Why? Because it is the beginning of your novel. It is the first thing your reader is going to read and it is going to make the first impression. Say you send in the first three chapters and not the prologue. The agent reads them and asks for more. You send more, plus the prologue. Now they have extra work. They can’t just keep reading from page 49 or 51, or wherever your first submission left off. They have to figure out where this prologue fits in–which involves going back to the beginning of the story and possibly even rereading the first bit in light of this new information.

The cold hard truth: You’ve just wasted their time.

Ask yourself: What sort of impression have I just made?

This is my take on the whole prologue business. Naturally, there are folks who may disagree with this, and that’s fine. There also may be agents who feel differently about this as well. However, I think you can use this advice as a general rule of thumb to keep you ‘out of trouble.’ And if in doubt, check out the agent’s/agency’s blog and submission guidelines–occasionally they will mention what to do about the prologue.