Hey fam, just a quick life check-in around the holidays and a reminder to please be kind to yourself if you can't produce the amount of writing you normally can, or if it just doesn't feel quality, or if you are terribly uninspired and stuck in a rut. All of these things are normal, human, and valid.
Or, at least, this is what I'm telling you and hoping that you believe it a hell of a lot more than I do. I've been trying to practice self-compassion these days, because it's officially been 3 weeks since I have touched a single piece of my draft, and I'm feeling horrible about it.
But, I've been a student in my final semester. I've been an academic advisor during the holiday season, which brings like every single problem student out of the woodwork. I've been in charge of running a whole house by myself for a week, something I've never had to do before. I've been a caretaker.
I've been living off caffeine, PF Chang's frozen Korean Pork, and beef stew from Dooney's Pub, as well as iron pills and approximately three hours of sleep a night.
And when I put all that into perspective, I think it's okay if all I've been doing in my free time is reading bargain books and watching HBO.
However, I made a promise that I'd write a post once a week and I've had this bad boy queued up for a while, so I think I owe you all something, even if my actual writing is stalled.
Like I said, I've been reading a lot of books in all different genres, some major bestsellers from years past, some relatively unknown. Some from the big five publishing houses and their various imprints, some from indies or ones that have since been bought up by the big boys. Some extremely good, some that could have used a round or two more of edits...you get the point.
I read a lot.
But my self-soothing urge to read has led me to think even more deeply about the role of the prologue. Depending on who you ask, a prologue is either vital or a nuisance. I've always fallen in the "nuisance" camp, and this is still where I remain.
I don't like prologues, because most times, the information doesn't need to be told this early and can actually unfold naturally over the course of the story. Think Game of Thrones. Why on earth do I need to know about the White Walkers attacking when we don't encounter White Walker stories until, like, Book 2? Multi-POVs have been a thing since the start, so it could just as easily have been slipped into John's point of view when he goes to the Wall, as a legend told or a recent attack. While it does make for a much more catchy hook than the politics of Westeros that unfold over the subsequent 800+ pages, I distinctly remember that the thing that grabbed my attention more was when John finds Ghost and the other five direwolf pups.
I've always maintained that leading with a thing that does not become relevant until much later sets the tone up in a very strange way--it either leads a reader to become disappointed that this super cool element (White Walkers) remains marginal, or it happens so soon that the reader genuinely forgets about it. (I say this and then stubbornly retained Cailleach as my opening chapter for a solid three drafts, so feel free to call me out)
However, this being said, after the first draft of my manuscript, I started to question if my story might actually benefit from this thing that I had once considered disjointed, unnecessary, and a sign of sloppy writing. I had dropped my beta readers into a story that had a 300-year old history, most of which I felt was crucial, and I couldn't see a way to weave this history in while still maintaining a natural feel and avoiding the dreaded info-dump.
When I talked to my best friend and beta reader a couple nights later, it turns out we both had the same thought: you need a prologue.
So, I wrote a prologue. It told the story of Ais and Emrys's parents, one the last of the gods' enemies and one the woman who had been tasked with hunting him down. They decide to strike out against the gods, because Macha does not believe in the justice of what she does. But she knows she can't survive to take down the entire pantheon of gods herself, so she does the next most logical thing, and she and Donn conceive Ais and Emrys. And then it time-skips all the way to the night they die, which is also the night Ais and Emrys are born.
I set this prologue in 3rd person, past-tense, and I didn't hate it. In fact, both my beta and I felt that this was the best thing I'd written on the story so far.
It had a bold opening sentence: They called her Lady Death, and she was growing impatient.
It had worldbuilding and catchy, short sentences: But now her former enemy, the god of death at whose table she sat, was telling her to wait.
It had a certain enemies-to-lovers tension: And with a final glance at the barrier that she created, with the blood of her enemies dried under her nails, Macha set aside her sword and stripped off her armor. He untied his robes, she pulled down her breeches. They set in place the eventual death of the Tuatha de Danann. There was no love. Only duty. The deed done, they shook hands and parted ways.
It was concise, coming in just under 5 pages, and stripped of all that burdensome purple prose that plagued the entire rest of my draft and obscured literally any point I'd tried to make.
I kept it right up until the end of Draft 3, when I began to seriously consider querying. By then, I'd condensed the 300-year timeline down to 100, because it was unwieldy and, quite frankly, unnecessary. I'd also begun to realize I needed a good first chapter, a solid ten pages.
But...problem!
The prologue was way too short. I couldn't send agents only 5 pages, and I couldn't very well break off 5 pages of the first chapter and bundle it with the prologue. The POV shift would look weird and give the impression it was a multi-POV story (it wasn't and still isn't). The timeline skipping would seem baffling. And, most importantly, absolutely nothing happened in the first five pages of Chapter 1, so it wouldn't end on a good cliffhanger.
So, no. I couldn't send the prologue.
I sent the full first chapter instead (10 pages), but then I was in a bind, because no site could give a definitive answer as to whether, if you have a prologue, you should send it as your first ten pages or not. And then if someone asked for a full or a partial manuscript and I sent them the one with the prologue, would I look like a liar because those were technically my first pages and yet I'd sent something else?
Because of this bind, I came to the conclusion that the prologue had to go. And yet, despite my pathological aversion to prologues, I couldn't deny that this one did good work! It gave valuable information missing from the entirety of the story. Removing it left the reader, once again, with no road map, and I was sad to see it go.
I had no answers to my bind, so I tucked it away in the back of my mind, axed the prologue, and sent the whole third draft, prologue-less, to my brilliant professor whom I thought was an alpha reader but turned out to be a beta.
And then she promptly told me that she wished she'd had a road map.
So now, I was in a worse bind, because I knew that I had used my prologue as the same thing that I had once criticized others for: a convenient and lazy excuse to drop backstory all in a chunk and make up for a dull first few chapters.
Like, girl, seriously?
So, here's what I did. I combed through the entire draft much more critically, especially those first few chapters, and axed anything that wasn't doing good work. This meant removing the extraneous narrative elements my professor had pointed out, but also looking to fill those spaces with the former prologue details. For example, instead of having Ais listen to a solid three pages of debate over which god could possibly be in the cairn (a pointless exercise in name-dropping characters that never become relevant), I instead had her summarize the lecture that her guardian gives her about her mother...which is a convenient recapping of prologue details and history.
So, instead of this:
The war had dragged on far too long for her liking, dragging with it far too few of the bodies she wanted to see and far too many of the ones she didn’t. Her people were mired in another ceaseless battle against enemies she now found herself allied with. Under the cover of night, of course.
As far as the Tuatha de Danann knew, Macha, the Morrigan, fearsome goddess of war and carnage, was the only weapon that could ever be relied upon to stay loyal. Once, that might have rung true. Over the past two hundred years since Dagda, king of the gods, broke the truce between the Tuatha de Danann and the fae, the Morrigan has been his trusted enforcer. His companion. His lover.
Through the invasion of the Milesians, rival gods from the east who sought destruction and conquest, and two faerie uprisings, Macha had never wavered. As long as her blade sunk deep into soft flesh, she was satisfied. Her soul could rest easy, her power unleashed from where it coiled beneath her chest.
But loyalty does not last forever, and Macha was more than a mindless blade, never mind what Dagda might have seen in her. She’d been playing the long game for years now, sneaking across the channel to Tech Duinn, where her vanquished Milesian enemies still held some sway. Hoping that the god across the table, the only Milesian who hadn’t been stripped of his powers or killed, might hold the secret to ending her lover’s life and reign.
...which goes on for 5 pages and is really quite a lot of words that don't add up to much, isn't it?
We get this:
I know this story already, I want to tell her. I have grown up with it, have had it weaponized against me for sixteen years. Nuada, then-king of the gods, is rattled by the arrival of the Milesians from a shore so distant there is no trace on kingdom maps. Gods fall beneath the onslaught, the clash of magic against magic rippling throughout every part of Hy’Brasil, from Annwn to Tech Duinn and finally, to Tír Na Nóg, the home of the Tuatha de Danann. Nuada is no great strategist or warrior, merely the firstborn son. The one who claimed the crown after the Tuatha de Danann waged war against the fae some centuries before, whose bloody battle split the island in two and left the fae with the worse half.
When my father slices Nuada’s hand off during the first battle of the Milesian War, the crown passes to his brother Dagda, who is Nuada’s opposite in every way. And Dagda has a secret. He’s in love with a goddess from one of the poorest villages of Tír Na Nóg. My mother, whose blood-and-bone magic can damage even gods beyond their healing capabilities. At his insistence, the Tuatha de Danann craft a crown of bones for her, heavily runed to augment her power further. They send her to turn the battles to a killing field. And when they catch word, after their supposed victory against the Milesians, that Donn is alive, that he has taken the throne of Annwn and imprisoned Arawn with the help of the fae, they pull my mother from her early retirement to slaughter once more.
They keep her in Arawn’s court until her own execution, Nuada alongside her as a further safeguard of rebellion.
The Morrigan is too precious an instrument of control to retire.
So she works with Arawn and a newly-healed Nuada to keep the fae oppressed, devising any number of torments daily, while Dagda writes his praise from across An Brasil. Until, one day, Macha is sailing over to Dagda and instead sees my father, alive on the shores of Tech Duinn. First, she demonstrates every technique in her library of pain. Then, while his bones reset so painfully slowly, he calls a truce. He invites her to sit at this very table until she understands reason. She feels the souls of her victims vibrating in cairns above. He pours them into her hands like water until she understands every ounce of their suffering as her own. When she leaves, Donn thinks this will be the end of it. He will take months to recover, she will spend the night with Dagda, but she’s sworn to keep his secret safe.
But she is back the next night, blood-spattered and ready for mutiny.
The same story, delivered this way instead of as a prologue, gives us a feel for Ais as a character and how she's processed this history through her own lens. It gives us a sense of how her legacy has been used against her and also denies Macha the right to speak for herself, which becomes a key point in the manuscript's ending. I allow the story of Macha to continually unfold throughout the narrative, with this being the major touchpoint.
While weaving in key details is arguably much more difficult than a prologue, I feel like it's worth it. Which brings me back to all of those books with prologues that I read. In every single one of them, I feel like it could've been done away with and the information woven in much more naturally. Maybe your story will beat the odds. Or maybe you'll be like me...you'll write a prologue only as an exercise in finding the true heart of your story and weaving it in much more seamlessly.
I hate to do some confirmation bias here but...
To prologue or not to prologue?
There is no question.
Comments