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Showing posts from October 14, 2009

Workin' On It Wednesday #33 -- On Prologues

Recently, Maya Reynolds did an excellent post on the appropriate use of prologues and backstory. In her analysis, prologues are often mistakes because they deal solely with backstory -- stuff that is history of the story, but that's not changing or moving. A prologue is usually only useful if it is an active (if preliminary) part of the story. I personally don' t do prologues--I haven't come up with a story yet where one has seemed necessary--but Maya's description of the prologue really intrigued me. She compared the events of the prologue to a "precipitating event," like a trigger in the crisis counseling she's done. In crisis counseling, precipitating events usually happen six weeks in advance of someone calling a crisis hotline. So this week I went back and looked at the stuff I'm working on right now, and sure enough, there they were, the precipitating events. In The Book, the story starts approximately six weeks after the main character get