it's that time of the month . . . .

[swan_tower]

Hey, look -- I remembered to link to this on time, rather than after the fact! Go me.

This month's post at SF Novelists is me dissecting "The Use and Misuse of Prologues."

Comments

[unforth.livejournal.com]

I've had this discussion with you before, but as usual I think you are spot on. I always used to skip prologues, and it was RJ's that made me start reading them when I learned that, occasionally, they DO have something worth while to say. The infodump thing can be really tough, but so many author's find awesome ways of working that info into the story, that I think it's sort of a cop out to put it into a prologue. I mean, you COULD have put a prologue into Doppelganger infodumping about the magic system and the goddess and stuff, but instead you worked it in, and that was far more interesting. I tend to feel that if all the prologue does is infodump, it should be cut.

[mirrorred-star.livejournal.com]

I only read Eddings' Elenium trilogy after being told not to read his prologues until after you've read the rest of the book, otherwise they're amazingly boring and make no sense. Really, what's the point of writing a prologue so boring that you need to be warned to skip it?

I haven't had any other problems with bad prologues in high fantasy. Maybe I've just managed to avoid the right books?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Eddings is one of the ones where I remember just skipping over his prologues as a matter of course.

[kaz-mahoney.livejournal.com]

This is particularly good timing for me - I've saved it to read again later. :)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I aim to please. :-)