Prologue
Quick answer: Prologues in fiction: what they do, why readers skip weak ones, famous examples from Shakespeare to fantasy, and how to write one that actually earns page one.
Before chapter one, a prologue delivers material the main narrative cannot begin with: another time, another viewpoint, another register entirely, set apart from the story's first chapter under its own heading. In other words, it is a doorway built in front of the front door, and it must justify making the reader pass through two entrances.
Prologues belong to the architecture stage of writing, when you decide where a story truly starts. They flourish in fantasy, historical fiction and thrillers, and they are famously divisive: plenty of agents warn against them, largely because slush piles overflow with prologues doing jobs a first chapter should have done.
Two households, both alike in dignity
Shakespeare opens Romeo and Juliet with a fourteen line prologue that tells the audience the entire plot, including the ending: two lovers from feuding houses will die, and their deaths will end the feud. It looks like a spoiler and works as a lens. Knowing the destination, the audience watches every scene for the machinery of fate, and the play trades surprise for dread, a far stronger currency in tragedy.
Modern genre fiction uses prologues differently but for the same underlying reason: to install knowledge the reader needs and the protagonist lacks. A Game of Thrones opens with a prologue in which minor characters meet something lethal in a frozen forest, characters the story then abandons. The reader carries that dread through hundreds of pages where the main cast dismisses such threats as legend. The gap between what we know and what they know does quiet work on every chapter.
What a prologue can do that chapter one cannot
A prologue can break the rules the rest of the book obeys. It can visit a viewpoint that never returns, sit decades before the main action, or adopt a mythic register the close narration will drop. Used well, it plants a promise, a threat, secret or image, that the opening chapters could not deliver without contortion, and it sets the story's true scale before a smaller domestic scene begins.
The costs are equally specific. A prologue delays the protagonist, and readers bond with the first person they meet; introduce a stranger first and you spend that bond on someone who exits. Worse is the throat-clearing prologue: history lectures, dreams, or scenes whose only content is atmosphere. Readers have learned to skip these, and an opening section that trained readers to skip it has failed at the most basic level a page can fail.
Writing one that survives revision
Hold your prologue to a harsher standard than any chapter. It should contain a scene, with a character who wants something and a change from its first line to its last, and it should plant exactly one thing the reader will carry into chapter one: a question, a threat, an object, a voice. If you can name that one thing, the prologue has a job. If you can only say it establishes the world, cut it and fold the world into the story.
The trap is using the prologue to hide a slow first chapter. Test the book both ways with a reader who does not know which version you prefer. And keep it short; a prologue is a promise about pacing as well as content, and twenty pages of prelude promises a slow book whether or not the book is slow.
Prologue, preface, foreword, cold open
A preface and a foreword are non-fiction apparatus: the author, or someone else entirely, speaking about the book rather than inside it. A prologue is fiction, part of the story's dramatic world. The framing chapters some novels use, such as the found-manuscript openings of older fiction, sit between categories and are better called framing devices.
The cold open is the prologue's fashionable cousin: chapter one simply begins mid-action, no separate heading, no shift in time or viewpoint. When editors advise cutting a prologue, they are usually advising this instead, on the theory that whatever the prologue promised, the story itself should promise faster.
What poets can take from this
- Give the prologue one deliverable the reader carries into chapter one, and be able to name it.
- Write it as a real scene with desire and change, never as a history lecture.
- Keep it brief; length of prologue is read as a promise about the book's pace.
- If the prologue exists to excuse a slow chapter one, fix chapter one instead.
- Test the manuscript with and without it on a reader who has no stake in the answer.
Try it yourself
Write a 500 word prologue set forty years before your story begins, in which a character we will never meet again buries something. Then write the first paragraph of chapter one, present day, in which an entirely different character finds the disturbed ground. The prologue may not explain what was buried.
Questions
Do readers really skip prologues?
Some do, because they have met too many that were skippable. The habit tells you the standard: a prologue must contain story, not preamble. If skipping yours would cost the reader something they later feel, you wrote a real one.
Should a short story ever have a prologue?
Almost never as a labelled section; the form is too small for two entrances. Short fiction gets the same effect with a one paragraph cold open in another time or voice, separated by a space break.
How long should a prologue be?
Shorter than an average chapter, and many of the best run under five pages. Past that length readers stop treating it as an entrance and start judging it as the book itself, which defeats its purpose.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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