What Is a Prologue?
Quick answer: What is a prologue? An opening section set apart from chapter one, often in a different time or viewpoint, that frames the main story. Uses, examples and pitfalls.
A prologue is an opening section that stands apart from chapter one, usually separated by time, place or point of view, whose job is to frame the main story: planting a mystery, showing an inciting event the protagonist never witnessed, or establishing a world before the plot begins. It is labelled as a prologue precisely to signal that difference. When the story proper starts, the reader understands they have jumped to the true beginning.
Prologues are also the most argued-over section in publishing. Many agents confess to skipping them; many bestsellers open with them anyway. The disagreement is really about misuse. A prologue that does necessary work no chapter could do earns its place. A prologue that warms up, info-dumps or delays the story is just a first chapter wearing a disguise, and a poor one.
The longer answer: what a prologue is for
Legitimate prologues do a small set of jobs. They show a distant cause: an event years before the plot, a crime, a prophecy, a betrayal, whose consequences the main story inherits. They open a viewpoint the novel otherwise cannot enter, such as a victim or antagonist in a crime novel whose knowledge the detective lacks. They establish contract in speculative fiction, demonstrating the world's rules and scale before a domestic chapter one. Or they frame: an older narrator introducing the tale of their youth.
What unites the honest uses is separation. The material genuinely cannot sit inside chapter one because it belongs to another time, head or register. That is the test. If your prologue features the same protagonist, hours or days before chapter one, in the same voice, it is not a prologue; it is your actual opening, mislabelled.
Prologues carry an old theatrical inheritance. Elizabethan plays opened with a Prologue as a speaking role; the chorus of 'Romeo and Juliet' famously gives away the entire plot, two households, two lovers, death, in fourteen lines before the play begins. The gambit shows how confident framing can convert spoilers into dread, the audience watching the machinery of a fate already announced.
Prologues in the wild
Crime fiction leans on the victim or killer prologue: a scene of the crime, often in a viewpoint that then disappears, giving readers knowledge the investigator must earn. Thrillers from 'The Da Vinci Code' onward open this way so routinely that the technique borders on convention. Fantasy uses the deep-past prologue; 'The Fellowship of the Ring' opens with concerning matters of history and hobbits before the story proper, and George R. R. Martin's 'A Game of Thrones' begins beyond the Wall with characters we never meet again, purely to prove the supernatural threat is real while the court plot ignores it.
Literary fiction prefers the frame prologue. Emily Brontë opens 'Wuthering Heights' with Lockwood's disastrous visit to the Heights, effectively a prologue that makes us crave the history Nelly will tell. Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' opens by confessing the murder and the killers, converting the whole novel into a why-and-how. Note what all these share: the prologue creates an appetite that chapter one alone could not.
Should you write one, and how
Draft the book without it first, or at least be willing to. Then ask what a reader would lose by starting at chapter one. If the answer is a specific charge, dread, irony, a planted question, write the prologue to deliver exactly that charge and nothing else. Keep it short, ideally under a tenth of the length a chapter runs, and give it the same scene discipline as any other unit: a want, a turn, an exit that points forward.
Connect it visibly. The reader will hold your prologue in suspension, waiting for the main story to touch it; the longer the wait, the stronger the eventual connection must be. A prologue whose relevance never becomes unmistakable is remembered as a broken promise. And resist using the label as armour for exposition. World history, family trees and magic systems delivered as lecture read no better for being called a prologue.
Short fiction almost never needs one; at two thousand words, an italicised opening section is usually cost without benefit, and stories entered in Writory's monthly contest do better spending those hundred words inside the story they are actually telling. In novels, when in doubt, try the material as a first chapter with a date stamp. If it works there, you never needed the label.
Common prologue mistakes
The most notorious is the info-dump prologue, a history lecture before the story earns any interest in the history. Second is the false-start prologue: a scene of manufactured action, a chase, a scream, designed to disguise a slow first act, after which chapter one deflates. Third is the redundant prologue, dramatising events the narrative later explains anyway, which spends surprise twice and gains nothing.
There are also craft-level fumbles: prologues in a florid register the book never uses again, prologues that reveal so much the first hundred pages hold no questions, and prologues starring the protagonist five minutes before chapter one. Each has the same cure. Ask what the section uniquely buys, cut it if the answer is vague, and if it survives, cut it to the bone.
What poets can take from this
- Test every prologue by starting the book at chapter one and naming precisely what was lost.
- Use a prologue only for material chapter one cannot hold: another time, head or register.
- Keep it short and scene-shaped, with its own want, turn and forward-pointing exit.
- Make its connection to the main story unmistakable before the reader forgets it.
- Never label exposition a prologue; a lecture is a lecture wherever it sits.
- In short stories, skip the prologue and spend the words inside the story.
Try it yourself
Write a 300-word prologue set thirty years before your story, showing a stranger burying something at night. Then write the first 300 words of chapter one in a completely different tone, present day, ordinary life, and plant one detail that quietly touches the buried thing.
Questions
Do agents and editors hate prologues?
They dislike bad ones, which are common enough to have soured the label. A prologue that does unique, necessary work is not a handicap; plenty of agented, bestselling novels open with one. If yours is skippable, though, assume professionals will skip it.
What is the difference between a prologue and a first chapter?
Separation. A prologue stands apart from the main narrative in time, viewpoint or register, and the story restarts at chapter one. If the opening flows directly into the plot with the same protagonist and voice, it is a first chapter regardless of its label.
How long should a prologue be?
Shorter than a typical chapter, commonly two to eight pages in a novel. Length should match function: one planted question or one framed cause rarely needs more. If your prologue keeps growing, it may be a first chapter or a dual timeline trying to happen.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.