such-justice-wow:

dasha-is-bats:

oleanderwasp:

dasha-is-bats:

biphobicerasurer:

termythespoopybutterfly:

sindri42:

codename-me:

herewaskendra:

sigh. i still have much to learn.

@herewaskendra me too, however I love prologues and I write them too. I notice Stephen King spend a few pages and then some more pages describing the other world or a specific scene I’m using King here b/c I just finish listening to Mr.Mercedes. I wouldn’t be hard on myself and you are an amazing writer- keep writing amazing words.

So you’re not allowed to ease the reader in, you gotta jump straight to the action! Except you’re also not allowed to start in the action, because then they don’t know enough to care about it!

All of these rules are stupid. Everything they describe can be done poorly, but can also be magnificent. The only real writing tip here is “every literary agent has their own huge secret list of pet peeves and if you trip over any of them your work won’t be published, regardless of its quality”.

In particular, a good prologue can smooth over a lot of other major problems in beginning a story. For example, if your book is mostly going to be fairly dark and full of action, but you need to establish what “normal” looks like for the first couple chapters before things start getting broken, then the prologue can establish that tone, show the reader the stakes, and keep the audience hooked through the quiet bits before your POV switches to the oblivious protagonist in the first real chapter. Or it can be a perfect establishing character moment, like if you’re doing a fish-out-of-water story with a badass protagonist in a situation they don’t know how to deal with, the prologue could be about how terrifying they are or how much ass they kick in their usual job before the first chapter throws them into a situation where their skillset doesn’t apply. Or the prologue can let you show important past events instead of just talking about them in a big dull exposition dump down the line. Or if you’ve got two important lead characters, but the second won’t be joining up until a little bit later, the prologue can give an early glimpse of who they are and what’s going on there. Its an incredibly useful and versatile literary device, and any agent who throws a story out just because a prologue exists is doing their job wrong.

Also I like writing prologues and you can pry them from my cold dead hands

I was planning to write that exact comment, but you got to it before I could

There are very few hard rules in fiction.

these are marketing rules not “literary” rules.

they are guidelines for “maybe follow these if you want it to sell more to the majority of readers”

Yeah and they contradict each other and don’t apply to a lot of modern best-sellers.

Pretty much every “rule for writing” is bullshit. If you can write it well then write it.