Prologues

Blogging about story openings made me realize that I use prologues a lot.
In my novels, Questionable Minds, Impossible Takes a Little Longer, Let No Man Put Asunder and Brain From Outer Space all use prologues. Love That Moves the Sun uses one and it’s a short story.
One reason to use prologues is that they tell readers whatever’s happening is not the real beginning of your story. The usual rules about a beginning having to fit with the ending don’t apply because the prologue’s not the beginning: Prologues can focus on a significant scene from early childhood, or a point of view different from the rest of the novel, and readers realize it’s not part of the main narrative. You can also set up the stakes by prologuing a scene from late in the book: I remember a Y/A novel that opens with the protagonist wondering how her efforts to start a rock band led to her getting hit with a $5 million lawsuit.
Case in point: Impossible‘s prologue showcases a typical night in the life of Nighthawk, superhuman guardian of Fort Walton Beach. Everything gets weird in the first chapter (and that’s weird for a world with superheroes and a Nazi-ruled Western Europe) so I wanted to establish a baseline for what normal is.
In Asunder, my beta readers (back before I lost the manuscript) consistently told me the same thing, that they needed a better feel for the characters before they were plunged into chaos (especially as the book involves a lot of character stuff, though I wouldn’t say it’s character-centric). So I created a prologue with Adrienne and Neil maybe 15 minutes before they meet. And I threw in a scene with the bad guys to set up the stakes (and introduce the Big Bad who doesn’t appear in person until the final chapter)——my only opportunity, as the rest of the book is alternating first person POV.
Likewise, Love That Moves the Sun confused everyone I showed it to with its opening——a bit too much in media res——and the prologue showing an earlier meeting between Macha and the Poet (protagonist and villain respectively) fixed that.
Brain‘s prologue starts with Senators John F. Kennedy and Thomas Dorman creating the agency that Steve and Gwen work for, several years before the story starts. It also features a few short scenes setting up some of the behind-the-scenes scheming that’s already going on by the time the story starts (thereby making it seem more plausible when the good guys discover it). I suspect I may end up cutting some of it, or other parts of the beginning, but we’ll see.
Questionable Minds … actually I can’t think of a reason to prologue it, since it flows fairly seamlessly into the story. If it comes back from the publisher currently checking it over, maybe I’ll de-prologue it.
Prologues. I like ’em. How about you?