Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

What's with your Prologue?

So this is a chapter that has been a long time coming. This chapter is about the prologue. It seems like every other day I'm writing a critique that says the same darn thing. What you wrote is not a prologue. Stop calling it a prologue!

I've found probably 80% of the stories I stumble on have prologues that aren't actually prologues. Maybe 10% do it right and only about 10% opt to not have a prologue at all. I assure you that the number of people on here that shouldn't write prologues should be much, much larger.  

What is this obsession with prologues about? There are very few mediums of books that truly warrant a prologue. It's there to inspire mystery and provide background, and it doesn't typically fit in with romances or fanfictions. And on wattpad, that might as well be considered doubly true.

Don't get me wrong, on wattpad, you're trying to affect readers on a per chapter basis. That often means you only have one chapter to strike home and get a dedicated reader. The first chapter of a book might not set up half your characters, start the plot, or even be all that interesting. It's the wait before the real story gets underway. It's the setup for the background information and the character introductions.

So, many writers choose to pre-empt that chapter with a prologue. They attempt to write the most interesting part about a story, quickly drawing you into wanting to read the rest. Others choose to info dump so that they don't have to provide that information in the rest of their story. I've even seen people use a prologue like they use a summary, which is mind boggling to me because if you're going to write a summary, call it a summary.

Even when you do write a prologue right, publishers tend not to like them. If you have to have "preinformation" in order to tell you story, that's rarely a signal that you story is good. Quite the opposite, if you need to pre-tell information to even start your story, then it suggests that your story was written in a lazy way that couldn't provide that information some other way.

Either way, the basic truth is that most of these things don't qualify as prologues. Most writers on wattpad don't even seem to understand WHAT a prologue is. So I might as well do that. But before I tell you what it is... I'll tell you what it isn't.

It is NOT a chapter of your story. I have seen too many people write a prologue that literally just starts the story. It is NOT there to set up your plot. It is NOT a vehicle to introduce characters or setting. It is not a story catalyst. It is not there to summarize the plot and it isn't there to "tease" people about the rest of the story. It's also not an area for a poem, prophecy, or fluffernutter purple prose.

The point of a prologue is to provide nonessential information that adds background in the story. This information can occur before the story starts, as per usual, during the story (a little rarer), or after the story ends.

Put another way, your prologue is your introduction. It introduces your story. If you want to write a story that is being told by an old man, and so the prologue consists of an old man in the future dwelling on things before falling into the retelling of the story from the past, that fits as a prologue. If you want to base a story on a jaded girl who has ditched love, and you want to start the story with the event that made her that way years prior, that fits a prologue.

The important thing about a prologue is that it is NOT a part of your story. The time, setting, and characters are all separate from the story in some way. If it happens before the story starts, it should have happened years before the story starts. If it happens after the story ends, it should be years after the story ends. If it happens during the story, it should depict an event in a way that isn't presented in the actual story, either through another PoV or angle that isn't approached in the story.

For example, if I had someone come to give a talk, and I was asked to introduce them, would I be giving part of the talk? No. I'd introduce the talk, and then the person would give the talk. A prologue works the same way. It may introduce the story, but it is not the story itself. 

The easiest way to make this separation is to just cut your prologue out. If the story still tells all of the components of the story without chopping out the beginning, end, descriptions, or details about your characters or setting, then it is probably a prologue.

It is a supplementary. It is background information. It can be engaging. It can be there to add to the mystery, but it can't be there to set up the story. It will not explain your plot and it will not introduce your main character.

If you find that your prologue is doing these things, then simply retitle it chapter one and add one to the rest of your chapters. I don't know why so many people are afraid of starting with chapter 1. That is perfectly fine. I've found most stories have wiggle room on where the story should start anyway, so just go for it.

If you are concerned that the structure of chapter 1 is odd and doesn't fit with the rest of the chapters, consider rewriting it... either to fit in with the themes of a prologue or to fit with the rest of your story. Don't just be lazy and dump stuff that you can't fit properly into your narrative into a chapter and call it a prologue.

Because ultimately, I think that's it in a nutshell. Prologues are lazy. People on Wattpad use them because they are too lazy to write an engaging story, so they feel like they should put an addendum in the front that functions as the prologue, explaining what's going on. Rather than writing a clear and concise story, they have to spend two pages explaining the characters and plot. That's bad writing. It's why publishers don't like to read prologues, and it's why I don't like them either.

If you have to do that, call it a summary or a blurb like it is. Heck, put it in your summary or blurb. There is a section for that. Long story short, as much as you painfully wrote your prologue and how much you love it... do everyone a favor and delete it. Your story rarely suffers from the lack of a prologue and I've seen too many cases where it'd be an improvement.