Wattpad 101: Your guide to th...

Od whatsawhizzer

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So you just started an account... Or maybe you've been here a while and you just aren't getting a feel for th... Viac

Day 1: What do I do?
Etiquette - How to be Nice on Wattpad
How do I get reads on Wattpad?
Critiquing 101
How to write a decent Critique?
Writing Dialogue
Dialogue Tags
How to Gain Followers
Copyright Law
Describing Faces
Ten Common Wattpad Pitfalls In Writing
In the US - The American Education System High School & College
The 7 Sins of Wattpad (What not to do)
Editing 101
Accepting Criticism
Writing in the Male Point of View
How to Write a Blurb/Summary
How to Come up with Good Title and Character Names... or Not
Writing Tools and Software to Help You Improve
Describing Bodies
What to do about Adverbs
How to Start a Story
How long should my chapter be?
How to Get Over Writer's Block
What you "can" do and what you "should" do.
5 Complaints about Wattpad
Commonly Misused Words
Clichés Do Not Equal Bad
The Mary Sue and Female Inconsistency Syndrome
Sexy Food and Useless Descriptions
Unreliable Critiquers and Authors
Disposable Words That Bloat Your Writing
Describing Points of View
Critique Horoscoping
Pretty Little Nothings and Purple Prose
A Big Sloppy List of Cliches (By Genre)
Comments, Likes, and Readers; Oh my!
How to write a paragraph
Chapter Breaks and Point of View Titles
Six Inappropriate Subjects to Write About
How Do I Describe My Main Character?
Writing Your First Story
Wattpad Popular Versus Publishable
How I Learned to Describe My Books Before People Read Them!
This is Just Fiction
Filler Introduction Chapters
A Message for the Younger Followers on Entitlement
The Moral Question
Every Fan Fiction Ever Written
Every Fan Fiction Ever Written (Part 2)
Every Fan Fiction Ever Written (Part 3)
Every Fan Fiction Ever Written (Final)
Foreshadowing 101
Sex and Wattpad's Mature Rating System
Accents, Banter, and Lizard People?
How to Write an Interesting Story
The Four Narrative Forms of Fiction
Target Audience and Niche Writing
What Do You Want, Wattpad?
World Building 101
Sex, Consent, and America!
Plot Armor and Character Death
Editing 201 - The First Things to Fix
Wattpad's Ranking System Revealed!!!
Statistics and Demographics
Write WHATEVER you WANT
How to Become a Published Author
In The US - Classes, Homes, and Cars
How Much is Money?
Every Fantasy Ever Written
US Versus UK Grammar and Spelling
In The US - Diet, Obesity, and Fat-shaming?
How to Become a Better Writer
Every Science Fiction Story Ever Written
Fixing Format Foibles
The Weakest Form of Writing
Fan Fiction 101
"Show, Don't Tell" and Other Thoughts On Description
Writing Dialogue 102
What You Don't Write, Doesn't Exist
More Shameless Self Promotion
How to Write a Three-Dimensional Character
Outrage, Backlash, and the Art of Being Offended
Getting Help on Wattpad
Writing for Indians
Writing a Darker Story
The Group Mentality Chapette
Accepting Criticism: Take 2
It's Like, My Opinion, Man
Same Story, Different Writers (Part 1)
Same Story, Different Writers (Part 2)
What the Heck is Filtering?
Grammar Nazis
A Wattpad History
Please Star and Comment on This Chapter
100 Reasons Your Work Isn't Getting Stars
Quit Starring Yourself, You'll Go Blind
Git Gud: Some Advice for The Youngest Writers
Applicability Versus Allegory
Is The Bible a "Good" Book?
The Ten Grammar Mistakes That Anger Your Readers The Most
Self-Publishing On Amazon: Living the Dream
The Ten Worst Comments On Wattpad
Editing 301 - Drafts
Ten People You've Met on Wattpad
The Cost of Chapter Length
Emordnilap Palindrome
Help! Help! I'm Being Infringed!
The 10 Biggest Mistakes In This Book
An Update on the New Ranking System!!!
Reader's Fatigue
The Dream Sequence
Tag Your Story 101
Commenting 101
Microediting and Why I Don't Like It
I Don't Write Filler
When Arguing Goes Too Far (Defending Versus Arguing)
You're Worth It
Get Your Suspension of Disbelief Out of My Plot Hole
Five Skills Towards Becoming A Better Webnovel Writer
5 Critical Comments About Critical Commenters
Anchoring Bias or Why Your Brain Is Dumb
Public Readers are the Worst
Artists, Illustrators, and Book Covers
Grammatical Indecisiveness and the Philosopher's Bone (To Pick)

What's with your Prologue?

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Od whatsawhizzer

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.

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