A novelist revising the household novel, the book this guide uses as its running example, has been told by two early readers to cut her prologue. The prologue is one page in the father’s viewpoint on his last ordinary day. He counts the till twice, waves off a boy knocking at the glass, means to flip the sign to CLOSED and does not, and puts the good pen, the fountain pen he keeps by the till for the ledger, into his coat pocket. Chapter One belongs to his daughter Nadia, four months after his death in March. The readers’ complaint is the usual one: nothing happens, the father is not in the rest of the book, and the book should start where the book starts.
She cuts it. The new first page is Nadia counting register receipts that nobody else thinks need counting, and it reads well, as an opening scene with a want in it. The loss appears two hundred pages later. About two-thirds of the way through, Nadia puts her hand into the pocket of her father’s coat, still on its hook in the flat above the shop, and finds the good pen. In the draft with the prologue the reader saw him put it there, so the discovery is a recognition: the reader knows how the pen got into the pocket and Nadia does not. Without the prologue the scene is a discovery like any other, a pen in a pocket. The dread the prologue laid over every domestic scene, the reader’s knowledge that the ordinary day was the last one, has gone too, and nothing in the main narrative can restore it, because none of the three children was in the shop that day.
She restores the page and, to meet her readers halfway, heads it Chapter One. A third reader reports something different. She took the father for the protagonist, settled into his head, and felt dropped when the next chapter moved to Nadia. The label Prologue had been doing a job as well: it told the reader that this viewpoint would not be held, which let her watch the father without attaching herself to him.
The novelist has learned three things by experiment. The page earns its existence, since cutting it costs the book a recognition and a dread. It earns its position, since nothing inside the main narrative can see that day. And its label is an instruction about how to read, not a title. What she could not do was say any of this before the experiment, and the chapter’s purpose is to make that saying routine, so that the decision is made by argument instead of by trial and error.
The readers who said cut it were not wrong to be suspicious. A prologue asks of a reader things an ordinary scene does not. It makes her begin twice, investing in one situation, setting it down and investing again a few pages later. It asks her to hold the first situation in reserve for an interval she cannot estimate. And it occupies the position she uses to decide what kind of book she is holding. Readers who have met many prologues that repay none of this learn to resent the label, and editors who read submissions at speed learn the same thing faster. The suspicion is a reasonable response to a poor average. The chapter turns it into a test instead of a rule.
The chapter’s claim. A prologue is not asking to be kept. It is asking to be kept separate, and those are different arguments. A scene that does no work the reader would miss is cut. A prologue that does real work, but work the main narrative could do as well, is not cut: it is absorbed, and its material moves to where it belongs.
The rest of the chapter supplies the means. The definitions separate the prologue from the cold open, the preface, the frame and the epigraph, which are often mistaken for it. How It Works gives the reasons a separated unit costs a reader more than an equally good scene inside Chapter One. The taxonomy names what a prologue can do that the main narrative cannot, and the mechanism shows how the distance it opens is closed. The tests, failures and worked analyses turn all of this into a decision about a draft: keep it separate, absorb it, or relocate it.
See also: the Reference introduction, on the two beginnings and on the chapter’s place beside the opening and the ending.