The nine tests are for revision, and most need the finished manuscript, since the closing, the plants and the genre contract cannot be judged from the prologue alone. Run tests 1 to 4 (Higher bar, Absorption, Label and Axis) first: they decide whether the prologue should be separate at all, and there is no point tuning the register of a passage that belongs in Chapter One’s third paragraph. Record a sentence, not a verdict. The output of the whole set is a three-way decision, keep separate, absorb or relocate, and very few prologues should simply be deleted, because the material is usually good and only its compartment is wrong.
Test 1 — Higher bar
Can you complete “This must sit outside the main narrative because…” with an impossibility, not a preference?
Failure. Real work, wrongly placed.
Exception. Middlemarch, whose intrusive narrator could have asked the Prelude’s question in chapter 1.
Test 2 — Absorption
Write the material into Chapter One, then cut it entirely: what breaks each time?
Failure. Nothing breaks, or only a hook is lost.
Exception. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, whose flowers Henrik later explains to Blomkvist anyway.
Test 3 — Label
Would anything change if the prologue were headed Chapter One?
Failure. Chapter One in disguise.
Exception. Their Eyes Were Watching God, whose overture works inside chapter 1.
Test 4 — Axis
Which of time, place, viewpoint and register carries the load, if any?
Failure. No axis, or several incidental ones.
Exception. The Breaking Bad pilot, distant only by weeks, on a screen where the cold open is free.
Test 5 — Register
Rewritten in Chapter One’s voice, does the material survive, go flat, or become impossible?
Failure. Information, not register.
Exception. The Da Vinci Code, whose prologue shares the book’s register and rests on viewpoint.
Test 6 — Closing
For each element the prologue opens, on what page does the book next touch it?
Failure. A distance never closed.
Exception. The Turn of the Screw, whose frame never resumes.
Test 7 — Plants
Which specifics recur, once or more, and which never?
Failure. Unredeemed promises in a privileged position.
Exception. The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, many of whose pilgrims never tell a tale.
Test 8 — Skip
Can a reader who starts at Chapter One follow the whole book, and what does she lose?
Failure. Nothing lost, or something incomprehensible.
Exception. “Concerning Hobbits”, skipped by many readers at a cost the book accepts.
Test 9 — Genre contract
Do the prologue, pages 40 to 60 and the last chapter share pitch, pace, mode and scale?
Failure. False advertising.
Exception. The Scarlet Letter, whose satirical essay precedes a tragic romance.
Three refinements sharpen the tests. In test 1 (Higher bar), a completion that ends because it would not be as striking names a preference and counts as a failure; acceptable completions sound like because no one in the main narrative could have seen it or because the vantage belongs to someone dead before Chapter One. In test 6 (Closing), a viewpoint gap “closed” by the narrative reaching the right date is a mismatch: a viewpoint distance is closed by a viewpoint event, a time distance by arrival, a register distance by recurrence. In test 8 (Skip), the reader must be someone else, interviewed at page 100 and at the end, and the intended profile is nothing incomprehensible and something lost.
Reading the results together
Failures cluster, and the cluster points to the first move. Tests 1 (Higher bar) and 3 (Label) together mean a Chapter One in disguise: relabel and renumber, and nothing else is needed. Tests 1 (Higher bar) and 4 (Axis) together mean a strong scene in the wrong compartment: absorb it, using the inventory test 2 (Absorption) produced. Test 4 (Axis) alone means distance that costs without buying: collapse the prologue onto its load-bearing axis and expect to lose about a third of its length. Test 6 (Closing) alone means a distance the book forgot: build the closing, preferably in fragments, or absorb the material so that no gap needs closing, but do not add a late scene that explains it. Test 7 (Plants) alone means over-planting: cut specifics rather than inventing payoffs. A failure on test 8 (Skip) because something is incomprehensible means the book depends on a unit it has licensed the reader to skip: restate the essential fact in the main narrative, so that the prologue supplies first knowledge, not only knowledge.
Test 9 (Genre contract) alone means false advertising, and it carries a warning. When a prologue and its book disagree, writers revise the book toward the prologue, because the prologue is more finished and often written last with the whole book in view. The direction is usually wrong. The prologue is a thousand words and the book a hundred thousand, and the smaller object is the one to change.
See also: the Reference protocol, with ten tests (removal separated from absorption), their procedures, and a table of combined failures.