12.1 Practical exercises
Exercise 1 — The domain audit. Annotate your prologue per §5.5, marking each sentence’s domains and then marking each domain I (could be done inside) or X (requires exteriority). Write 250 words on what the I/X distribution reveals. Justify every X in a sentence beginning “This cannot be done from inside Chapter One because…”.
Exercise 2 — Type substitution. Identify your prologue’s type from the fourteen at §6.3. Rewrite the same material as two other types that preserve the load-bearing axis. Do not judge which is best until all three exist. Write 300 words comparing what each buys and costs.
Exercise 3 — The absorption attempt. Physically write your prologue’s material into Chapter One — as a memory, a document, a line of dialogue, or a relocated scene. Then produce the inventory of what could not be carried across (§7.1, test 2). This exercise resolves more prologue problems than any other in this list, and it resolves a substantial minority of them by ending in absorption.
Exercise 4 — The label experiment. Print your prologue three times: headed Prologue, headed Chapter One, and headed nothing at all. Give the three versions to three readers who have not seen the manuscript. Ask each to describe, in two sentences, what kind of book they expect. Record the answers verbatim.
Exercise 5 — The skip test, run properly. Give a reader the manuscript with instructions to begin at Chapter One. Interview at page 100 and at the end, using the four questions at §7.1, test 8. The intended profile is nothing incomprehensible, and something lost; write 200 words on which profile you actually obtained.
Exercise 6 — The plant ledger. Tabulate every specific in your prologue against every page on which it recurs. Sort into the three regions of §7.1, test 7. Then cut, rather than invent, until the “never recurs” region is empty.
Exercise 7 — The return schedule. Draw the book as a horizontal line. Mark the prologue at the left and every closing instalment at its proportional position. Assess the shape against §6.6: is the first instalment inside the first quarter, do the weights increase, and is there a long cold interval anywhere?
Exercise 8 — The false-advertising rewrite. Deliberately write a false-advertising version of your own prologue, as §9.9’s Version A does — the same characters and material, rendered in a genre the book does not belong to. Then run test 10 on it. The exercise teaches by inversion: writing the failure on purpose makes its symptoms visible in drafts where they were unintentional.
Exercise 9 — Historical transposition. Take a contemporary novel with a prologue and rewrite its threshold twice: once as an eighteenth-century editorial fiction, once as a Euripidean speaker supplying antecedents. Write 500 words on what each version can say that the original cannot, and on what the original’s reticence buys.
12.2 Seminar questions
Is the higher bar a craft principle or a market artefact? §3.6 argues that contemporary hostility to prologues has institutional rather than aesthetic causes, and §3.10 concedes that the bar presupposes a sceptical reader. Test the bar against a pre-1850 prologue and a post-1990 one. Does anything survive that is not a description of acquisition practice?
Five domains or six? Argue for or against admitting the authority domain (§4.6) as a separate category. The strongest evidence on each side: Dracula’s note and The Handmaid’s Tale’s “Historical Notes” for the affirmative; Genette’s existing typology of fictive and apocryphal prefaces for the negative.
“The Custom-House”: design or self-indulgence? §8.4 and §9.3 defend the non-closure as thematically motivated. A long critical tradition reads it instead as a professional grievance Hawthorne could not bring himself to cut. Competent critics disagree. Which reading better explains the sketch’s length — and does the answer change how the romance should be taught?
Does the label belong in the definition? Wuthering Heights and Their Eyes Were Watching God perform every prologue function without the label (§9.2, §9.5). Is the definition at §2.1 therefore too narrow, or is “prologue-function without a prologue” a distinction that should be kept? Consider what each answer implies for §7.1’s test 3.
Whose conventions? The failure patterns at §8 are drawn from an Anglo-American workshop tradition. Examine the threshold apparatus of a work outside it — The Tale of Genji, Dream of the Red Chamber, The Thousand and One Nights, Season of Migration to the North — and consider which of §8’s prohibitions describe narrative and which describe a local literary culture. The Thousand and One Nights is a particularly sharp case: its frame is not a prologue but the machine that generates the book.
Is fragmentary closure always better? §6.6 argues that it usually is, on the grounds of frame warmth, and concedes two exceptions. Test the argument against a novel whose prologue is a structural secret. Does the concession swallow the rule for whole genres — and if the crime novel is a systematic exception, what does that say about the generality of the claim?
12.3 Assessment rubric
For a submitted prologue (800–2,000 words) with the first chapter it precedes (1,000–1,500 words) and a 750-word critical commentary.
| Band | Craft (60%) | Commentary (40%) |
|---|---|---|
| Distinction | Two or more domains served, at least one requiring exteriority; a load-bearing axis that is identifiable and unmixed with decoration; specifics that are recoverable and scheduled; a pitch, pace, mode and scale that match the chapter that follows; a last sentence that earns its position | Names its type and defends it against two alternatives; states the closing schedule and justifies its shape; identifies its own weakest domain; engages at least two theoretical sources critically rather than decoratively; distinguishes market objections from structural ones |
| Merit | A defensible positional claim; distance opened on an identifiable axis; some specifics planted with intent; register consistent with the book | Accurate self-analysis; the closing is described if not fully justified; theory applied rather than cited |
| Pass | A competent scene in the prologue position; the separation asserted but thinly justified; some unredeemed specifics | Describes the prologue accurately; theory referenced but not applied; the absorption question not seriously entertained |
| Fail | No axis of distance, or distance opened with no closing contemplated; false advertising unrecognised; the prologue indistinguishable from a first chapter | Description without analysis; the higher bar restated rather than applied; no engagement with the possibility of absorption |
A note to markers. A submission that concludes “this material should be absorbed into Chapter One”, argues the case rigorously, and supplies the absorbed version, should be marked as a success, not as a failure to produce a prologue. The chapter’s central operation is a three-way decision (§7.0), and reaching the second option correctly is a better outcome than defending the first badly.