Things You Need to Know: Prologues, Blurbs, and Foreshadowing

The deeper you go into the rabbit hole of writing, I feel like you suddenly start seeing a lot of advice on What Not to Do maybe more so than general advice on good writing technique. To me, this leads to a jumble of mixed opinions on all sorts of things, which can suddenly make even the most confident writer unsure of themselves.

            Let’s take a moment to stop right here and take a breath from that ensuing panic, shall we? Maybe this sounds dumb to some people, but I sit firmly in the camp of there’s no strict, specific way to write a book correctly. If you sit down to write a story and do so to the best of your ability, the way you write it is fully up to you no matter what advice anyone gives. Trust your gut and try not to get caught up in the noise of what everyone else says to do.

            Now, to the point of a lot of writing advice, I think a fair amount of it might be given in attempt to ward off overuse. It always seems like there’s a ton of lists warning writers of cliché techniques, for good reason, or opinions on elements people get tired of seeing. On a larger scale, some reuse of elements can be primarily driven by genre (or as Kristin and I suspect) pressure from publishers. Have you ever read a couple series by the same author and caught on to the use of very close elements or tropes? Is this an author just recycling ideas, utilizing common story elements specific to their genre, or being told to write something they’ve proven can sell? Hard to say.

            But getting back to my point, one comment about writing I’ve heard is that some people just will not read prologues. Like, they just skip over them, I guess assuming they’re unnecessary to the story at large and the reader probably won’t miss much by skipping it. Maybe this is my writer brain, but I don’t understand this.

            I can see where people are coming from on prologues though. A prologue is usually an opening scene that differs quite a bit from the traditional part of the story in setting, character, or tone, so the vibe is usually considerably distinct from the rest of the book. It is kind of a weird setup scene that doesn’t start the reader out at the initial point of action, which might slow down your pacing, and there probably are instances where information could have been included later within the story itself rather than been given a separate scene at the front.

            Now I’m not someone who’s immediately going to skip a prologue if I see one, but I do think as a writer you have to determine whether or not one is needed. To me, a writer would include a prologue if there was information that absolutely had to be given to the reader before the main inciting incident. For example, my mind immediately jumps to stories with complex backgrounds, characters that the readers will need to know later, or a wider setup at large.

            Let’s look at some examples. There will be spoilers ahead.

            Take Eragon by Christopher Paolini. This first book in The Inheritance Cycle doesn’t start with the title character, Eragon, but with an enemy Shade about to ambush Arya, the main girl of the series, attempting to protect one of the last known dragon eggs. Arya’s desperate ploy to get the egg to safety is what inadvertently gets the egg to Eragon in the first place and results in her capture, setting up the need for her eventual rescue. This prologue creates the direct cause-and-effect for the events of the story. Though he didn’t start directly at the events of the core story, Paolini started at a crucial event and still gave himself a high-action scene to start in.

            Two of my favorite reads of 2023 were newer books that started with a prologue. Amie Kaufman’s The Isles of the Gods starts with an eight-page scene set five hundred and one years before the actual beginning of the main story. This scene introduces you firsthand to characters who will mostly be regarded historically later and succinctly lays out the complex mythology of the world within the story. This is the incident that starts the subsequent need to travel to the Isles of the Gods, which is the primary goal of Kaufman’s mix of heroes and villains. Most of this story takes place around the gods and myths of the world, so I think a lot of this prologue is to help the reader be introduced to it in a digestible manner before the story takes off running. Second, Marissa Meyer’s Renegades series opens in a tragic prologue familiar to all of us well-versed in the world of superheroes. This is the incident where the main girl, Nova, gets forced onto the path of the villain (or hero?) she’s meant to be, so this section presents her origin story in classic superhero style.

            If prologues aren’t your thing, but you have some information you feel your readers need to know before the start of your story, I can actually think of a lot of books that don’t necessarily start at the beginning of the core story or don’t utilize a prologue to immerse you into the story. Chapter one of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (J.K. Rowling) starts with a baby Harry getting dropped off at Privet Drive, rather than the magic-prone, eleven-year-old Harry at the core of the story, so I could see where that in and of itself could be viewed as a prologue if it was classified differently. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and The Kane Chronicles, both start off with brief messages warning the readers off unless they’re willing to risk danger and know the truth. The Lightning Thief is pretty much just a warning, but Kane Chronicles is written in a way that lets readers know they’re listening to a recording the main characters have made and left to warn others. Do scenes like that technically count as prologues? I’m not sure if that’s what they’re considered or if there’s some other kind of term for them.

            Another technique for bringing in information or starting the reader off in an exciting moment is to grab a dramatic snippet of scene from later in the book, usually a scene where a character is in dire peril, and pop it in right at the front for a taste of action before backtracking.

A good example of this is the first book in Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s sci-fi trilogy, Aurora Rising, which alternates at break-neck speed between scenes of Tyler Jones attempting to rescue the lone survivor of a long-lost ship and the events that accidentally (or not so accidentally) led him to be there.

Once again, Rick Riordan utilizes this technique as well in multiple books. His Nico Di Angelo led stand-alone, The Sun and the Star, which he wrote with Mark Oshiro, jumps from the present story to previous events as Nico narrates his side of things. In the same vein, his Norse mythology series, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Sword of Summer, begins with a brief section where Magnus clearly announces to the reader that he’s about to tell the story of how he died.

All the examples I’ve currently mentioned have been placed right at the beginning of each book, with the exception of The Sun and the Star which runs through a good portion of the story. Adding little additional scenes throughout the story too can be a really interesting way to continue telling the story dynamically, while also playing off of and introducing new information. I feel like I talk about the same, like, ten series all the time, but I like talking about books that just have really cool writing technique to me. So, let me present another series I talk about all the time.

One of the most interesting and best utilizations of information scenes spread throughout a story is Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s Starbound trilogy. These books don’t have a specific prologue, but they sprinkle information in a brief scene (usually only one page) between each chapter in what I’m going to refer to as a “blurb”.  In B1, These Broken Stars, the first blurb makes it clear that Tarver, the main guy in the story, is being interrogated, and so while he and Lilac, the main girl, narrate the story of what really happened to them after they were shipwrecked to the reader, it becomes apparently clear as the blurbs continue that Tarver is being a little less than forthcoming with whoever it is asking him about what happened. This is an excellent way to build tension as these two characters struggle to survive after the crash because, for one thing, it immediately gets your mind pounding with information you don’t know what to do with. Obviously, there’s a rescue, but why is Tarver the only one being interrogated? Did they both make it? Why is he being interrogated and by whom? Why is he not fully telling the truth? Like, even with a writer brain, the first time I read this book, I couldn’t figure it all out.

B2, This Shattered World, expands on where B1 left off, though jumps to different characters on a different planet. Based on what you know from B1, things are a little less trippy, but the blurbs in this book present themselves as dreams where the main girl, Jubilee, replays events from her past (informing the reader of her own backstory) but there’s always some element to the dream that’s off.

B3, Their Fractured Light, which is probably one of the best trilogy-ending books I’ve read, presents blurbs that are memories from “the whispers”, which are the alien intelligence who’ve brought the six leading characters together. Up until this point, the whispers are pretty mysterious, but this inclusion of their side of the story just ties up all the things the reader didn’t understand about the story so nicely that it completely breaks your brain with each new reveal.

This technique of brief information dropping, even if it doesn’t immediately make sense until more is known, is so engaging and effective because it always keeps your mind running trying to figure it out. Kaufman and Spooner really executed this series fantastically, and I’ll probably keep jabbering about it forever.

So, I think when it comes to when and where to put information, writers have a lot of decisions to make. A prologue might be a good idea if you’ve got something complicated to introduce like The Isles of the Gods or need to jump to a character we’ll see again later that is crucial to the cause and effect of the major story like Eragon. Still, in both instances, both authors chose to keep their prologues very brief and succinct, and Eragon started immediately with an action-packed scene. There’s also something like Harry Potter that begins with a prologue-like scene, but it’s considered more of a first chapter.

Maybe this is one thing that just rubs me wrong about readers skipping prologues due to irrelevance, but as a writer, a prologue is exactly the kind of place where I’d be hiding all sorts of clues for later. I’ve not tried to write prologues very often- like I said, I think you really have to weigh what you’ve got to convey, brevity (my eternal enemy), and action to determine whether one’s necessary- but anytime I have, I’ve always tried to hide as much as I can to come into play later.

If you determine a prologue isn’t for you, maybe look around at your favorite books or some of the examples I’ve mentioned because there’s a ton of different ways to tell the info your story needs. Maybe a brief foreshadowing scene or creative warning like Rick Riordan might be enough or an action-packed start and backtrack would peak your reader’s interest. I forgot to say it before, but those scenes that throw you into a story at a dramatic moment and then are like “Stop! Hold it! Back up!” always remind me of the opening scene from Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove. Anyway, as you can see, there’s no right way to give your reader the information they need to know. Look at Starbound, they used the same in-between chapter blurb style in each book, but the medium conveying the info was completely different and tailored to each stage of the story: interrogation, strange dreams, memories. There are no rules- just be creative and have fun with it!

Got any other great examples of stories that present information in different ways or recommendations for technique on this? Let us know!

Thanks for reading. Write on.

-Kamryn