Ok, I promised you some writerly bang for your buck (non-existent buck, I might add, as this newsletter is free) and it seemed the best place to start was at the very beginning, and that is prologues.
In Elmore Leonard’s famous ten rules for writing, his second rule was: avoid prologues. Which makes everything I’m about to say slightly awkward. “They can be annoying,” he wrote, “A prologue in a novel is back story, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.”
You see, I beg to differ. I am a huge fan of prologues. Why? Because they represent your contract with your reader. What you are stating here, right from the first page – actually, before your first page – is why someone should pick up your book and keep reading. They work beautifully, in my opinion, in both fiction and non-fiction, though I have tended only to use them in my ghosting work until now.
But before I dive into the ins and outs of a prologue, what I want to talk you through is the most perfect one I have seen lately, …