MathiasCavanaugh.com
Writing a prologue
I have written a couple thousand more words to my story over the weekend. I’ve started to get into the meat of things at this point where the main character is well on his journey.
While I have at times thrown in some backstory as conversations between characters allow I am left wondering if the entire setting of the story and the overarching world conflict is well enough defined to someone who might be reading this story. To me things are well understood, but I am the writer and not a typical reader. I understand that this is just a first, rough draft but I want to be sure everything makes sense to the reader. I have gone back through much of what I have written looking for places to expound but do not see many if any.
Thus I have opted to go back and write a prologue to the story. Since my setting is a robust world and the story is being told from a limited third person POV (as of right now) prejudices and perceptions of the main character simply prevent major knowledge of the world’s past from being known or seen through untainted opinions.
This prologue may not work out but I am going to try it. It may even get looped into the main body of the story later on. I don’t have an aversion to prologues but I know some authors and readers do for their own reasons. I have seen prologues that work and ones that do no.
I plan on using a standard prologue which is to give background and knowledge to the reader about things that happened before the main story and before the characters of the story were even born. I do not plan on using it to introduce the main or sub characters of the story as a sort of Chapter 1.
Still looking for the short story I set out to write though. Until that crops up I plan on plugging ahead with this longer work.
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