MathiasCavanaugh.com

If someone tells you, as an author, that you should “never” to this or “always” do that when writing, my advice would be to ignore them. Telling someone such things is not advice on their part. It is merely their own prejudices establishing guardrails in their own minds which they are not willing to cross and which they believe everyone else must be bound within.

One thing I have discovered very quickly is that there are some people, be they writers of fiction or readers of the same, who hold some very illogical opinions. One such thing I find people very passionate about are the means though which an author should provide back-story.  More than a handful of people say really strange things on this topic.  Like, that they don’t read prologues because if it isn’t part of the “main” story then they are not interested, and that the author should give all information the reader requires during the course of the story.

This boggles my mind!  Because prologues always have been considered parts of the stories to which they belong.  Many famous and great works of fiction have prologues.  Are people who so ardently claim to be against prologues saying that when they read absolute classics like Romeo and Juliet that they skip the prologue?  Nonsense!  Silliness! Read more…

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.