Hi,

I am writing a detective novel and the first chapter is set in the Middle East and the second chapter switches to the UK where the crimes take place.

Do you think I should do the first chapter as a prologue (it sets up the rest of the book) or should I just label it as chapter 1? What are your thoughts?

Interesting because I'm also writing a crime novel and have a prologue and your question made me suddenly realise that I didn't really know what one was!

This sounds reasonable:

http://www.foremostpress.com/authors/articles/prologue.html

It sounds as though, if your Middle East bit immediately precedes the rest of the action, it should be Chapter One.

I'm sure that people who actually know what they're talking about will respond, though!

This is a discussion that occasionally crops up on this site. Some people don't seem to like prologues on principal. Others have suggested that they work best when what they contain sets the scene for the story without being directly part of the main story.

For example, you might start a historical novel set in post-Roman Britain by showing a Roman-period event whose long-term consequences the main story explores. That scene isn't really part of the main story, but is a prelude to it. In that situation, it would probably work as a prologue.

Even then, though, the scene might work better as Chapter 1. I feel that it probably depends on how long it is. I think of prologues as being much shorter than a chapter, so if the events/scene that you want to show is a lengthy one it might be better as Chapter 1.

I blogged about prologues, which might help you think things through:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/07/prologues.html

Emma

Hi,

That is helpful. I think it can stay as Chapter 1. It is too long for a prologue and there is too much information spread out in the first chapter that is relevant for the rest of the book. I can't pare it back enough so that it will still set-up the rest of the plot.

Thanks for the helpful comments

Sounds like a good call.

Among my many revisions to my WiP - and believe me there have been a few - I changed Chapter One to become a Prologue. This was because the tone of the chapter was quite unlike the following chapters.

However, it didn't work as a prologue - not fitting with what a prologue should ideally be. What I needed to do - and have subsequently done - was revise the tone, to better fit with subsequent chapters and the general tone of the book.

What I should have also done, was do as you did and ask more specific questions about the basis for a prologue.

ask more specific questions about the basis for a prologue.

That's the conclusion I came to in writing that blog - that finding yourself wanting a prologue is a sign that it might need more thinking through... and the answer might turn out to be that you need a prologue, but it might not.

Yes, what Emma said - Mongoose (great name by the way). I started with a prologue that just ended up saying 'Northern India 1820'. I didn't need it - I just thought I did.

I didn't need it - I just thought I did.

Or you needed it at the beginning - as part of working out that aspect of the backstory or whatever it was. Process writing, in other words.

And what you created - what you found out by writing it - then fed later stuff, and then you go back and take out that bit of scaffolding - the tacking-stitches - the collar round the soufflé once it's been in the fridge long enough to set...

I'm not a great one for cutting - my drafts don't get hugely shorter in revision - but it's almost always the early bits that lose most: that's where I was putting in all sorts of things which might or might not turn out to flower later... the ones which didn't get cut.

Process writing, in other words.

I didn't realise there was a name for it. That is absolutely what it is.

Yes, I think realising that some of the "wrong" writing needed to happen before you could reach the "right" writing is very important part of understanding how writing works for so many of us - whether your process is to write a shitty-first-draft of a novel, or of a paragraph, before you go back and make it work:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2010/12/the-common-scaffold.html

I would say that's more important than the so-called "rules" that writers are supposed to follow. Sometimes, you can only tell how you need to write a story or scene once you've made the first attempt, or maybe even the first few attempts. As with any expressive art, it's only when you've got the thing in front of you that you can tell whether it works.

Sometimes, you can only tell how you need to write a story or scene once you've made the first attempt, or maybe even the first few attempts.

So true.

I am seriously contemplating going back to the material and characters (though absolutely not the text) of a novel that took me two years to not-make-work.