How to Write a Prologue for Your Book

      In my previous blog article, I talked about whether you should have a prologue in your book.  If you missed reading it, you can read it here.  
 
     In this article, I am going to talk about how to write a Prologue if you want to place one in your book.  As stated in the previous article, a Prologue should be short and to the point.  The shorter the Prologue the better for the reader.  In fact, most Prologue's should never venture past three pages at the most.  If they do, you might want to consider making this Chapter One instead.

     Here is someone talking about how to write a Prologue in the video below:

     In my previous article, I stated that I love Prologue's and I have used them in several of my books.  One, in particular, is when I used it in a book I wrote called:  "Shattered Pieces of Shay".  In this book, I felt the prologue was needed.  But, I made sure it was short and to the point.

     Here is the prologue in the book:

Prologue

Shay fought her way through the water in the vast, Atlantic Ocean.  How did this happen and how did she go from being on the deck of Brandon's yacht to being in the water fighting for her life.  She struggled and desperately looked up in the direction of the boat hoping that someone would at least throw her a life preserver, but all she saw was her husband of four years, Brandon standing there looking directly down at her with a stone, cold look on his face before she went under the water. 

As you can see the Prologue is short and to the point.  What happens later is Shay's body washes ashore only to awake with amnesia. So when she eventually reunites with her husband she has no idea that he had thrown her overboard because he wanted to kill her. The reader discovers why he wants to kill her, but Shay is oblivious to this, which hopefully makes the reader want to know if Shay will get her memory back in time before it is too late.

So if you really feel the need to have a Prologue in your book, my suggestion is to make sure it is short.  Believe me, most readers don't want to read a long Prologue and will abandon your story if it is too long.

In my next blog entry, I going to talk about how to write a strong first chapter if you decide you don't want to write a Prologue but want to make sure your beginning doesn't send your reader to sleep.

So stay tuned!