Writer's Fallout Shelter

Bernidette surmised:
The first section is going to begin around the time two of my characters meet but I was going to have a prologue that was a scene from where the SECOND section begins. So the first section was going to be a bit of a flash back.


A couple of things leap immediately to mind. First of all, it sounds to me as though the real problem is not the type of opening, but where to open the story. If the first section is "slow", perhaps it contributes less to the story than it should and removing it entirely could be a consideration? Perhaps instead of a long flashback, important points from the first section could be highlighted as the story unfolds through short flashbacks, reminisences, or through dialogue (characters discussing some event in their shared past)?

Is the story already written? If you have not yet penned a first draft, perhaps that needs to be gotten out of the way first and then you can move bits and pieces around and experiment with different timelines before sitting down to rewrite the final version. Some writers create their novels as scenes. They sketch out the scenes in brief descriptions of a page or two each and shuffle them around until they find a comfortable timeline.

As for the prologue itself, personally, I always read them. Some of them are very powerful, some of them are a waste of time, and others are just plain weird, but I always read them. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series has extensive prologues in almost every book. A couple them add nothing to the story except bulk, a couple of them set up important elements of the next book in the series, a couple of them are little more than quick reviews of what came before. Sadly, I found almost none of them to be effective. I feel a truly effective prologue would have been a scene opening the first book with Lan and Moraine outside the village of Two Rivers having a brief discussion about why they had come to this out of the way farming village and hinting at why their mission was so important.

As a reader, the prologues that impress me most and leave the strongest impression are those that at first seem to have little or no relation to the story but later on turn out to have contained some absolutely vital piece of information that the writer had no other comfortable way of including in the story. For example, Robert Heinlein's book, Glory Road. The first chapter contributes absolutely nothing to the overall story. It does, however, provide some important insights into the personality of the main character which explain why he allows himself to be dragged into an impossible adventure on a distant world. To my mind, it really should have been a prologue because skipping it does not lessen the impact of the story while reading it enhances the experience of the reader.

Some readers do skip prologues. There is nothing "stupid" or bad about this habit. A reader has the freedom to read in any fashion they choose. If they like, there is nothing to stop them from starting at the last page and working their back to the opening. As writers, we cannot ever hope to control how any individual reader approaches our work. The only thing we can do, is present it in the fashion we feel has the greatest impact and provides the biggest bang for the buck. The final judgement, however, is always in the hands of the reader.