It may be worth noting that the character in the Prologue is not the protagonist--she actually ends up being a minor character for much of the book.

Ah, cool. I can see that.

Something amusing: I saw the "The Archive" in the header, and I thought it meant you had pulled this out your archive, since it was something you'd been working on for a long time. Then it dawned on me that it was the actual title.

Question to prologue-writing folks. Do you find that to be the most efficient way of clarifying important matters that take place in the past? My mind keeps returning to the original novel I've got, where the main story takes place ten years after the instigating events. Most advice I see says to start a book with something going on, but I don't feel comfortable starting the conflict without showing the settled, comfortable life my heroine is currently living. I need to show some of what she has to lose before revealing the dichotomy that is her past.

I just have flashbacks interwoven, myself. Time will tell if I made the right decision, especially with my tense problems.

A prologue to tease the audience about some central problem is a fairly common technique in the fantasy genre, but it has to be very vague to avoid giving anything away. I personally used one in my book because I wanted to broaden the world I was about to introduce (the first actual chapter takes place in a much narrower environment, and I wanted the reader to get a taste of broader problems at hand).

I don't feel comfortable starting the conflict without showing the settled, comfortable life my heroine is currently living.

Is it possible to show a snippet of this time without giving away too much about who is involved? Anonymous woman from Prologue could be anyone in the heroine's life, not just the heroine.

That said, I agree with erika that flashbacks woven in often work just as well. Like I said, I'm writing in fantasy right now. When I'm writing in a "normal" style, I usually don't use one. (I'm anything but original.)

While I guess many fantasy works contain prologues, I don't think "normal" ones can't not work with them. A lot of my short story ideas start in medias res, so while this can lead to either interwoven flashbacks or one long flashback, the first section can effectively be considered a prologue.

In your case, Connie, I say go with it. You have a lot of flexibility at the beginning, so if you think a prologue will help, do it. I find them to be very good for hooks. The one in Plainsong had a killer punchline.

The heroine was in a relationship with a severely abusive man, but she was finally able to walk away--true, she'd just gotten engaged to someone else, but one takes one's impetuses where one can. If I did the scene where she walks away from him, and the villain is apparently calm and supportive while she's terribly nervous but determined, it should make people wonder what's up with that. Plus if people think she's gotten married, readers shouldn't automatically realize it's her when she turns up single again. This could work.

Hey, I could actually get back to that and finish it. The first draft's been done, but the beginning has been an unholy mess and doesn't match the second half. At the very least, a prologue will knock the dust off of it.

The whole thread is being productive! Yay, creativity!

Has the world turned enough, you think, that a thriller set in the financial centers of New York could/could not get away with a passing reference to 9/11? The heroine of my novel works on Wall Street, and I was thinking she could say in a melancholy moment that she was in the office that day and remembered the wall of debris that went by. Would that be gauche?

Hmm. You're writing it now. I don't know how fast or slow your write, but we'll say for the sake of argument you finish it sometime in the middle of 2005. You edit it and send it out to an editor or agent, who accepts it in mid-2006 for publication sometime in 2007.

IOW, I think you could leave it out.

IOW, I think you could leave it out.

If it's only a token reference, of course. If it serves some sort of thematic purpose, I don't think your method is gauche.