On Writing: What Makes a Good Prologue?
t’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m meant to be resting this cold and fired up throat, but my mind keeps circling the same question: what makes a good prologue? I want one for my book because this project isn’t just a collection of essays. It’s an attempt to gather the elements that make a person—biography, spirituality, wonder, culture, travel, and the quiet weight of moral responsibility. All the things that shape a human life before God.
A prologue feels like the small doorway one slips through before entering a larger house. It’s not there to explain. It’s there to set a feeling in the reader’s chest, the kind that leans them forward before the official beginning even arrives. When it’s done well, it colours everything that follows, like adding a particular light source to a room.
It isn’t meant to be a stray “chapter zero.” A real prologue stands slightly apart, offering what the first chapter cannot. Sometimes it anchors the reader in a memory that can’t be placed anywhere else. Sometimes it casts a mood that the main text will only deepen. Sometimes it simply offers a truth that needs to be felt before it can be understood.
Think of Rebecca. The opening isn’t about plot at all. It’s a memory, carried like a scent. You’re inside the narrator’s dream before you ever meet her properly. Or Tolkien, whose prologue feels like picking up a weathered manuscript from a long-vanished world. Once you begin chapter one, you’re already steeped in the history he wants you to breathe.
What these writers do is simple: the prologue gives something the story can’t easily give later. It opens a door from a different angle.
So when I began shaping mine, I tried to ask the same question. What can be said here that can only be said here? A prologue doesn’t need to be large. A single image can carry a whole book. A single moment can hold a feeling the reader remembers hundreds of pages later. Clarity matters, but mystery matters too. The goal isn’t to teach; it’s to invite.
Used well, a prologue plants a seed whose meaning might stay hidden until the right moment. Then suddenly the reader realizes it’s been growing quietly since the first page. It becomes part of the pleasure of the whole.
Toni Morrison knew this. The opening of Beloved isn’t backstory. It’s atmosphere, grief, and truth distilled into a few sentences. The first chapter could never do what that opening does. It needs the key first, and the prologue is the key.
With all that in mind, I found myself returning to one memory from childhood, something I’ve carried for years. It stayed with me because it held wonder, simplicity, and that ache of human connection that makes life feel fuller than we can put into words. So I made it my prologue, just as it is.
“It must have been late summer, 1962, Telstar by the Tornados played regularly on the radio. I had spent the whole summer to autumn season on the Isle of Bute on Scotland’s west coast. We had a simple wooden hut with no water or electricity.
Each day I walked to the communal well with an older person with containers to collect water. Cows watched with wary eyes; the calves edging forward, curious, and timid.
At dusk, we lit paraffin lamps. My father read to us — Heidi, Tales from 1001 Nights, Chinese Folk Tales — his voice a thread that carried us into other worlds. We ate freshly baked pancakes with homemade jam and washed down with sweet stout in small glasses.
The lamp hissed softly, its light flickering sleep into our eyes. When it finally dimmed, so did we.
Lying in bed, I watched stars pour through the window; all of them. And I wondered if the Chinese farmer boys or the Bedouin shepherd boys or the milkmaids in the Swiss mountains were seeing and feeling the way I felt as the universe stepped gently into the room?”
That memory holds everything I hope the book will explore wonder, the dignity of simple things, the connectedness of human experience, and the sense that the world—wide as it is—is also somehow intimate.
Image by Copilot.