: Re: How long can a prologue be, and what should you not do? A while back I wrote a prologue about the beginning of time and space and all that. One thing I noticed later is that between the

@Welton431

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To answer your last question (and sort of the rest of it):

Sidetracked: When introducing a story, would a prologue be best for those with historical and adventure genres?

Prologues are very common in the fantasy genre. It's a good way to introduce different elements of your world to the reader.

As I read mostly thrillers, here's what I've noticed in that (and mystery/suspense/adventure novels): most do not have a prologue. Those are stories where you need to start with the action almost right away and preferably start with relevant action. However, for historical thrillers, prologues are common as well, because they start with something that happened a long time ago to set the stage for the rest of the book.

In my opinion, prologues shouldn't be more than a few pages (book pages, that is). That's enough time to get some important information down, but not so much as to wear the reader out and think "good grief, when's the darn story going to start?!". 18K seems like an awful long prologue. That's about a fifth of a book.

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