: Re: Is it considered lazy writing to have a dry prelude at the start of a book? I'm thinking of the crawl sequences at the beginning of Star Wars, that just give you the background information

@Welton431

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It's not exactly lazy, it has the potential to be considered bad writing. If an agent asks you for the first five pages of your book (and many ask for just five), is that what you want to send them? They don't want to represent "dry" writing, they want something engaging from page one. Not fireworks and battles or the world blowing up, but an engaging character doing something in their normal world, and leading into the story.

You'd be misleading them to send them anything else, likely guaranteeing they won't represent you. And if you did send them the first five pages after your dry prelude, if you were relying on that prelude to orient the reader, then the agent won't like those five pages either, because they won't make much sense. So ... rejection on route two.

Like the Star Wars lead in, readers/agents/publishers, by opening the book, will give you a small allowance to get the ball rolling. If your dry prelude is clearly less than a page long (say less than 200 words) then you can probably get away with it.

But if it takes you less than 200 words to provide this back story, you can probably dispense with it! That much information can be conveyed indirectly or in scene, or truthfully, not at all.

Human beings IRL are very adept at picking up clues and piecing together what is going on without being explicitly told what is going on. We can watch a conversation in a restaurant and guess many things about the characters having it. In writing, you can use place names, names of people not present in the scene, and all sorts of things and trust your readers to figure it out.

Just like in real life, we meet new people we have to work with and don't know anything about them, nearly everything we learn about them we learn in context, not by somebody telling us all about them. The same thing can be true of your setting and plot. You can have pages where all the reader knows is "they are going to Seattle" without knowing why. As an author it is up to you to devise scenes to fill in why and the background. Aha, they don't want to go to Seattle but they are. Aha, somebody named "Jack" is going to punish them somehow if they don't. Aha, they are going there to steal something that was stolen from Jack!

I honestly think Star Wars could have opened without the text prelude, and everybody would have figured it out just fine, who the heroes and villains were. The visuals showed underdogs massively outgunned just fine, and we would naturally root for them. The movie might even have been better for it.

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