: 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

@Reiling826

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I know this is an old question, however there have been more recent replies so I figure it's not terrible of me to add one more on.
I'm not a published author yet, as I'm still working on my novel. But I'd like to contribute my opinion as an avid reader. I'm sick of seeing the hate for prologues. I love them, so long as they are gripping and add to the story something that is necessary. If it provides important information essential to the world (though not in the form of an info dump of course), or the POV of someone other than the protagonist, or will be necessary in order to understand events/scenes in following chapters or later in the story, but it just doesn't work within the main narrative, then yes it would be fine to make it a prologue. It depends entirely on each individual story whether or not a prologue is needed. For some it is, for others it's not, and genre comes into play here too. Someone else in these replies gave a pretty good Do and Don't list. You would do well to follow it. There are other good lists like that if you Google it, as well.
I have never skipped a prologue personally, and frankly the people who do are the lazy ones. It's not laziness on the writer's part. That's just a ridiculous accusation coming from someone who doesn't know how to write a good prologue themselves. I can't understand why anyone would skip prologues as a rule... it's like tuning out of a teacher's lecture on a subject and jumping straight into the assignment (you may get lucky sure, or you may fail that unit). Or fast forwarding the first 5-10 minutes of a movie. You're only going to be confused throughout the rest of the story, or you'll be asking questions that were probably already addressed in the prologue, but you were too impatient to read it. I'm honestly surprised they would even bother to read a whole book at all if they're too lazy to even read a prologue.
A well thought out prologue takes as much work and care as every other chapter in a story. And If publishers/agents toss your manuscript without reading it simply because it has a prologue, they're garbage and you're better off without them anyway. They're probably going to do a very lazy job or just be generally nasty people to work with. If you think of it like that, keeping a prologue means you can weed out the less desirable publishers and agents, haha.
As for length, there's no set limit. However, If your prologue is even longer than the average length of your chapters, you may want to think about what you can cut out or disperse throughout those main chapters instead. As much as I love a good prologue, even I would find one upwards of 10k or more a bit too wordy. Personally, I would try at least not to exceed 5k words with 2-3k being ideal, though ironically my current novel has a 7k word prologue (It's still a rough draft, so the length may be subject to change). So it really is a case by case basis.
In summary, above all YOU decide what's best for YOUR story. Don't let other authors dictate to you that you shouldn't have a prologue if you feel your story needs one. Length is as subjective as the necessity of prologues themselves, but a good rule of thumb is that it should probably not exceed the average length of your main chapters, and in fact is best off being a bit shorter than them. Since your question is years old, I hope you were able to finish your novel and maybe even publish it by now. Happy writing!

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