If you don’t care about that, then keep in mind that as progressive values become more mainstream, stories that hurt their readers will be harder and harder to sell. ![]() Why does it matter if people say a story hurt them? You’re not supposed to care what other people think! I’m assuming that most Mythcreants readers don’t want to hurt their audience, so it behooves us all to care what other people think in that regard. Even worse, this tip is often used to silence criticism from marginalized readers. On that level, not caring what other people think is just code for not doing the work to tell a good story. Just jot down whatever makes you happy and call it good. If you actually don’t care what anyone else thinks, then you don’t need writing advice at all. ![]() If you’re writing a story for other people to read, by definition you care what they think, let alone if you want them to pay money for the story. This one is a little complicated because the sentiment can come from more than one angle. Someone voices their fears of a bad review or of readers not liking what they’ve written, and then someone else loudly proclaims that you shouldn’t care about how anyone else might react to your work – speak your truth you beautiful auteur! I hear this one all the time in various online writing groups. While it’s always possible you could find a good use for a truly disconnected prologue, that’s always going to be an edge case at best. Calling it a prologue is just giving false expectations at that point. On occasions when a prologue doesn’t have this disconnect with the rest of the story, then it’s probably not a prologue in any meaningful sense. They aren’t interested in reading what is at best a completely different story. When readers start a story, they want to start the story. That’s where prologues get their bad reputation, and it’s well deserved. You can see why neither of these is a great experience.īecause of this dynamic, authors usually end up either dumping a lot of boring exposition in the prologue or filling the prologue with action to try and prop up their story’s slow beginning. In the second scenario, the prologue has its own story and the reader loves it, but then they have to stop reading about that story and be jerked into a completely different one. In one scenario, the story hasn’t started yet, so the prologue is really boring. That means one of two things is likely to happen. Prologues present unique problems for storytellers namely that by definition, they appear before the rest of the story. Here’s the problem though: that isn’t true. However, they all boil down to the idea that prologues are a perfectly legitimate storytelling device and you should use one if it fits your story. ![]() These defenses can go to some fascinating places my personal favorite is that prologue-hate is forced on us by capitalism so we can get to the profitable violence faster. Unfortunately, we can’t just leave it at that and end this section early, because prologue-fans often get riled up in defense of their favorite book-starter. Prologues get a lot of much-deserved derision, to the point that “don’t use a prologue” is almost a truism. When you hear one of these, be on the lookout! Without the hard data of more technical fields, how can new authors tell what advice is worth following? I can’t give you a complete list of what you might find, but I can go over a few common suggestions and explain why they should raise red flags. That’s to be expected, but it’s often hard to tell the good tips from the bad. Everyone seems to have their own take on this endeavor we call storytelling. It probably won’t surprise you that there’s a lot of writing advice out there.
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