So my progress on B3 continues apace, thanks largely to my participation in the Clarion West Writeathon (and don’t forget, Writeathon Participants, my “Buck for Your Best Sentence” offer is still good for a few weeks more … so if you haven’t posted a sentence, hop over and make a buck for Clarion West!)
I got the first draft of B3 up to 48k over the weekend. Some of this new wordage reflects the addition of one of my patented, totally random, non-sequitur prologues. The whole time I was writing it, I was thinking, “Ha ha! People are going to hate this!” I am such a bitch.
If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from the reviews I’ve seen, it’s that readers really don’t like my prologues. Maybe they just don’t like prologues in general, maybe they specifically don’t like my prologues … but it’s a pretty constant refrain. And I hate to say it, but those repeated expression of dislike do nothing more than cement my intention to keep writing prologues—the non-sequitury the better. This kind of perverse stubbornness is how I got to be a published writer, after all. The more people disliked, rejected, or were indifferent to what I was writing, the more driven I felt to write it. And anyway, I like prologues. I like the puzzleish aspect of them. I like how you have to hold them in your head and try to figure out why they’re relevant. They’re like the amuse bouche of a fine meal. How much does that beet sorbet really have to do with the steak tartarte that comes four courses later? Nothing … until later, when you’re thinking about the meal as a whole. Then it should make sense.
One of the best example of a prologue the way I think it should be done is from one of my favorite movies, Dead Man, which I just rewatched recently. There’s a monologue at the beginning of the movie, delivered by Crispin Glover, that has pretty much nothing to do with the rest of the movie … that is, until you get to the very end of the movie, and then you’re all like, “Oh, I get it. That makes sense now.” I absolutely love that moment. Because it’s like the rest of the movie is in service to unlocking the riddle presented in the prologue. The prologue is the real meat of the message; the rest of the film is just footnotes.
I’m not saying my prologues work that well. Thinking back on them, they probably don’t. But they should. Perhaps that is my writerly mission here on this earth: to one day write the perfect prologue. I’ll just have to keep trying until I get it right.
