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Is 'prologue' not just a word? Also, could you please read my excerpt and criticize?
Surely you could name the so called 'prologue', chapter one? Examples, in HP7, Rowling has the chapter where Voldermort kills Charity Burbage. this would classify as a prologue, yet she calls it chapter one. If agents and publishers dislike prologues so much, why don't aspiring authors call their prologue, 'chapter one'?
BQ: Below is an excerpt. Please could you rate?
Buzz. This was how it had been since the beginning. The beginning – when his daughter had disappeared, when the men had arrived and sent him on a one way trip to hell and when life as he knew it was snatched away from his hands.
Often, the man would weep. There would be times when great remorse flooded through him and he would remember what he had done. What he had done. Pictures and images would fill his mind and he would grab his throat but he would be too weak to end it all and the images would still come – a man struggling in a large expanse of water, followed swiftly by three mountain peaks between two ridges. But the clearest image would be of a woman in his arms, blood flowing from a gaping wound in her chest and forming a bloody stain on the floor.
Then the pain would come. First a great stab in the back of his dry throat and then tears would come to his wide eyes.
@Lucipher, thanks for the excellent answer - I won't comment on the *slight* lateness. xD Also, thanks for the comments on my excerpt as well; however, this is not the beginning to... well, anything. i just wrote this to get me back into writing my original project - I have been neglecting it for a while now. Thanks once again for the comments.
2 Answers
- LucipherLv 410 years agoFavorite Answer
Incredible as it seems, many authors do have prologues. Even though they are hideous — to me, anyway — many people like to copy the idea of using a prologue. Perhaps because they think if they use a prologue they are successful. Many people are also under the impression that prologues actually are supposed to mean a very long rant about the setting and the world. They could use a prologue for that, but it's not very effective. Authors use prologues effectively by using them to build suspense, and to get the reader wanting to read the story. Some are successful, some are not. Even though I hate Twilight, I have to give it props for making great use of the prologue. Putting riveting events in the prologue that actually happen much farther into the book. So we want to read up to those. That is an effective use of a prologue. One that's not and is quite boring is Eragon's prologue, which is basically how the stone got to Eragon, and in my opinion not needed.
Now for your writing. Well, I found an incredible use for my simile. Where it says, "blood flowing from a gaping wound in her chest and forming a bloody stain on the floor" What if you said, "blood erupting from her chest like a blooming rose, forming a bloody puddle on the floor.
Never really found a use for that in my "child friendly" story. I can tell your not a bad writer, good for B&A, but I don't know if this is an ideal beginning for a story. It's quite bland because I can't figure out what's going on. But this is just the opinion of someone on the internet, so it's not like it's a big deal. Heck, if I'd been criticizing Wuthering Heights I would have called it a piece of sh*t beginning, but look where it's at.
Thank you for reading, and Good Luck.
Edit: Oh shoot! I misread that as Beginning instead of Excerpt. Well I reread it and I think it could work for either. However, as an excerpt it's much more appropriate. I actually copied this into a Scribd document because it helps me imagine I'm actually reading a book, and I didn't actually find many mistakes (You should see my writing, it can be pretty scary stuff, looking at it like it's a real book). I can imagine that excerpt in a book, however, I'm not the one you want to impress, it's those hounds called Publishers.
If you know what Inkpop is, you'll know what Scribd is, and it just gives that feel that it's in a book. Please go check out inkpop and make an account, even if you don't share your works, it still has some great features. Good luck.
- ?Lv 45 years ago
Books have prologues to grant you style of a historic past on what you would be examining approximately. no longer each and every e book has a prologue. this isn't any longer proper how a prologue is began, it somewhat relies upon on how plenty information you prefer to assert with regard to the e book, or it must be fairly of an authors word, the place they only describe what the e book is going to be approximately. the factor on the top of a e book is an epilogue, which will most of the time end the e book by making use of asserting how the character/regardless of ended up. it is going to style of end the e book up if the final financial ruin did no longer do this.