Exercise #22: The Set Piece Prologue as Scale Model
Don DeLillo, Marissa Levien, Fernando A. Flores, Jeff Tweedy, Anthony Doerr, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor
Hi friends,
It’s finally feeling like fall here in the Phoenix area, with daily temperatures under 100 for the first time since early spring. Surviving the summer here is always a lesson in endurance, and I’m glad to be on the other side of it for another year. I can already sense the lightening of moods in everyone I encounter: my students were universally more excited and joyful this week, and as much as I’d love to chalk it up to my good teaching, I know it’s more likely the good weather.
This month’s exercise is on prologues and on how they might be interestingly used in both short fiction and novels. The prologue gets a bad rap these days, but I tend to write a few for every novel of mine, even if they don’t stay in the book: at one point in the drafting process, Appleseed had FOUR.
Obviously, I knew a novel couldn’t really have four prologues, but they were each ways of exploring the novel’s thematic material or its backstory in ways the main novel couldn’t then support. One of the prologues became a short story I published on its own. One became a crucial chapter inside the novel proper. One got scrapped, but then later reappeared as a tale told by a character very late in the novel, in an unexpected place and time. The fourth got cut down to the 250 words or so which now open the novel, in an unlabeled prologue.
If I had accepted the conventional wisdom these days that prologues are always a bad idea, I would have missed out on so much crucial discovery and fun writing.
Anyway! More on all that below.
As always, I hope your own writing goes well this month, and that you and yours are happy and healthy. Enjoy this month’s exercise, be safe, be kind, and happy reading and writing!
Yours,
Matt
What I’m Reading:
The World Gives Way by Marissa Levien: This debut science fiction novel has one of the fastest-paced stories I’ve read recently. Set on a generation ship about to discover that it’s doomed, it manages to be hopeful in the face of apocalypse while also thinking hard about class and the environment, while also doing a lot of interesting worldbuilding.
Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores: I reread Tears of the Trufflepig this month in advance of talking to Flores on a panel, and I’m so glad I had the occasion to revisit it. This is the rare novel that feels like it has no comp titles: the only thing I can ever compare Trufflepig to is Trufflepig. I can’t for his two new books coming our way soon.
How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy: I’ve been learning guitar during the pandemic, but I don’t think I’ll ever be a songwriter. That said, there’s a lot in this book for prose writers too. Most of the process notes here are really about getting out of your own way while making art, and my guess is we all need help with that these days. A great audiobook, with Tweedy reading.
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr: I was Doerr’s conversation partner for his launch event here in Phoenix this week, my first in-store event since 2019. It was a blast to talk to him, and to power through his 640-page novel in the nine days I had to prep between the time I got the book and the event. There’s a lot of wonder in this novel, and my guess is that anyone who liked All the Light We Cannot See is going to love this one too.
Exercise #22: The Set Piece Prologue as Scale Model
Of late, the prologue seems to have acquired a bad reputation among writers, and every few months another Twitter-storm erupts about how no one should write them. For instance, Victor LaValle (one of my favorite writers and generous blurber of one of my own prologue-bearing novels) wrote a while back that “prologues in novels are generally as useful as vestigial tails in human,” sending cheers and disagreements and subtweets careening throughout the writerverse. And why not? We all have our preferences, and certainly there are enough bad examples of any choice a writer might make that it’s easy to point out what doesn’t work about our pet peeves.
That said, I firmly believe there are no bad choices in art, only bad implementations. And even that’s obviously subjective!
Personally, I love a good prologue, and I especially like what I call the set piece prologue, where the prologue is entirely or mostly self-contained, with its own story and a satisfying beginning, middle, and end. Such a prologue often contains a compressed expression of the novel’s thematics, a scale model of theme and emotion set on a shorter timeline. Characters from the novel’s body might appear, but they’re rarely focused on, and most often they go unnamed. In this narrative, they’re the bit players, if they appear at all, easter eggs for readers of the novel to remember later or maybe not even find before a second read.
(What the set piece prologue isn’t is the kind of prologue-as-info-dump that seemed required in a certain kind of fantasy novel I read as a kid, where the entire cosmology of the universe and the pantheon of gods had to be laid out before the story could get started in Chapter One. Although I used to love those too, as a teenager! My guess is it’s this sort of thing LaValle was really objecting to, although I’m not sure.)
The set piece prologue isn’t that rare, but my favorites might all come from novels by Don DeLillo, who used variations of the move throughout his career, including in Underworld, Mao II, Point Omega, and Players.
Mao II opens with an untitled fourteen-page prologue depicting a mass wedding in Yankee Stadium, ending with one of DeLillo’s most famous lines, a sentence that offers the reader a frame for the novel that follows: “The future belongs to crowds.” (One of the novel’s smaller characters also appears in this prologue as part of the mass wedding’s crowd.) The prologue is its own thing, entirely enjoyable without reading the rest of the novel, but it also provides the reader a lens through which to read Mao II.
Similarly, Point Omega opens with an unnamed man standing against a gallery wall, watching a NYC video installation of Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho”, something he’s been doing for days:
He’d been standing for more than three hours, looking… The original movie had been slowed to a running time of twenty-four hours. What he was watching seemed pure film, pure time. The broad horror of the old gothic movie was subsumed in time. How long would he have to stand here, how many weeks or months, before the film’s time scheme absorbed his own, or had this already begun to happen? He approached the screen and stood about a foot away, seeing snatches and staticky fragments, flurries of trembling light. He walked around the screen several times. The gallery was empty now and he was able to stand at various angles and points of separation. He walked backwards looking, always, at the screen. He understood completely why the film was projected without sound. It had to be silent. It had to engage the individual at a depth beyond the usual assumptions, the things he supposes and presumes and takes for granted.
We’re told, “The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.” Point Omega is a sparse, slow novel, about time and scale, about war and extinction, set in a desert: the prologue offers a way to approach that sparse slowness, aiming to see more by looking harder. (And it is indeed a novel that really opens up on a reread.)
At one point, two other men enter the gallery:
…the older man using a cane and wearing a suit that looked traveled in, his long white hair braided at the nape, professor emeritus perhaps, film scholar perhaps, and the younger man in a casual shirt, jeans and running shoes, the assistant professor, lean, a little nervous.
These are two of the three main characters of the novel, but they barely exist in the prologue. They come in, watch a few minutes of “24 Hour Psycho,” then leave. “What, bored?” the man at the wall thinks. The two men are the protagonists of the novel Point Omega, but background players here. The man against the wall is the protagonist of “Anonymity,” that novel’s prologue and frame story—and possibly a certain offscreen actor in it, although I’m not sure you can prove that for sure.
Either the body of this novel or “Anonymity” could probably be read entirely on their own. They’re so separate that the Wikipedia entry for Point Omega’s plot summary doesn’t mention “Anonymity” at all: it is not strictly vital for the reading of the novel. But it’s also impossible for me to imagine the novel without it.
Here’s a trick that many successful prologues uses to get by the prologue-haters: the best of these prologues often aren’t labeled as such. Sometimes they go untitled, but often they have their own titles, because, again, they can be successfully read on their own. Returning to DeLillo again: Point Omega’s prologue/epilogue frame story is simply titled “Anonymity,” while Players opens with “The Movie,” a seven-page set piece that does not require the novel that follows to be understood and enjoyed.
Underworld does have a labeled prologue, although in my edition the word prologue is rendered in tiny text at the edge of the page, while the title “The Triumph of Death” dominates. “The Triumph of Death” was originally published in Harper’s as a novella titled “Pafko at the Wall,” five years before Underworld’s publication: for those five years, the only way any reader could read “Pafko”/“Triumph” was as its own thing.
If you can read “Pafko at the Wall” without Underworld, can you read Underworld without “The Triumph of Death”? Probably. (But you shouldn’t, because it’s one of the best parts of the book.) Nick Shay, the protagonist of Underworld, doesn’t appear in “The Triumph of Death,” but in the novel proper it’s revealed that he believes he owns the baseball Bobby Thomson hits out of the park during the baseball game it recounts, in the famous “Shot Heard 'Round the World.” That’s a pretty minor link—as is Cotter Martin, the boy who catches the ball during “Triumph,” appearing in-scene once in novel proper, during a flashback tracing the ball’s first step toward Nick. (Bill Watterson, the other primary character of “Triumph” never appears in the rest of Underworld, as far as I know.)
What makes “The Triumph of Death” essential to Underworld isn’t plot, but theme. For “The Triumph of Death,” DeLillo revised “Pafko” at the sentence level, and added a new, more openly grand first line: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” During the baseball game, we see J. Edgar Hoover in the stands, learning about the first Soviet nuclear explosion, an area of interest that will repeat in the novel’s invented Lenny Bruce monologues during the Cuban Missile Crisis and in the novel’s late visit to a nuclear waste depository in Kazakhstan. As in Mao II, crowds are everywhere, including on the first page of “The Triumph of Death”:
Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day—men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.
Longing on a large scale is what makes history. If that isn’t a clue to how to read Underworld, I don’t what it is—and while you could read Underworld without the prologue’s demonstration of that longing through the vehicle of a championship baseball game, you might not read it as well.
It’s notable that in many of these DeLillo novels, the prologues are what the people I know seem to remember best: it’s anecdotal, but I’ve heard more from other readers about the mass wedding in Mao II and the 24-Hour Psycho viewing in Point Omega than I’ve heard about the rest of the books. I loved Underworld, but it’s “Pafko at the Wall”/”The Triumph of Death” that I think about most often. (Well, that, DeLillo’s incredible rendition of Lenny Bruce, and a conversation with a priest about “the depth and reach of the commonplace”.) And perhaps one of the reasons for this is that it’s easier to revisit the themes and artistic achievement of Underworld by reading its relatively short prologue one more time instead of reading all 827 pages.
For me, the real power of a successful set piece prologue is exactly this: how it can, at least to some level, serve as a stand-in in for the whole of the novel. It is the novel in miniature, translated into different terms and different action but somehow evoking similar effects. (It occurs to me that another tactic might be to use the prologue to create contrast or offer a correction to the themes of the body, but that seems more likely to be achieved by a frame story or a set piece epilogue.) When done well, such a prologue is a masterful introduction to a novel as well as its own work of art.
Let’s give it a try. You have two choices for your exercise this month, one for short form writing and one long:
1) Write a short story or a flash fiction that begins with a set piece prologue that’s no more than 10% of the length of the rest. (Don’t label this prologue, at this scale—just use a line or two of white space between it and the body of the story to reset the reader.) You can complete this exercise by writing something completely new in one of two ways:
writing a short prologue with its own beginning, middle, and end, and then following it with a longer fiction working with the same thematic material but telling its own tale;
or you could write a full story or flash first, and then, after analyzing the thematic material you see there, write a set piece prologue meant to complement it.
1a) You could also take a flash or story you’ve already written, and append a set piece prologue onto it, proceeding as in the second option above.
2) If you’ve got a novel-in-progress (or have recently finished one), consider trying to write a set piece prologue for it, even if you don’t think the book needs a prologue. You might surprise yourself and discover something about the novel’s structure and leave what you write in as an actual prologue, or you might end up with a standalone short story working through similar material in its own way, serving as a scale model for the book you’re writing, one that clarifies what it is you’re trying to do with your book-in-progress. I’ve had both experiences in the past, and each time I’ve made important discoveries I wouldn’t have made without this attempt.
Note that the prologue you write in this way will likely not recreate the thematics of the story or novel it accompanies exactly: at its best, this tactic creates not a repetition but a rhyme, one that might be all the better for being unexpected or slant.
Good luck! See you next month!
P.S./Update: After posting this, I sat down to reread the second half of Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon for my worldbuilding class: it has not one but three set piece prologues, one at the beginning of each of the book’s three parts. All of them are narrated by animals: a swordfish, a tarantula, and a bat. Pretty great!
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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed was published Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in March 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.