JUNE 2025
I am fascinated by the devices and conventions, ever more formulaic, that are now imposing themselves, even in self-publishing.
The prologue was once a means of presenting an essential element before the "real" start of the narrative, though its importance might well escape the reader at first glance. It plunged the reader straight into the thick of it — oiled or not, as the case may be. It was, under no circumstances, a compulsory feature.
Whilst this obligation still does not formally exist, it is now strongly suggested by the reading samples offered on ebook platforms. We are encouraged to craft a brief opening scene in which nothing is explained. This is the two-second "hook" principle native to social media, transposed onto literature. The thriller had already been practising this since the 1990s: a scene of future action projected into the present, which the reader will encounter again later, almost intact. The connection is then woven quite naturally, offering the reader a small reward. Mmm, how good dopamine tastes.
The series NCIS, with its one-second flashes in black and white, was the undisputed champion of this. The ebook sample, then, invented nothing; it merely generalised, across every genre, a convention the crime thriller had already perfected long before.
And yet, there is "hook" and "hook". That of the thriller can prove rather too revealing: the reader already knows where the story is heading, and the tension rests solely upon the how one gets there. The best modern prologues, by contrast, have understood that one may turn the mechanism on its head: showing without revealing a thing. A scene or an image whose significance escapes one, which only makes sense in retrospect, once the thread of the novel reaches its hinge point. It is no longer a window onto the plot, but a window onto a mystery.
So why impose this constraint upon oneself? Because books that fall in with this fashion mechanically enjoy a conversion advantage over the rest, in a saturated market. What was once a possibility has become an expectation; and a disappointed expectation, a disadvantage. Yet this flash-forward often kills suspense by shifting where the stakes lie: the reader already knowing, the replayed scene brings little that is new, offering merely a few further details. It is a toll paid to sales, at the expense of the reading itself.
Except that the best modern prologues sidestep this very trap: they sell without revealing, they hook without disclosing. Two requirements that seldom coincide without one having to be sacrificed for the other. This is what I sought to achieve in my first volume... and in my second (currently being written).
Each week, I take stock of the commercial strategies now in place, which fashion formats resembling safety nets to limit and compartmentalise creation. What was once a non-obligation has, in the end, become an inescapable format.