As its name suggests, the purpose of the action prologue is to thrust the audience into your story as quickly as possible.
This particular prologue has little time to bother with narrations or opening expositions. It’s sole objective is to build character, introduce your story-world, set the tone, hook the audience, and lay the foundations for your plot. Oh yeah – and be separated by the rest of the story with one key ingredient:
TIME
A distant cousin to opening In Medias Res (a fancy-schwancy way of saying your story starts after the plot has begun – such as in Inception), the Action Prologue steps a few time units backwards to reveal a key event that influences the rest of the plot.
This event could theoretically be skipped, with the details instead revealed through alternate story means (dialogue, subtext, dramatic exposition, flashbacks, or other various implications) without affecting the true start of the story – the protagonist’s journey.
However, the Action Prologue is a perfect way to establish the context of your story in an engaging manner, eschewing the pitfalls brought about by stopping the narrative midway through Act One and saying, “23 years ago, when an alien spacecraft attacked one of our vessels, your father died a hero as you were born.” Blah. Exposition.
That made-up line is what our prime example – 2009’s Star Trek – could have done. Sure, it would have provided information, but it wouldn’t have emotionally resonated without using extra precious minutes to make the line empathetically connect with the audience. The filmmakers instead took a bolder approach and decided that we – the audience – needed to experience a key event in our hero’s past in order to perfectly establish the plot and characters to come.
As Star Trek does, the Action Prologue should fulfill seven steps in order to successfully open your story:
1. Your prologue should be the best way to open your story.
Let’s start with the obvious: if you have a better way to start your story than a prologue – GET RID OF YOUR PROLOGUE. The main danger of prologues is they can slow the story down (yes, even action prologues) by weighing the story with unneeded information or unearned scenes.
Starting a flick with a car chase may be fun and all, but are your mad driving scenes establishing a key event in your story’s past, setting the foundation for everything to follow? Or is it just kinda-sorta fun to see your hero romp through L.A. streets 12 years before the REAL story begins?
Even if a key event is revealed in the prologue (e.g., the hero accidentally runs someone over. No witnesses. He hides the event for 30 years, the guilt slowly demolishing his life), do we absolutely need to see that scene first and foremost? Or, will your story be better served by slowly serving your audience clues about what the protagonist is hiding, eventually culminating in a massive reveal?
2. Your Prologue should hook your audience.
Really, this should be true for any opening scene – not merely prologues. However, since your prologue carries the added burden of being separated from the rest of the story, the importance of grabbing the audience and clutching with all its prologue-might is even greater.
Thankfully, hooking the audience is much easier to accomplish in an action prologue or flash-forward prologue than it is in a narrative prologue (we’ll get to these latter two in the coming weeks), but it is dangerous to assume that action will automatically hook the audience.
So how do you hook your audience?
- Ask a question/provide a mystery.
- As Star Trek opens, we’re instantly thrust into a federation crew’s bridge as a phenomenon – a lighting storm in space – occurs, followed by a mysterious vessels.
- Establish characters worth investigating and/or rooting for.
- Since this movie belongs to a beloved franchise, it has the benefit of offering the audience characters related to the original series – an unintentionally sneaky, but effective way of encouraging the audience to care, and buying a few additional minutes of story time to create an empathetic bond. However, nostalgia can’t last forever, and Star Trek wisely uses these minutes to connect us to a key player – Jim Kirk’s father. Despite perishing several minutes later, his impact on the plot and his son are what drive the remaining two hours.
- Establish peril for these characters.
- A mysterious vessel swiftly cripples the federation vessel, disposes of its captain, and decimates the crew. Great stories don’t make things easy on their heroes, and Star Trek carries this storytelling principle through to perfection. There is never a doubt that the characters we’re rooting for are in peril, and that’s exactly where the writers want us.
3. Your Prologue should provide information in a dynamic way that the rest of the story couldn’t do better.
Granted, this notion is subjective. At what point do you determine that your prologue is the best way to open your story? How long should you work on fitting the information into the rest of the narrative before “resorting” to adding a prologue?
There isn’t a formula, nor an easy answer.
The hard truth is that prologues should never be the first solution we writers jump to. If you’re willing to put-in the energy-draining effort to weave information throughout your plot, dramatize key bits of information, and subtextify requisite points into dialogue, that is usually the best way to scrap your prologue and unveil the details in a more natural way.
However, if opening with the prologue allows for THE MOST dramatic, empathetic, and emotionally engaging way to quickly thrust your audience into the story, you better be going for that prologue!
Just make sure you’re not confusing dramatic adrenaline for emotion. How do you know? If you’re bored after the 5th reading/viewing of your prologue, it was adrenaline.
4. Your Prologue should emotionally connect the audience to your story.
It’s tempting to leave this section blank. I dare you to watch the prologue through and not feel something within your chest tighten and squirm with empathy by the end as Jim’s mother mourns while clutching her newborn son. It honestly didn’t matter what the next couple of scenes were – the filmmakers had us where they wanted us…and was why they could get away with having Kirk act like a rebellious jerk in the next few scenes.
A good prologue should make the audience feel something that relates to the upcoming story. A great prologue should launch a truthful, emotional thread that the remaining story can hang on until the end credits roll.
5. Your Prologue should introduce your hero/protagonist.
Ok, ok. So Star Trek cheats a wee bit here. Sure, the film’s hero (Captain James Tiberius Kirk, thank you very much) is technically present in the opening scene as a recently birthed baby (and by recently, I mean recently. You know what I mean) AND provides an emotional crux the writers hung the action on…..but Baby Jim doesn’t really do too much in the opening 10 minutes.
Ideally, in an action prologue you want your protagonist to actively participate in the action. Give him a trial or two. Start establishing his wants or needs. Put him in peril. Show us something integral about his character that the story-proper can build upon. Think Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. While this particular prologue has its faults (more details in the podcast), it has a clear purpose: show us the relationship between the hero and her father, and show us that our hero is now on the run from the Empire.
While Jim Kirk is too young to actively participate in the action, the events surrounding his birth in the prologue are essential to rest of the story. Without the sudden arrival of a mysterious spacecraft and without Jim’s father sacrificing himself, this particular Star Trek tale simply doesn’t occur. The fact that Jim is born while his father makes the ultimate sacrifice provides instant empathy for the audience, and builds an emotional bridge to our hero which carries us through a few subsequent scenes where all-grown-up-Kirk is a self-obsessed rebel.
6. Your Prologue should establish a major plot point or two.
Every scene in your story must, in some way, drive the plot forward. Your prologue is no exception.
Naturally, you don’t want to reveal all your juicy plot-points from the beginning, but unless your prologue offers us a few key plot-pillars that peel open the first layer of conflict and establish the direction of your story, you’ve gotta ask yourself it the prologue is necessary.
Star Trek’s prologue oozes with subtle moments that subconsciously prepare our minds for the story-to-come, but two particular moments establish this tale’s subsequent direction:
- We are instantly introduced to the antagonist: the time-travelling Romulan – Nero. While we’ve yet to discover his motivation and purpose, the first 9 minutes of said film shows us why our heroes should fear Nero and his forces, when they ferociously whip a good ‘ole federation vessel in mere seconds. We know these baddies will return to face-off with our heroes.
- Arguably more importantly, Jim Kirk’s life changes as it begins with the death of his father in the prologue. As the story later implies, Jim’s life would have been much different if his father had raised him, and the lack of a good father-figure in his life provides our protagonist with the backstory, wounds, and motivations to weave into a subsequent and compelling character arc.
7. Your Prologue should set the tone for the rest of your story.
Is your story a buddy comedy? Then you probably shouldn’t open the tale with a crime-noir scene. Unless of course, you’re aiming for a bit of dramatic irony or purposeful contrast with the rest of the narrative. Typically though, your prologue should capitalize on this prime opportunity to let the audience in on the feel of your story. Giving your audience a taste of the tone to follow is an excellent way to ease your readers or viewers into the story.
Back to Star Trek, this prologue has much to accomplish, as the film’s overall tone delicately (and expertly) balances the seriousness of world-ending situations with witty comedy and high emotional stakes. Thankfully, the prologue expertly weaves these aspects together to provide a perfect tone which gives us a very accurate preview of what we’ll feel over the next two hours.
The emotional ingredient is at the forefront. The prologue’s action rises and falls on the sacrifice of Jim Kirk’s father as he wrestles to save his crew’s lives, knowing their salvation will mean his death never seeing his newborn son. UGH. Check.
World-ending drama is the stuff action prologues excel at. Putting your heroes in a life-threatening situation from the start is a fantastic way to loop your audience into the story without the danger of exposition. A word of caution though: make the danger meaningful to the characters AND the plot. Weave them together, else the danger seems forced and the subsequent emotion, false. Thankfully, Star Trek accomplishes this perfectly, as the danger-drama spews from the film’s overarching antagonist and thrusts our hero in the crossfire. Check.
Witty humor. For all the hand-wringing moments Star Trek’s prologue plops in your lap, it still drips in a few lines that remind us that things aren’t always doomy and gloomy. Star Trek’s humor relies on wit, not slapstick or situational humor, and is essential to the overall tone. The humor is largely based on the character’s reactions to dark situations, and often reveals character.
The very first series of lines set the tone perfectly by exemplifying this wit in the midst of danger. As the opening credits conclude, an unknown crew member sends a message to (presumably) the Federation, describing “a lighting storm in space”, to which the Federation’s reaction is, “What you sent us doesn’t seen possible.”
The crew’s response?
“I know, that’s why we sent it.”
Subtle and witty.
By touching on the film’s humor as the opening titles fade away, the prologue is then free to focus on the emotional and dramatic moments that construct the rest of the tone, while still ensuring that the subsequent humor in the story-proper doesn’t appear misplaced.
To recap: your Action Prologue should always have these 7 elements:
- Your Action Prologue should be the best way to open your story.
- Your Action Prologue should hook the audience.
- Your Action Prologue should provide information in a dynamic way that the rest of the story couldn’t do better.
- Your Action Prologue should emotionally connect the audience to your story.
- Your Action Prologue should introduce the hero/protagonist.
- Your Action Prologue should establish a major plot point or two.
- Your Action Prologue should set the tone for the rest of your story.
Join us soon as we break open the NARRATIVE PROLOGUE!
Leave a Reply