Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell Page B

desire. What matters is not the tag, but the function.
    To use an action prologue, remember:
Make the action big enough to justify a prologue.
Keep it relatively short.
End with trouble — something bad happens or is about to happen.
Make sure you tie in the prologue with the main plot at some point, or at least explain what happened.
Framing a Story
    A prologue can also give us the view of a character about to look back and tell the story. Why do this? In order to set up a feeling that what is about to unfold has consequences that reach into the present and the future.
    Stephen King’s novella,
The Body
, begins with the narrator looking back to 1960, a “long time ago,” when he first saw a dead body. But he indicates that the incident was much deeper than a visual image — it was one of those things that “lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried. …”
    The Catcher in the Rye
is a frame story, though Salinger does not mark it with
Prologue
or
Epilogue
. That comes out purely in the writing.
    The narrator, Holden Caulfield, informs us he is going to tell about “this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.”
    Where is
here
? We don’t find out until the last chapter, where we learn Holden is in a sanitarium.
    With a frame prologue:
Establish the kind of feeling and tone you want to hover over the main plot.
Make it good reading in and of itself, not just dry
telling
. An interesting voice is essential.
Show us how the events about to unfold are affecting the prologue character
now
.
The Teaser
    Though rarely used, the teaser can work on occasion. Mary Higgins Clark has done it more than once.
    In the teaser, you present a scene at the beginning that will happen later on in the book. It’s like a preview of a coming attraction.
    Why do it this way? Because you grab the reader with action. You don’t play the scene to full fruition, leaving a mystery. You leave the reader wondering,
How did this character get herself into this predicament?
    When you get to that scene in the novel, you then play it out, and answer the reader’s initial question.
    Some purists object to the teaser, as it is not adding anything to the plot. It’s just using plot material earlier, they say.
    To which one answer is, So what? If it functions to grab the reader and create interest, then it is doing its job.
    For a teaser, do this:
Select a highly charged scene from your story.
You may choose to use the exact same wording, or rework it a bit.
Stop short of resolution, so you truly tease your readers to move on.
ESTABLISHING A BOND WITH THE READER VIA THE LEAD CHARACTER
    Before I started to sell my fiction, I had a major weakness with characters. I would come up with a plot or situation, but I’d stock it with cardboard story people, characters who seemed to be on the page just because I stuck them there.
    Then I happened across Lajos Egri’s advice about living, vibrating human beings being the secret of great and enduring writing. Egri suggested that if you truly know yourself, deeply and intimately, you will be able to create great, complex, and interesting characters.
    That’s because we have all experienced, to a greater or lesser degree, every human emotion. By tapping into our emotional memories, we can create an infinite variety of characters.
    This is not a book on character creation though there is overlap. Plot doesn’t work without characters; the stronger your characters, the better your plot. For your character work, I recommend reading
Creating Dynamic Characters
or
Write Great Fiction: Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint
, both by Nancy Kress. Strong characters draw readers into your plot. This dynamic is called the
bond
.
Ways to Establish the Bond
    After conceiving a compelling Lead character, you must go a step further and figure out how to create an emotional