Section 3: Prologues

A prologue can improve the reading experience. That's possible. A helpful prologue will (always? almost always?) be an event that happens before the story, hopefully spoiling nothing. It can provide a context for the events in the story.

Most prologues are nothing like that. Most prologues are an event taken from the middle of the story and moved to the front. The only goal for these transplanted prologues is to interest the reader; the principles of good writing are ignored. And easily violated.

In other words, most prologues are much like a goofy first line, only larger. They have some of the same problems as the goofy first line, but they have their own problems too.