“PAST IS PROLOGUE”

 

Editors, I’m told, don’t like prologues.

 

A story needs to start in the present. Prologue forces us readers to scroll back before we’re allowed to knock on the door. “Just let me in, blast the past,” the exasperated editor is saying, taking on the readers’ cause.

 

Books of yore had no such impatience. We live and read in a rushing age.

 

How do you feel about prologues?

 

My personal view is that short prologues pique my interest, similar to the back cover teasers meant to sell the story. Long ones, if well written, captivate. But then it’s a letdown when they end and it feels like I must now shift gears to a new, (as in the now) story. If I make the adjustment, I’m glad for the prologue. If I lose the thread right then, it’s a fail.

 

The current writerly wisdom is to sprinkle back story in bits throughout the narrative of the “now.”

 

That’s fine. But it isn’t the only way to make sense of the present.

 

"What's past is prologue" is a quotation of William Shakespeare from his play The Tempest. In contemporary use, the phrase stands for the idea that history sets the context for the present.

 

Prologues have a legitimate place in literature.*

*I used the Palatino Linotype font in this post on purpose. Old and relevant.

TYPOS and PROOFREADING

 Working on becoming a better writer is one thing. Then, we have to work on becoming better proofreaders.

 

Not proofreading well is a pesky problem of mine. It’s one of those I don’t  see what I don’t see. Of course, much more so for my own writing and ever more if the proofreading comes minutes after writing.

 

Standard advice is to put writing aside and look at it later, as in days/months later. This is not practical for posts responding to online forums or for emails.

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Relying on Microsoft WORD or GRAMMARLY (insert any other spell/grammar check of your choice) is foolish. They catch some things, miss many, and misdirect often.

 

Let’s face it; some people are excellent proofreaders. Some of them become editors because of this advantage. But many superb writers confess they aren’t blessed with the proofreading brain. 

{Yup. I *just* had to correct "proofreading" above,👆 because I had typed "prrofreading." 😬 }

 

An excellent beta reader gave me a helpful suggestion, which I have found to reduce my rate of typos. In addition, it catches echoes; those repeat words coming too close together in a paragraph. 

{I like this egregious example of echo: "She looked at him. "Look at it," she said. "When I last looked it didn't look half as bad as it looks now." 😰 }

 

It’s the text-to-voice feature, where a mechanical voice reads highlighted text back to you. It’s better than my reading aloud, (something I also do) because when reading my own words, I often read what I thought I wrote and not what’s on the screen/page.

 

Here is what this feature looks like in WORD. Other writing platforms have similar functions, though you’d have to find them yourself because I only use WORD. I red-penciled it on the upper left:

In addition to catching echoes, this device is literally an echo. It, too, isn’t perfect. You won’t catch homonyms with it. But if you haven’t tried it, you will be pleasantly surprised at how helpful this editing feature is.