Thread:Writing Discussion/@comment-35465738-20191013090557

I'm writing a novel.

One of the issues I've come up against is that people don't seem to like prologues and the like. My question is, what do you think?

There was similar stuff said about a long, tedious chapter where nothing happens. This I agree with, however, if you look at the work of people like David Eddings, he has a long, boring chapter at the start of each book, and he was a bestseller.

I'll put my thing here (yes, it's supposed to be mildly confusing), and I'll see what you guys think about it.

THE PROLOGUE/PREFACE:

Before Before, there was a Presence. It simply was, then Before began and it knew itself a thing. And when Before ended and Then began, the Presence took form. It held two legs, two arms, a body and a head. It could do nought but exist in the Then. After Then came Later. The Later brought the Presence hands and fingers, feet and toes. But it could still only be. The Later ended and the Earlier began, and hair and eyes and ears sprouted from atop the head. And the Earlier was empty. Then the Past began and the Earlier died. Countless years had passed in the time before time, and in this time known as the Past, the Presence knew a mouth and a nose. Thus was the first person complete. As the Past continued its stately march towards After, the Nothing that was before became a Something that was Everywhere. Surrounding the Presence were countless other Presences, each with a different form. Beside the first Presence was a Presence with a similar but different form. And ranging out were other pairs of similar Presences. Orange things with four legs and black stripes. Sliver things that sparkled and had no legs. Such was the Something that was lit by the Everywhere. Then After began and the light died. Clouds of swirling gas that emanated light swirled around the countless Presences. From these spewed forth solid balls of light more innumerable than the Presences themselves. That was when After ended and Time began. Time is Always and Never, Time is Now. Time simply is. It has no beginning other than when After ended. And After, like Before and Past and Then, is eternal until it ends. And it never ends. Before and After and Time are Always and Never, there is a link but there is not. They simply are. The time that the Presences have true and total awareness, which they call sentience, is Now. It is always Now, but it is also Time and Past and Future. Future is forever Now, just like Past is forever Then which is always Before and Now and Time. The Presences witnessed in the Now the birth of balls of rock and gas from the points of light their consciousnesses all referred to as stars. They knew it was the Now because they were too undeveloped to know the Past from the Now and the Future. And they saw the birth of these misshapen balls of gaseous clouds and solid rock balls in an Eternity and an age, but only knowing Now they never knew how long it took Time to get around to causing the stars to create these new things. These new things changed form over endless moments of Then and Now and After, and eventually they began to carve squashed circular shapes around the stars. Such were the whims of Time. And in that instant the Presences were jarred from their places in the ever-expanding Now and tossed casually onto the now-cooler faces of the balls of rock. In the following moments, the Presences took names, and they knew the name of what they were. The first Presence and its similar but different twin were called Humans. Their names are lost to Eternity’s cold grasp, but it is they who have caused what the Humans call Civilisation. It is the Humans who have developed so far compared to so many others, and it is they who must solve the problems they have created by disrupting the plans of Time by discovering what they call Magic so early on in Time. Their advancement has travelled too fast, and their thinkers, whom they call Philosophers, changed the Future to the point where Time lost all control. There are still some Humans who can see the truth, but they are deemed as crazy and insane. In retaliation, Time sent fragments of its consciousness down, in the image of the Humans, to the planet the Humans call Kala’ha, and it is those fragments who shall restore balance by redirecting the Humans onto the right path, as deemed by Time’s ultimate plan for all of Existence, Creation and Eternity. 