Thoughts On Aside Chapters

My novel that I am writing started out with a prologue.  It was a historical commentary of my fantasy world written by a sage that set up the conflict to ensue in Chapter 1.  I was not happy with it coming first in the novel although I believe it to be important to the story.  The reason why I was not happy with it being first is that it had nothing to do with the main or secondary characters of the novel in particular.

I tried writing the information into the dialogue of the larger story but what I found in doing that was there were just long monologues of boring historical facts where someone would recount what they had once heard.  They broke up my chapters and made them not flow well at all.

Right now what I have done is chop up this prologue into four 2 to 3 page chapters and sprinkled these chapters in among the rest of the story.  I picked my placement based on dramatic appeal and where I think there might be natural pauses in the the story to locate this sort of background information.

For example, the first of these asides comes right after the novel's main, and POV, character (a human) is confronted by the main support character (an elf) and after it is already well established that humans and elves in my world do not like each other one bit.  This first aside however shows how in the past the two races were not so adversarial.

Again, it is only two pages and the chapter is headed in such a way that it is clear that the reader is reading something outside of the normal story.

A regular chapter for this novel is 20 to 30 pages long usually with a scene switch or two.  So I was figuring a two page aside chapter wouldn't brake things up too badly.

Does anyone have a thought on this approach?

MathiasCavanaugh.com

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Writing takes time.  Writing takes patience.  Writing takes critiquing.  Writing takes rewriting.  Writing takes rewriting some more.

Mathias,

I'm sorry  I'm not very well versed on how you could proceed with your approach.  I hope you receive some valuable feedback somewhere along the line.

I wish you well.

Mother's Happy Child

I suppose something like Star Wars (the first one)... "in a world far, far away and a time long, long ago"... would work. But then you'd have the problem of a lengthy and probably boring prolog.

Why not pick up Newt Gingrich's Days of Infamy, or Herman Wouk's The Winds of War and see how they handle lengthy exposition (or explanation).  From your explanation, it sounds like you have adopted this approach. But ask yourself: Does it flow? Does it advance the plot? Is it interesting by itself?

There's no way of knowing how well it works without reading the entire novel. 

I will say this.  A true prologue is pre-story, set in the past, and most often has nothing directly to do with the protagonist or antagonist of the story, except to set up some long ago cause that leads to the current story.  This is as it should be.

But you can weave the same information into the story one way or another.  How ell it works depends solely on how well you write it, and whether it does or doesn't interrupt the reader, knock him out of the story flow.

Sometimes, as they say, you pays your nickle and you takes your chance.