Today I decided to ditch the prologue from my book, Chasing Money. I wrote it originally because I wanted the book to feel like a true story. After all, the painting is real, the reward is real, and I’d carefully researched the painting’s disappearance and the people who’d been involved. It all could have happened just as I’ve described.

Early on, when I was still finding my voice, it helped me to think about the book as a story Marty was telling years later, maybe to a friend or to a stranger that he’d met in the bar. It wouldn’t have been smart for Marty to tell that story because he knew things, and had done things, that could put him in prison or get him killed. But Marty is a storyteller, and it’s hard for him to keep a secret, so it eventually spills out in this book. The prologue made that explicit. It started:

“I don’t think I’m spoiling the story for you by telling you upfront that I survived. Some didn’t, and there were times I was convinced I wouldn’t either.”

I’ve had mixed feedback on the prologue for the past two years. Some beta readers really liked it, and others hated it. My wife thought I went on too long about my storytelling and my background. My friends, Mike and Mary, really didn’t like the opening line.  My book coach liked the prologue, with a few exceptions, but said it was too long, and warned me that some agents don’t like prologues on principle. She recommended I trim it up substantially and call it something else.

I rewrote the prologue multiple times over the past two years. I took parts out and added parts in. The opening line never changed though, and I linked back to that in the epilogue, which began:

“I told you at the beginning that I survived. But survived doesn’t mean intact.”

That linkage between the beginning of the story and the end was important to me. I liked how the story came full circle.  But I continued to get feedback that the prologue wasn’t helping me. I had trimmed it up and made it shorter, but in the process, I had also watered it down. There wasn’t as much to engage the reader. I was telling them Marty was a great storyteller, but I wasn’t showing them a good example of that.

After talking it through with my wife again today, I decided it was time for the prologue to go. I rewrote the last chapter so that instead of referencing the opening line at the beginning, it reads:

“If it is true that we age not by years but by stories, then I should already be a ghost. I’ve told this story reluctantly, not because it’s hard to tell but because it’s hard to believe. It is a confession of sorts, and while there is no statute of limitations for murder, the truth is not always convincing and, absent any proof, invariably refutable. I survived, which brings its own regret because survival is an end, not a beginning, and certainly, for me, carries no redemption.”

I’m happy with that. And I found other places in the book to use the lines from the prologue that I had sweated over and really loved. For example, now the phrase about collecting anecdotes like souvenirs is in chapter five and describes how both Bo and Marty use these stories to entertain friends and investors.

So, although I finally gave up on the prologue, I figured out how to do it in a way that keeps some of my favorite prose intact, and makes the book better. My first chapter has always been a great read, and now readers will start there right away. The first lines of that chapter were the first lines I every wrote for this story. Now they are, once again, the opening lines of the book.