miashara@juno.com wrote:

I'm going to make this short and to the point. Why do you write a prelude
or a 
prologue to a fic? To give the reading audience a idea of what to expect.

Kleppe wrote:

I'm a bit of an unusual case. The preludes to my upcoming Hearts and
Minds series are as numerous as the chapters in the series itself --
and, for all I know, might be as large in total bytes. They're as much
continuation stories in their own right as they are lead-ins to the main
series.

So why did I write them? For one thing, the HaM series takes place seven
years after the manga, and most of the characters have been through some
changes in the meantime. I wanted to show development that was
(hopefully) believable, rather than just saying, well it's a serious
story, so therefore the characters are now automatically more mature.
Secondly, given the... active... nature of the characters' lives, it
just felt wrong for me to jump ahead all those years as if nothing much
important had happened in that time. Finally, I had what I felt were
good ideas for these prelude stories, and I wanted to write them.

Bastion writes:

	Um, no.  It would be in, in my opinion, better that you act like it was nothing, because
to those characters it is.  Those characters are thinking forward, and only the times
they would look back are through reminiscing, writing memoirs, looking at pictures, etc., which
something that people don't do very oftened. Actually, believe it or not, it would be more believable.

Like in my story TTtW, I do have a prelude, but its short, and leads three years ahead of the original
series.  BUT I do the explaining and characterization slowly, piece by piece, character by character in
each chapter (or atleast try to).

Harder to characterize, yes. 
But it's our job as authors to creatively explain what happened between point A to point B.

Also I assume readers have short attention spans, (or atleast I do), and would probably
want the author to get to the point pretty quickly.  
So in short, long preludes are just chapter 1s with a special name.
But that's my short, blunted opinion.

Bastion