Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is the act of giving the reader or viewer hints about what is to come. That cat with glowing eyes from Act 1 is probably not one the hero should take home with her. Some foreshadowing tips are equivalent to downright spoilers. In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare tells us in the prologue that the young lovers are going to die. He also calls them “Star-crossed” lovers, in other words, ill-fated. So, everybody in the audience knows from the very beginning how it will end. So, logically, why bother to watch the play? Foreshadowing as in Romeo and Juliet adds tension. It makes every moment the lovers spend together more important, more frantic. It heightens the stakes. If it didn’t do these things, how can you explain why the play keeps selling out performances 400 years after it was written. 

Stephen King utilizes foreshadowing to great effect. Again, sometimes it almost seems like it is to the point of being a spoiler. In his Dark Tower series, the fourth book is called Wizard and Glass. The book is almost entirely taken up by the story that the hero Roland tells his companions about an adventure long ago when he fell in love with a girl named Susan. The foreshadowing of the tragic story begins in the previous book and continues until he begins his tale. There is no doubt how this story will end, and yet, like travelers passing a car crash, we can’t take our eyes off it.

It seems to me foreshadowing often happens at the end of chapters, almost like a cliffhanger, spurning us on to read what comes next. As the chapter closes you will read words like, “and that was just the beginning,” or “if I had only known what that would lead to.”

But foreshadowing can be more subtle. In George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, there is an event that happens in book three, A Storm of Swords, the event is called the Red Wedding. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It made quite a reaction with readers who first read it in the 1990’s. But when the Red Wedding took place on the HBO series of Game of Thrones, the internet exploded. It became a cultural phenomenon. You Tube videos started popping up which showed people's reaction to the Red Wedding. Those who had not read the books were caught completely by surprise. They may have had an inkling that something bad might happen, but no one had any idea about the shock they were about to experience. This is because the foreshadowing of the Red Wedding was subtle. It was the kind of thing you realize after the fact. Subtle foreshadowing nags at the reader’s subconscious.

Like every technique a writer uses, foreshadowing needs to be handled with care. You don’t want to post a bunch of random exposition at the beginning of the book that will have relevance at the end. You can introduce information, perhaps skills a character has, or ominous properties of a newly developed substance, but it should be handled subtly, not as an info dump.

I have been paying more attention to foreshadowing in my own writing. I have done some of it without even realizing I was doing it. Sometimes I have gone back to a story after it was done and added foreshadowing. That is a good practice. Ask yourself where it is needed and carefully add it in, keeping in mind whether you want the foreshadowing to act on the conscious or subconscious realm.

Handled well, foreshadowing builds expectation. Handled clumsily, it just spoils the event it is foreshadowing, or leads to tedious exposition.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources)

Star Liner