Carol Rose
Basic
FORESHADOWING
Have you ever come across a detail in a story that reads like it was tossed in there for the writer’s convenience? One that makes no sense to the plot or the characters? It simply appeared in the story without any logical reason for it being there. Annoying, isn’t it? You feel cheated, like the author got stuck and instead of going back to fix the story earlier so that detail made sense, they just wrote it in there assuming readers are stupid. Well, we’re not.
Those ridiculous last-minute, come-out-of-nowhere, save-the-day clichés are called deux ex machina. That’s New Latin translated from a Greek phrase meaning a god from a machine. It’s a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and seemingly unlikely occurrence, typically so much as to seem contrived.
We sometimes see these used in TV shows or plays to surprise the audience, to bring the tale to a happy ending, or to act as a comedic device. But more often than not, when used in a novel, it means the writer didn’t plan their story very well and had no clue how to bring it to the conclusion they’d written. So they tossed in a last minute detail that solved everything. Kind of how most sitcoms are wrapped up within the half hour time frame, so that the last two minutes consist of Surprise! Fluffy was hiding in the closet the whole time! Awww….how cute!
Fix-it-all plot devices leave the reader with an unsatisfied feeling, and you don’t want that. To avoid this, use the subtle yet meaningful art of foreshadowing.
Subtle yet meaningful. That’s what you’re striving for when you foreshadow an important event or plot point in your story.
Subtle, because you don’t want to make it so obvious to your reader that they know at the time you’re foreshadowing something. If they see what you’re doing, you’ve broken the fourth wall. You’ve just made your plot too contrived. Readers like to be surprised, but only to the point what you’ve written is still believable. Remember: we suspend our disbelief when we read a story. That means you as the writer need to pull us in and make that possible.
Meaningful, because you also don’t want to toss a detail in there so carelessly that they really don’t remember reading it. If that happens, they might tear you apart in reviews with the dreaded plot hole critique. Not really fair, since you did foreshadow it, but it was so quick and inconsequential they missed it.
Granted, some people have the reading comprehension of a fruit fly, or they don’t really read a book so much as skim it, so that might happen anyway. You can’t control readers like that. What you can control is how well you set your readers up for the big reveal, or the series of small reveals that logically lend themselves to the conclusion of your story.
We see foreshadowing in play most often in mystery novels or thrillers. The way to craft these novels is to plant false and true clues along the way, leading your reader along on a chase against time and the next victim. But you don’t need to write a mystery or thriller to use foreshadowing effectively. I use it all the time and I write romance.
I love to write complex characters with horrific events in their past. It’s a great way to explain why it’s taken them so long to trust, or why they’d given up on love before they met the hero or heroine. But as a reader, I also don’t like to know all those details in the first few pages. I don’t need a long, boring info dump at the start of the story, telling me everything about the hero’s tragic past. A tiny detail is all I’d rather have. Just enough to explain why, when he meets the heroine on page one, he’s abrupt and almost cold, instead of asking for her phone number. Then, as the story progresses, the author reveals more details, connected to the points in the story, of course, until finally I understand why he is who he is.
There are more important reasons for leading readers along like this than avoiding info dumps or deux ex machinas. In any character-driven novel, you want your readers invested in those characters. You want them to care about what happens to those people. If they don’t, there’s no motivation for them to turn the page. We’ll talk about creating empathy for characters in another Craft Chat post, but using foreshadowing is one way to do so.
Foreshadowing doesn’t only have to be about who the killer really is, or how the detective will finally solve the case. It can also be about slowly revealing the details of a character’s personality. If you’re writing stories about adults, they don’t come to the page as blank slates. They have a past, a family, friends, ex-lovers, ex-partners, ex-spouses, children, pets, secrets. In other words, they come to this present relationship or situation with baggage. Foreshadowing can also involve revealing the relevant details of this baggage to your readers, in as much as it’s meaningful to the story, of course. Otherwise it’s not necessary.
In Private Pleasures – The Doms of Sybaris Cove 8– my heroine is a veterinarian who came to live on the fictional island in the Gulf of Mexico to escape an abusive ex-husband who tracked her across two states after she finally got away from him. When she meets the two heroes (all but one of my Siren-BookStrand books under the pen name Tara Rose are MFM), she’s reluctant to trust one of them let alone both, because she was hurt so badly in her past. No one on the island knows about her past. She’s built up her vet practice and has reshaped her life, but keeping her pain inside has taken its toll on her spirit.
I use foreshadowing in this particular book by way of horrible nightmares the heroine has, giving readers just a tiny glimpse into the abuse she suffered, without giving them all the details at once. I’m talking a paragraph or two every other chapter. When she finally does tell the heroes the whole story, it’s very emotional for all of them because the guys had no idea the love of their life had borne this all on her own.
Foreshadowing doesn’t have to be there all the time, and it can take many forms. If you’re talking about relationships, you can use nightmares or flashbacks. You can use the character hearing something, smelling something, or seeing something that sparks a memory.
I’ve used foreshadowing so that I can use a special skill one of my heroes or heroines has, and they use that skill near the end of the book to solve the crisis for the couple or triad. But if I hadn’t foreshadowed earlier in the story that my character had that skill, or could use it in such a way, that point in the story would have read as contrived. It would have seemed tossed in their for my convenience, not because it’s something the reader would have expected the character to do.
In Taking Passion by Storm – The Weathermen 6– my hero and heroine (these books are all MF, published by Evernight, and are under the pen name Ravenna Tate) both have a connection to the events taking place on the earth’s surface, and they use their skills to help rescue the heroine’s father when he’s lost during a storm. Because this was an ongoing series, my readers already knew the hero had those skills, but they didn’t know the heroine did because they hadn’t met her before this story. I used foreshadowing to make her part in the eventual rescue more believable.
As you may have already noticed, effective foreshadowing also has the added bonus of letting you sprinkle in backstory. Anytime you can use a writing technique to accomplish more than one thing, it’s a bonus. We’ll talk specifically about backstory in another Craft Chat post, but foreshadowing can accomplish this as well. By feeding your reader bits and pieces of a character’s past as a way to explain what happens later in the story – to foreshadow how the story comes to its conclusion - you’re also dribbling in backstory without making it obvious that’s what you’re doing.
You can also use symbolism to foreshadow. Consider the literary devices used in THESE EXAMPLES. Then scroll further down the page to read more foreshadowing examples from famous novels. As you can see, foreshadowing doesn't have to point toward specific events. It can also foreshadow a general theme.
This technique can take many forms, and as a writer you can use it to your advantage to plant clues along the way. You can also use it to go back and fix your story so that great ending you just wrote will make sense to your readers.
That’s it for this Craft Chat post!
