Foreshadowing: What It Is and How To Do It

[duckprintspress]

(this is actually tomorrow's post but I still haven't figured out scheduling posts on here and I won't have time tomorrow so, surprise, day early)

a guest post by JD Rivers

For a while, I’ve followed a creator who builds “tiny, nerdy things.” A big banner with the word “foreshadowing” scrolled more than once through his videos, usually after he’s said, “This should work out” because—foreshadowing—it never worked out as he wanted it.

The banner with “foreshadowing” on it is, of course, added in post-production when the creator edited their video and knew it would go sidewise. But the audience starts the video at the beginning, so to heighten the anticipation that something will go wrong, but not reveal what, the banner was added.

But what does foreshadowing mean, and how can an author do it?

Wikipedia defines it as “a narrative device in which suggestions or warnings about events to come are dropped or planted.”

Let’s take an example from a well-known movie. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones expresses a fear of snakes in the opening scene after encountering one. It becomes a running gag throughout the series, and pays off in the same movie, when Indiana falls into a pit filled with snakes. By mentioning to the audience that he has this fear in the beginning scene, the pit scene hits as intended—as a joke to further ruin Indiana Jones’ day. Without the foreshadowing of his fear, the later usage of it wouldn’t have worked.

In preparing the user for events yet to come, foreshadowing plays an important role. Like when Harvey Dent says, in The Dark Knight, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” and later turns into the villain Two-Face, the viewer can look back on the above scene and think, “Yeah, saw that one coming.”

These examples show how stories are enriched through foreshadowing. Depending on the story’s genre, foreshadowing can be used heavy-handedly or with a lighter touch. A murder mystery or political thriller will try and cram as many hints and hidden secrets into the narrative as possible to keep the reader guessing, puzzling out the real clues against the red herrings, whereas a cozy fantasy may employ a more laid-back style to usher the audience along while still incorporating clues hinting at later events.

But foreshadowing is also employed to keep the story logical and consistent. While everyday life is a contradictory mess of coincidences and surprises, stories turn unbelievable if the main character is saved one too many times out of the blue at the last second. For a story to work, for the narrative set-up to pay off at the right moment, there needs to be logical consequences laid out in the narrative itself. These can be a direct mention of upcoming events or characters, or indirectly included through symbols, dialogue bits, objects found and lost, mentions of a name, and in many other ways. Like in a whodunnit, the clues need to be there for the reader, or they’ll feel tricked through a deux ex machina solution (another plot device, in which a seemingly unresolvable situation is suddenly resolved through an unlikely occurrence or coincidence.).

You may wonder: how does the foreshadowing enter a story?

While stories are usually read chronologically, in the same order as the pages are printed in the book, they are seldom written so. Depending on how the author works, whether they use a planned outline or they wander from scene to scene, they add tidbits after the story is finished, usually when editing or working on the next draft version. Only when the full story is laid out can they smuggle in the little, special touches: the drop of blood on a shoe, the smudge of chalk in a corner, the character’s turn to villainism, the turn of a phrase, the news headline, the dialogue fragment between two characters. They are woven into the story, pointing to events and climaxes yet to come, help the reader guess a development correctly or encourage them to re-read the entire story to find the hidden secrets they overlooked at the first read through.

Foreshadowing is the breadcrumbs leading the reader through a story, keeping their interest strong, engaging them actively as they try to guess what will be relevant and what will happen, as they want to the see the payoff taking shape in logical climaxes.

What are you some of your favorite examples of foreshadowing, in works you’ve seen, read, or written yourself?