Having dealt with the theory of foreshadowing, here are some concrete examples of foreshadowing in action.
These five examples of how to foreshadow are in no way a definitive list. They are simply the ideas I came up with when I wrote this article.
In other words, I am sure there are countless other ways to foreshadow - either variations on the examples below or entirely different ways. My examples of foreshadowing are just meant to give you the idea.
Simply naming the event and indicating why it is likely to be momentous is one of the simplest ways of foreshadowing in fiction.
So you might begin a chapter in a novel like this...
Fred left the house at eleven o'clock and drove into town. He was meeting his father for lunch at Brown's. Officially, they were just 'catching up', but they both knew Fred needed money again - and not such a small amount this time, either.
Out of all these examples here, this one is hardly the most subtle - but it does the job.
Fred is on his way to a difficult meeting and, as readers of this story, we are looking forward to seeing how it plays out before either character has even reached the restaurant.
For added impact, you could foreshadow this lunch date earlier - the night before perhaps. Or else you could give Fred several other tasks to perform in town before he meets his father.
That way, the reader will anticipate the upcoming meeting for several pages, not just for a paragraph or two.
We are in the cockpit of an airplane. The plane suddenly hits turbulence and the captain struggles to regain control. It doesn't last long, and everything is soon seemingly fine again - but the reader implicitly understands that this is going to be anything but a trouble-free flight.
Or we are in a Wild West saloon. The hero walks in and orders whiskey. Over in the corner, the baddie watches him drink. As the hero leaves, the baddie spits on the floor. And that is it. But we know that their next meeting will probably not be so uneventful.
A pre-scene is simply a smaller version of a larger scene to come. They are not significant by themselves, but they imply that there is something more spectacular waiting to happen right around the corner.
A teenage girl leaves the house for an evening out with her friends. Her mother makes her promise to be back before midnight. The girl kisses her mother and tells her she worries too much. She'll be fine, she says.
But us readers know she won't be.
In the real world, mothers worry over nothing all the time, however old their children are (it's part of their job description).
In fiction, however, there is no such thing as irrationality. If a character worries, the reader expects - indeed, demands - that these worries are for a reason.
The obvious outcome here is that the daughter does not make it home safely. But how about using some of that misdirection I talked about earlier...
Here is how it might play out...
Midnight has come and gone and the mother is standing at the window. She hears the back door and runs to meet her daughter. But it is a masked intruder carrying a knife.
The reader would have been expecting bad things to happen to the daughter, but in the end it was the mother who was in trouble.
Foreshadowing, in this case, has enabled you to create both suspense and surprise.
An old man is sitting at his desk looking at his stamp collection. When he opens the drawer for his magnifying glass, his fingers brush against a revolver. He finds the magnifying glass and closes the drawer...
But us readers know that the gun wouldn't have been shown to us at all if it wasn't going to be fired later in the novel.
I said at the top that these examples of foreshadowing are just suggestions to give you the idea of how to foreshadow. You can use them any way you like.
For example, it doesn't have to be a gun in the drawer - it could be a bottle of poison or an unidentified object wrapped in brown paper or an unopened letter.
Or how about making it the absence of something - an empty bottle of heart medication, a fuel gauge close to empty.
Now for the last of my examples of foreshadowing...
The first thing Mary saw when she pulled back the curtains was a solitary magpie sitting on the fence. She waited for a second bird to appear, but no magpie came.
Any reader who knows the magpie rhyme "one for sorrow, two for joy..." will immediately suspect the worst for Mary, even if Mary herself is untroubled by the sighting and soon forgets about it.
The same thing would apply if Mary had opened her curtains to see storm clouds gathering on the horizon.
In novels, symbolism counts. Here is how Ernest Hemingway famously foreshadows an early death in the opening line of A Farewell to Arms...
The leaves fell early that year.
Like I said, there are countless ways to foreshadow events in a novel, so you really mustn't take these five examples as a complete list. They are simply meant to give you the idea, so that you can then go on to devise your own methods.
Four other methods I have written about in the longer version of this article involve foreshadowing through...
You can read the full article in my Ultimate Guide to Novel Writing.
Next Step: Learn how to handle the Exposition of a Story...