Foreshadowing in Fiction

Foreshadowing is another of those ways of making your fiction rise above the ordinary. A lot of novel writing beginners do not bother with it - they either don't know what it is or don't know how to do it. If you foreshadow in your own fiction, you will make it a lot more professional and a lot more publishable.

I have split this article into 3 parts:

• First, I ask why there is any need to use foreshadowing at all (beyond the fact that it will make agents and publishers more likely to accept your novel).

• Second, I explain what it is by running through 9 examples.

• Third, I tell you precisely how to foreshadow.

What is the Purpose of Foreshadowing?

Put simply, it is a way of sign-posting your novel's big events, of telling the readers to stick with the story because some exciting things are coming right up. And the purpose of doing that, of course, is to keep the readers turning those pages.

Foreshadowing creates suspense. According to the dictionary, suspense is "a quality in a work of fiction that arouses excited expectation about what may happen". Fail to foreshadow and the readers will have no expectations, because you haven't provided them with any.

The only thing you have to beware of is being too obvious. Ideally, you want to signpost the fact that something exciting is about to happen but without giving away the precise nature of the event. In other words, arouse expectations but keep the audience guessing.

Better still, you can use it to deliberately mislead the readers. Make them believe that X is about to happen but actually Y happens. (I will be talking more about deliberate misdirection in the examples that follow.)

Nine Examples of Foreshadowing

1. Naming the Approaching Event

Simply naming the event and indicating why it is likely to be momentous is one of the simplest ways of foreshadowing. So you might begin a chapter 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."

It isn't very 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.

2. Narrator Statement

"When Ruth Jones's alarm clock woke her at seven o'clock that morning, she had no idea that today would be the longest day of her life."

Again, there is nothing subtle about this. And it also pre-supposes the fact that you are using a disembodied narrator. If you are writing a first person novel, or a third person novel in which the "camera" is positioned behind the viewpoint character's eyes throughout, this method of foreshadowing won't be an option.

(For more on this type of narrator, see the article on Third Person Narrative Point of View.)

3. The Pre-Scene

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.

4. Irrational Concern

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 the 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...

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.

Foreshadowing, in this case, has enabled you to create both suspense and surprise.