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 two parts...

• First, I ask what is the purpose of foreshadowing.
• Second, I tell you precisely how to foreshadow.

(And in the article which follows, I provide you with some examples of how to foreshadow, which should hopefully make everything crystal clear.)

1. Why Foreshadow?

Put simply, foreshadowing 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.

There are a couple of things you have to be aware of, though...

First, don't be 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 foreshadowing to deliberately mislead the readers. Make them believe that X is about to happen but actually Y happens.

And that leads on to the second caveat: if you make a promise to the readers, make sure that you follow up on it.

If you foreshadowed the death of a character at the beginning of a novel but in the end they escaped death, the readers might feel that you had raised their hopes (if that is the right way of putting it) but then failed to deliver.

There is a famous device in storytelling called the two-shoe contract. If you hear a shoe hit the floor in the room above, the implication is that a second one will drop soon.

• The first shoe is the event being foreshadowed.
• The second is the event itself.

What that means in plain English is that every promise made in a novel must be delivered upon.

It also means that every big event should be promised in advanced - i.e. foreshadowed - to get the most dramatic mileage out of it.

And so you should never promise that a gun will be fired if it never actually is. That is failing to deliver. Having said that, it is perfectly acceptable to:

• Foreshadow the fact that the gun will be fired.
• Imply that Character A will use it to kill Character B.
• But actually, in the end, have Character A use it on himself.

2. How to Foreshadow

Planning and writing a novel, as you know, is a complicated process. Without good organization and discipline, it is easy to become overwhelmed or find yourself in a hopeless muddle.

For that reason, do not worry about "nailing" foreshadowing during the planning stage.

Sure, when you plot your novel, try to work in some foreshadowing of the novel's major events.

But it isn't until you Revise the Novel that you will really be able to check what has been foreshadowed and what hasn't and do the necessary fine-tuning.

But whether you are roughly foreshadowing during the planning stage, or foreshadowing in detail when you revise, how precisely should you go about it?

Effective foreshadowing in fiction is a simple case of reverse-engineering.

Select which events you want to foreshadow and then work backwards, planting signposts for each event in the preceding chapters.

• A small event might only require one signpost at the start of the chapter in which it occurs.
• A major event occurring near the end of the novel can be hinted at and alluded to almost from the start.

Still confused? Then my Nine Examples of How to Foreshadow should un-confuse you...