Foreshadowing: A Revision Skill to Love

Every element in a story must be necessary, suggests the dramatic principal known as “Chekov’s gun”: If you put a gun on the wall in the first act, it should be used before the end of the play. That’s equally true for any unusual detail. If you introduce a Waterford crystal vase in a trailer home, or a caged boa constrictor in the house where your character picks up his babysitter, it will grab your reader’s notice and make her wonder, Hmm, what’s that about?

Because your reader will assume that detail is a sign pointing toward the story to come, its presence (or even its sudden absence!) will add an undercurrent of tension to any scene taking place in that room. Dialogue can foreshadow as well. One of my favorite examples is a line from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Cask of Amontillado, when the protagonist says, “I shall not die of a cough,” and the antagonist who will later wall him up in the wine cellar says, “True—true.”

Yet even if you’re a dogged outliner, you may still discovering your novel’s identity in early drafts. How can you presage events that are yet to take place?

The easy answer is that you can’t. As you move through your first draft, the details you’re using are meant to build the kind of world in which your story could reasonably take place, and characterize those who will people it.

Once you know the story’s destination, though, you can go back and add in some signage along the way. Exploring how your favorite authors use foreshadowing to set up and guide their story is a great reason to immediately circle back and reread a novel you just finished.

Here are some structural issues that can be addressed with effective foreshadowing.

 

Problem 1: Too many questions

When a new reader arrives at the dark house of your story, the polite thing to do is to turn on a light in the foyer so she can orient to the new world she’s entering. A less confident author will switch on every light in the house—and then, fearing the reader may be bored, add the outdoor floods, too. The reader, who had hoped to be ushered into a specific kind of house featuring a specific kind of conflict viewed through a specific perspective, is now blinded by the light of details that raise so many different kinds of questions that she has no sense of this story’s nature.

Overwriting is a relatable first-draft syndrome as you build a new story world. But once you know the story all the way through to the end, you’ll have to weed through that verbiage and dig out the pertinent details that will raise the story-relevant questions you want the reader to hold in mind. Specificity is important: a rare ancient Chinese hand cannon on the wall of a history scholar’s office is going to raise a very different question than the Kalishnikov on the wall of a retired CIA operative.

Tip: Look for clues your own mind may have planted in your first draft, as your subconscious is a powerful creative partner, and as such, may already have foreshadowed the story to come. The second draft is a great time to unearth those clues and spotlight them in a way that raises pertinent questions for your reader.

 

Problem 2: Multiple personalities

Let’s say that upon second look, you realize your story fell into sections that seem very different. Let’s sketch an example.

Section A. The story begins with a bang: after receiving one of many dubious, anonymous claims that a sea monster has been spotted, a responding marine biologist is endangered when she is kidnapped at sea by poachers. She manages to escape, but their actions convince her there is indeed something rare out there. Her search is rewarded when she spots the largest and ugliest marine mammal she’s ever seen, riddled with harpoons. Because the kidnapping had been in the U.S. news, she uses connections to have the creature relocated to a safe haven in another country.

Section B. The animal is treated for its wounds and the biologist believes she’s found a marine mammal that is hundreds of years old. It is not a model patient. It gnashes its teeth, body slams its confines, and struggles against all efforts to help it. The locals supporting the efforts of the introverted biologist name it “Ugly” in their language. She learns that the rampant poaching is driven by poverty, not greed. Who knows how many of its hundreds of years this creature has been hunted? Due to some backstory motivation—maybe her beloved 103-year-old grandmother was abused in a nursing home or something—she  recognizes the fierceness that has kept this animal alive so long. She comes to love it and the community it built, and although she recognizes it is time, she is loath to let it go.

Section C. [Oops—got lost in developing emotional impact there, back to the suspense.] Just before the animal is released, the relentless poachers catch up to her. They are sitting ducks. The biologist struggles to find a way to set the animal free in a sea safe from poaching.

That middle section is crucial to building the kind of personal stakes that will invest readers more deeply in Section C, but right now, removed from Section A in spirit and intent, it feels like a completely different story. Time to invoke the 20/20 vision that hindsight affords.

Tip: Layer in foreshadowing that will assure the reader that the poaching story is still in play. Think through what the poachers might be up to and allow their actions to leak into Section B. Examples: The biologist might receive a surprise visit by a “colleague” who shouldn’t know where she is. She could receive some sort of overt or symbolic threat. One of the locals could seem suspicious. Threading in these actions will raise tension about what will happen once the creature is released.

 

Problem 3: Double Incitement

A well-plotted novel is chock full of events after which nothing will be the same for your character—but only one of these events, the inciting incident, should come at your protagonist so unexpectedly that she must set a goal she’ll be striving toward throughout the entire story. Her ability to achieve her goal without some inner change seems so impossible that an associated story question will be raised in the reader’s mind (Can the protagonist prevail, given who she is and what she’s up against?), by which she’ll assess all story movement (Oh no, it doesn’t look good! or Thank goodness, she really needed a break about now!).

Sometimes, to amp up tension, authors will create a second event that comes on sudden and strong, stealing attention from the first question and confusing the reader as she wonders, Was that first goal important at all? You want to raise questions, sure—just not that one.

A late-entering natural disaster is a good example. I’m not talking here about a woman-against-nature plot as in the movie Twister, where the characters are soon-to-be divorced tornado chasers. They seek storms from the outset; it makes sense that their final interpersonal conflict would be staged during a tornado. I’m talking about a story based on a goal unrelated to the disaster-to-come, and one in which this disaster is not a reasonable conflict.

Say your protagonist, Rosa, is working undercover to earn the presidency of the New York-based company that her father should never have left to her less-qualified and often absentee stepbrother. Right before the board meeting where she will unmask herself and claim her victory…

…an earthquake comes out of nowhere (it happens, you tell yourself! and what a surprising twist!). When it pulls down the building in her brother’s absence, Rosa shows she’s as strong and courageous as any man by ushering the injured to safety.

I’m sure you sense how unsatisfying that would be for the fully invested reader who was eager to know if she’d succeed in earning her right to replace her stepbrother: you’ve upstaged your first inciting event with another that can’t help but raise urgent questions that will completely dissolve the psychological bond you created between the reader and Rosa with your original inciting incident.

Can you save this plot with foreshadowing? Let’s see. You could move the company to an aging San Francisco high-rise. You could make Rosa a big-picture thinker, concerned about protecting the bottom line as well as the welfare of the employees and the historic building in which they are housed. After dropping her soda can and watching it roll all the way to the far side of the room, she could report this to the building manager, who says not to worry because the president knows and says it’s nothing to worry about. Later, they experience increasingly unsettling rumbles, the largest shaking things up on the day of the big board meeting. This is the moment she’s been working toward, but she also senses it’s increasingly unsafe to be in the building. What she chooses to do right now might just show that she’s the leader the company needs.

Without similar changes and foreshadowing, the earthquake is a structural misstep, because the conflict was not born of either the setting or Rosa’s story goal to earn the presidency. The confused reader will set down your book and never forgive you for denying their Rosa (remember the bond you built!) the chance to bring this story to a satisfying close.

Tip: If you want to add in a big second event, you’ll need to foreshadow it so that it raises tensions that make us worry about the effect this will have on Rosa’s original goal. And then make sure Rosa has her moment with the board, even if they must convene among the rubble.

Perhaps a better tip: Believe in the power of the family and corporate drama you first set out to explore. Give your undercover corporate heir-apparent her moment in the boardroom, and save your earthquake plot for your story about the grieving amateur geologist who is seeking hope in the wake of destruction.

In what ways have the authors of your favorite novels foreshadowed the story to come? Has your imperfect first draft ever suffered from one of these problems? What other story issues have you addressed through the use of foreshadowing?