Nokken by Kim Myatt

How To Foreshadow

Foreshadowing is a necessary part of any well-executed story. And yet, despite all its prevalence and importance, it’s actually a concept that many authors have a hard time getting their minds around. If we sift foreshadowing down to its simplest form, we could say that it prepares readers for what will happen later in the story.

At first glance, this may seem counter-intuitive. Why would we want readers to know what’s going to happen later in the story? If they know how the book turns out, they’ll have no reason to read on.

True enough. So let me reiterate. The point of foreshadowing is to prepare readers for what happens later in the story. Not tell them,just prepare them.

Foreshadowing’s great strength lies in its ability to create a cohesive and plausible story. If readers understand that it’s possible that someone in your story may be murdered, they won’t be completely shocked when the sidekick gets axed down the road. If, however, you failed to properly foreshadow this unhappy event,readers would be jarred. They would feel you had cheated them out of the story they thought they were reading. They would think you had, in essence, lied to them so you could trick them with this big shocker.

Readers don’t like to be cheated, lied to, or tricked. And that’s where foreshadowing comes into play.

Foreshadowing, Part 1: The Plant

We can break foreshadowing down into two parts. The first is the plant. This is the part where you hint to readers that something surprising and/or important is going to happen later in the book. If the bad guy is going to kidnap the good guy’s son, your plant might be the moment when your hero notices a creepy dude hanging around the playground. If your heroine is going to be left standing at the altar, your plant might be her fiancé’s ambivalence toward the wedding preparations.

Depending on what you’re foreshadowing, the plant can be blatant or subtle. Subtle is almost always better, since you don’t want to giveaway your plot twists. But, at the same time, your hints have to be obvious enough that readers will remember them later on.

Usually, the earlier you can foreshadow an event, the stronger and more cohesive an effect you will create. The bigger the event, the more important it is to foreshadow it early. As editor Jeff Gerke puts it in The First 50 Pages:

Basically, you need to let us in on the rules. If the climax of your book is going to consist of getting into a time machine and jumping away to safety, we had better have known in the first fifty pages that time travel is possible in the world of your story.

Foreshadowing, Part 2: The Payoff

Once you’ve got your plant in place, all that’s left is to bringthe payoff on stage. If you planted hints about kidnapping, jilting, or time travelling, this is the part where you now get to let these important scenes play out.

As long as you’ve done your job right with the plant, you probably won’t even need to reference your hints from earlier. In fact, you’re likely to create a more solid effect by letting readers put the pieces together themselves.

But you’ll also find moments, usually of smaller events that were given less obvious plants, that will benefit from a quick reference to the original hint (e.g., “George,you big meanie! Now I understand why you wouldn’t choose between the scarlet and the crimson for the bridesmaids’ dresses!”)The most important thing to remember about the payoff is that it always needs to happen. If you plant hints, pay them off. Just as readers will be confused by an unforeshadowed plot twist, they’ll also be frustrated by foreshadowing that excites them and then leads nowhere.

Foreshadowing vs. Telegraphing

The trick to good foreshadowing is preparing your readers on a subconscious level for what’s coming without allowing them to guess the ins and outs of the plot twist. You don’t want your hints to be so obvious that they remove all suspense. In her October 2012 Writer’s Digest article “Making the Ordinary Menacing: 5 Ways,” Hallie Ephron calls this “telegraphing”:

When you insert a hint of what’s to come, look at it critically and decide whether it’s something the reader will glide right by but remember later with an Aha!That’s foreshadowing. If instead the reader groans and guesses what’s coming, you’v etelegraphed.

Some clever readers will undoubtedly be able to interpret your hints, no matter how cagey you are. But if you can fool most of the readers most of the time, you can’t ask for more than that.

Foreshadowing vs. Foreboding

Foreboding—that skin-prickling feeling that somethinghorrible is going to happen—can be a useful facet of foreshadowing. By itself, foreboding isn’t specific enough tobe foreshadowing. Unlike the plants used for foreshadowing, foreboding is just an ambiguous aura of suspense. Jordan E. Rosenfeld describes it in Make a Scene:

[F]oreshadowing … hints at actual plot events to come, [but]foreboding is purely about mood-setting. It heightens the feeling of tension in a scene but doesn’t necessarily indicate that something bad really will happen.

Foreboding is useful in setting readers’ emotions on edge without giving them any blatant hints. But when it comes time to foreshadow important events, always back up your foreboding by planting some specific clues.Most authors have so intrinsic an understanding of foreshadowing that they plant it and pay it off without even fully realizing that’s what they’re doing. But the better you understand the technique, the better you can wield it. Using this basic approach to foreshadowing, you can strengthen your story and your readers’ experience of it.

Source x

Hello! I have a plan to get my main character injured by the antagonist. But, since the mc lives, is it better to describe the danger or get the mc injured so he (and the audience) would have no questions about the seriousness of the antagonist?

When to Injure Your MC

If you ask many writers why they beat their characters up so much, the immediate playful answer might be “Because it’s fun!” but there is (or should be) some strategy involved in when and how you injure your main character. So before I answer the question directly, I’m going to discuss these strategies a little.

Reasons to Injure a Character:

1. To create additional challenges in a high-stakes situation

If a character’s journey has been fairly easy to far, an injury is one way to complicate things. But the only way it works is if the injury lasts long enough to really hinder them. 

For instance, if you have a character that has the magical ability to heal others, then a character being injured and then healed two minutes later doesn’t create much of a challenge, nor does it heighten suspense since the character’s life was never truly in danger. So an injury that’s introduced to complicate things should take some time to recover from, and it’s usually more realistic anyway, especially when you consider the tortuous stuff we do to our MCs sometimes.

However, if you do have a healer character, and they’re currently separated from the character you injure, then a challenge is immediately presented. The injured character has to continue their journey through the injury, to either reach their destination or be reunited with the healer that can help them. 

2. To foreshadow a future situation

The situation I described above, where a character is injured and then healed two minutes later, could work, if it’s being used to foreshadow the second situation I described, where the two characters are separated. Showing the healer in action early in the story can foreshadow a later complication when the healer is unable to assist their companion, whether it’s due to a separation or a sudden loss of powers. 

It can also work as exposition to show the way the healer’s power works. 

3. To show the antagonist’s maliciousness 

The anon above suggested they injure their character to show the antagonist means business, and that definitely qualifies as a good reason to injure a character. 

See, when an antagonist hurts a character - and not just an MC, but anyone - they show that they don’t care who gets in their way. They want what they want, and in their opinion, the ends justifies the means. Even when a character isn’t necessarily in their way, and they do it for pleasure, it tells a reader a great deal about the antagonist’s psyche, and how far they’ll go to further their own agenda. 

My only caution here is to be wary of how often you’re using this reason. Often times it becomes easy to justify an antagonist’s plan by saying “They’re evil and they enjoy torturing people.” But villains who are evil just for the pure enjoyment of it grow uninteresting and predictable quickly. So despite the pleasure they get out of hurting people, they must have some greater scheme in front of them. Some ultimate gain that they’re hoping to achieve. A combination of these two things can breed a fascinating antagonist. 

4. To deepen a character bond or relationship

Injuries or illness are great opportunities to write a dynamic where one character is taking care of another, showing how close the two characters are, and how attentively they’ll care for the other. But this dynamic is most compelling when it’s a reversal, such as a little brother taking care of an older one, or when someone who the protagonist has built up to be invincible is suddenly sidelined and needs the protagonist’s help. 

Like the previous reason, i would just be careful how frequently this occurs. Situations like these are more effective when they’re big, and they last long term, rather than several smaller instances where a character keeps getting hurt and cared for. 

There may be other reasons out there to justify injuring a character that I haven’t thought of here, but I can surely tell you one reason not to:

Avoid injuring a character purely for the fun of it. 

Now listen, what you do in your own private writing universe is your own business, and if you want to put your characters through hell because it’s fun, I commend you for finding so much joy in the process of writing and I encourage you to keep at it. But when it comes to finding an audience, and telling a cohesive, well-paced, well-plotted story, you gotta start considering each move you make as a writer, and ask yourself if each plot point needs to be there. 

Back to the anon…

Now that I’ve gone into all this detail, let me get back to the specific question that the anon asked. Since the character ultimately lives, is it better to just show the possible danger, or to actually have the antagonist injure them to show they’re serious?

My answer to you would be that you could injure the character, since your reasoning falls within the reasons I listed here (reason #3), and it would be even better if it qualified for two reasons, such as delaying their progress to achieve their goal (reason #1) or repairing a strained relationship when a companion must take care of them (reason #4). 

Your argument that the character lives (so why bother?) ignores the need for conflict in a story. Readers appreciate conflict, as long as there are logical reasons for it, and if you consider these reasons I discussed, you should be in great shape. 

However, I think that you could show your antagonist’s malicious intentions without injuring the character, if you felt the injury would be too much for an already conflict-heavy plot. The antagonist might show anger/violence towards the people working for them (out of frustration), or even to innocent bystanders, or other minor characters whose fates we’re not as tied up in. So I think there are still options for you if you wanted to avoid an injury. 

-Rebekah

A Seljuk (or Seljuq) silver ring depicting a lion, dated to the 11th to 12th centuries CE. This image was found on WordPress and attributed to Christie’s.

Eowyn near Meduseld`s doors by  Matthew Stewart

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The Outsider’s Mark (x)

Another one that has been a long time coming! I LOVE the Dishonored games, so it had to be done at some point ;)

imagine if the oceans were replaced by forests and if you went into the forest the trees would get taller the deeper you went and there’d be thousands of undiscovered species and you could effectively walk across the ocean but the deeper you went, the darker it would be and the animals would get progressively scarier and more dangerous and instead of whales there’d be giant deer and just wow

Delilah’s got her eyes set on a much greater prize.

seaspun