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Hi everyone!
So when discussing writing with some of my friends, a common topic I bring up is foreshadowing. I was curious about how you all write foreshadowing in your stories? When reading a book, do you re-read a book to look for foreshadowing in earlier chapters? And what do you appreciate most about foreshadowing in any narrative? I'm looking forward to your responses! Have a fantastic day!

"Foreshadowing" is really a strange literary device because when you are reading you do not anticipate that something you are currently reading will be reprised at a later time. Sometimes it is obvious when you get to that future point in the novel that what you are reading about was covered before, often in a metaphorical manner, but I find that in most instances it has gone over the top of my head and I never make the connection.

An example : In David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, the story opens describing David's home which is known as The Rookery because when it was purchased by David's father there were found to be many rook nests on the property but the nests were all abandoned. Later in the novel when David is an adult and after both his parents are dead his evil step father sells the house. David had been away for a long time and he visits the property to find that the contents are all gone and it is just a shell of a house which makes him sad as he recalls all of the happy times he spent with his mother there. (His father died just before he was born.) So the abandoned rook nests foreshadow the future abandoned home. But by the time I got to that section of the book I had totally forgotten about the empty rook nests so the foreshadowing never entered my mind. I think a reader has to have very powerful powers of perception and excellent memory to profit from most foreshadowing unless it is made VERY obvious by the author.

My personal literary acumen is strong where interpretation of metaphor is concerned, but I have always had trouble with foreshadowing because - such as in the case described above - I find it hard to collate and database seemingly unimportant and incidental details for later reference and comparison.

With regard to my own writing: in a story which I have written for this website's "Creative Works: Short Story" section I have a seemingly unimportant event take place early in the story - a man asks a club attendant to get him an alcoholic drink. The man then tells his friends a horrific story in which he had been personally involved. At the end of the story, after the reader has been shocked by the contents of the story the man relates privately to the attendant that his story was only a joke. He once again asks the attendant to get him the same drink. The purpose of this was to return the reader to the beginning of the story before the horrific incidents of the tale had been told by reprising the "get me a drink" episode. Thus the reader is returned to the composed and innocent state he/she was in before learning the incidents of the story. I think in my case the foreshadowing of a "return to a peaceful state" is more of a feeling on the part of the reader than a metaphorical comparison of an object or physical representation of anything however. I am fairly sure that my readers would remember the first incident because I took the pains to make the drink include a special ingredient which is also alluded to at the end of the story thus making it easier to recall the first inclusion of the "drink" event.

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There's a word for this that I can't quite remember or find easily, but basically the idea is that if you mention there's a gun on the fireplace mantel in the first chapter, someone had better have been shot with it by the last chapter. The idea is that foreshadowing doesn't necessarily have to involve a ton of prophecies and the like, but that if a detail is worth calling out in the beginning, it's because it will have significance later on.

I play with foreshadowing mostly when I am going through and revising stories, because it's easier to know where it's going then. I may not know that my character will have to make a mad dash for a class that leaves her locked out of her dorm room later on, so I won't know that I need her to have a specific spot by the door where she hangs her keys every day, and when she locks down for a long weekend of studying in her room, she tossed them on the edge of her desk instead. It's little details that we may not know to include in the beginning, which is why I like to add them in afterwards, kind of like easter eggs.

I am very new at writing, in fact I am just recording my thoughts on my past life as a form of mental, cognitive therapy after suffering a stroke in 2015.

The topic of foreshadowing tickles my fancy as it seems to not only be a method used in writing to forewarn a future event(s), but also to help me look out for predictions in a piece of work that says that my therapy is successful, or not.

I write the entire first draft so I have all the information down, then in the redraft I start slipping in dialogue cues or references to what is to come. I think it's much easier to edit in foreshadowing than to write it in before you've even got to what you're talking about.

I love the Chekhov quote that goes something like this. If there's a gun over the mantle in the opening scenes, then it better go off by the end.

OskaWrites wrote: ↑04 Apr 2019, 07:57 I write the entire first draft so I have all the information down, then in the redraft I start slipping in dialogue cues or references to what is to come. I think it's much easier to edit in foreshadowing than to write it in before you've even got to what you're talking about.

I fully agree with this. I've found that if I try to build foreshadowing into the first draft, it's no longer relevant by the time I get to the scene I originally thought I was to write later. The narrative is likely to evolve quite a bit in the translation between a mental concept and an actual written draft.

Howdy, all!

Hatter - that's Chekhov's Gun ^_^

I feel that there are two distinct kinds of foreshadowing - one being a symbolic prefigurement while the other is more of a solid suggestion or the fundamental groundwork of things to come. The gun on the wall is of the latter category, while the first could be as far-fetched as a character distractedly regarding a brace of fowl and indulging in the strange and prescient notion that the plumage about their necks reminds them of their favorite scarf… Both have their uses, though I find myself drawn, personally, to the more mundane sense of the word.

Regarding re-reading: if the book is good enough, I will re-read it in good time and enjoy the scattered Easter eggs the author has left for us to find. I don’t tend to begin an immediate re-read solely to suss out the foreshadowing, however, excepting instances in which there has been a particularly sharp twist and I am caught unawares. This twist is masterfully accomplished in fairly few pieces and I feel an inordinate number of those successful instances are those whose big reveal has to do with one character or another's existence as a ghost or figment of the narrator character's imagination or psychosis. This is more a comment on the inclusion of a 'twist', perhaps, than on the general use of foreshadowing, but I feel that this is, all the same, the place where I will most frequently return to seek the author's establishment of a situation or occurrence.

Finally, If I may make use of an example to answer your final question, I am currently in the middle of Feist’s Magician: Apprentice and have come across a character whose existence, power, personality, and relevance were well foreshadowed through use of a story told in the preceding chapter. While I did not take the story for anything more than a delightful exercise in worldbuilding as I read it, it very immediately blossomed into a full and interesting part of the world once the characters in the next chapter encountered the storied magician in the flesh - this made the scene all the more engaging because any explanation of who and what this new character was had already been made, leaving only need for the seamless progression of story. That’s what I like best about foreshadowing - when done well, it streamlines the reader's processing of information and thereby makes the reading all the more enjoyable.

Now, what is it about foreshadowing that so intrigues you and drives so many discussions, friend Shulfer? I am curious~

Happy writing,
JPalomares

The key is to put hints and notes in places within the story and in such a way that the reader will probably never notice them until he goes back afterwards to see if there is some clue about what came to be.

I think it is a cool devise. Robert Jordan was a pro at this. He had foreshadowing several books in advance in his wheel of time series.

clint_csperry-org wrote: ↑21 Jul 2019, 16:57 The key is to put hints and notes in places within the story and in such a way that the reader will probably never notice them until he goes back afterwards to see if there is some clue about what came to be.

I think it is a cool devise. Robert Jordan was a pro at this. He had foreshadowing several books in advance in his wheel of time series.

Yeah. You don't want to be too obvious about it but at the same time you want the reader to be able to recognise that there were seeds planted for it in the beginning. Like, if you watch something like Arrow, in the first season you'll notice a lot of things that pays off in the second and third. Supergirl had a particularly interesting bit that became foreshadowing after the fact because Barry Allen, in his first crossover with that show, mentions a world that's all Nazis only to have them play a role in a later crossover.

You get the gist of what I was saying then, the hints are obvious when you see them for what they are, but they do not slow the reader when he crosses them. Subconsciously, they will pick up the hints and when the big reveal comes, it will make perfect sense even though the reader may not understand why.

Foreshadowing needs the writer to have a good understanding of what's happening in the main plot, meaning we can't "write as you go" without jotting down the outlines.