Guest Author - Melissa Weise

A foreshadow is the hint of something to come in a story. While fiction can imitate art, fiction also has some abilities to bend time that life does not.
Like a flashback, a foreshadow is one of these time travelling tools except that instead of looking backwards in time, the writer is helping the reader to look forward. Often, though the reader doesn’t realize this until the very end. Foreshadows are subtle and often unrecognizable. Of course, if you look hard enough you can even begin to divinate the plot of other fictional stories if you get good enough at “reading” foreshadows.

The purpose of foreshadows are multiple. First, they help to set the tone of a story or scene. Setting a scene in a small room can help to create a tone for an argument in a constricted relationship between characters. Or a sunny kitchen is a good setting for a happy revelation in a story. While setting gives a specific location to anchor your story, foreshadow helps the reader’s psyche begin to intuit the emotional anchor where you are either starting from or heading.

Second, they can help to lessen the impact of a shocking action like a character’s death. Placing a situation where the character ponders his own mortality or becomes injured helps to lessen the impact when you actually kill the character later. This is because human beings innately look for patterns in life. While real life does not contain regular patterns to help reduce the shock of something horrible, putting them into your fiction taps into our desires for them to be there and not only reduces the shock but makes it seem more believable.

Third, they can also set up an AHA! moment in your story. By making the pattern subtle enough, you can work in a coveted “twist”. Twists work best in stories when they have been nicely foreshadowed. For instance, in “Sixth Sense” the movie, the twist works because when it is finally revealed the audience realizes that the characters have been talking about it the entire time. The entire movie is a foreshadow to the twist but is done so well that the pattern is not overt. Of course, (as the many copy cat movies after this), it is harder to do this than it seems and having foreshadows that are too obvious clearly undermine and give away the entire plot.

Another pitfall of foreshadows is that they can work on clichés a well. For instance, “the butler did it” really doesn’t work anymore and the grumpy old man having a heart of gold won’t work either. Don’t set up a pattern that relies on stereotypes. It can be easier to fall into this pitfall than you realize so just make sure that you pattern feels original or takes a cliché and twist it so that it is original again.

Foreshadowing creates texture and realism in your story by working with your readers’ natural psychology. Adding them with thought and planning can make a good story even better.