Foreshadowing

May 29, 2009

 

Mary Rosenblum:  This is our Friday After Hours forum and we're talking about foreshadowing tonight. This  is particularly important of course, when you're writing mystery, but in any kind of fiction, you're going to need to set up situations so that you don't come out of left field and startle your readers.  But of course, you don't ant to give the ending away either.  More importantly, you don't want to flatten suspense by foreshadowing too obviously. It's a delicate balance.
You need to delicately hint at future problems but not so clearly that the readers know what is coming. With mystery, where you need to make the revelation of whodunnit at the end plausible you have to hide those clues in plain sight so that the very sharp mystery readers don't realize what they are until you reveal the perp
Aren't the clues ambiguous, so they hint at multiple suspects until the reader has all the clues?
Mary Rosenblum:   They can be, that's a good way to hide in plain sight.  Nearly every mystery tosses a couple of red herrings in front of the readers and the clues can obviously point at them  but at the same time, they're applicable to the less obvious person who is the real killer. You can slip a clue into a scene with a strong dramatic element, say a fight. And the readers are focused on the dramatic peak, thus paying less attention to the clue.
What  is a red herring?
Mary Rosenblum:   A red herring, Ingrid, is a person who seems to be guilty, but turns out to be innocent, thus distracting the readers from the real killer.
I've also seen where an author puts 2 clues in the same scene. The detective follows one clue to distract the reader.
Could a character say something but be ignored by the other characters?
Mary Rosenblum:  That's another way to do it, Charie. And yes, DLB, an unreliable character can speak up and everybody (including the readers) know that he's unreliable so they ignore him.
Almost right out of Sherlock Holmes!
Mary Rosenblum:   Well, Sherlock Holmes is sort of a good model, although Conan Doyle really doesn't put in sufficient clues to allow the readers to figure it out.  His premise, after all, is that Holmes is a genius and nobody can figure out how the crime was committed except him.
He always seems to solve the mystery but only at the very very end.
Agatha Christie seems like a better model: it's all there, but you're still always surprised at the end.
Mary Rosenblum:  Exactly, David, and actually, modern mystery readers are pretty negative about that type of ending, where the sleuth has all the answers but the clues were never visible to the readers.
Yes, Christie writes more in keeping with modern mystery form. And does PD James, and most others today.  What is actually more difficult  is the fiction story that is not a mystery, where your task is to foreshadow dramatic events so that they are plausible when they happen,  but without ruining the suspense.  Say your character comes home to a family reunion of some sort. She arrives, greets the family, is annoyed by some, amused by others, interacts the way most people interact when returning home after, say, a few years at college and meeting up with extended family.
Then, she's in the kitchen and all of a sudden she gets into a screaming fight with her stepfather, accusing him finally of sexually abusing her when she was a pre-teen. That's a powerful dramatic peak. BUT if she has been acting pretty normally up until now, it's going to come zinging in our of the blue and blind-side the readers. Because she gave no hints of any emotional turmoil or past issues, this will seem unreal and it will lack emotional power.
So the foreshadowing would be building up to that peak?
Mary Rosenblum:  The foreshadowing has to at least indicate that something is lurking in her past. You may or may not want to build to that scene, depending on how you are handling the character and the scene. But we need to know that something bad happened in the past and she at least has some anxiety about this reunion. When she sees stepdad with his hand on the back of her twelve year old niece, she goes over to the bar and pours herself a neat Scotch.
She hugs Mom at the door and turns away from stepdad to hug her brother.
Mary Rosenblum:   That can work, but it's so subtle that you'd probably want to give more clues, Charie.
Perhaps she has trouble with men (boyfriends), but we don't understand why? like keeping them at arm's length emotionally?
Maybe it's a younger sister that she takes aside to "interrogate"
Quiet reserved woman suddenly outgoing at reunion to hide emotional conflict
Mary Rosenblum:   That could work, moosie, but you'd want to point specifically to stepdad to some degree. She might pause on the doorstep, take a deep breath, close her eyes and remember what her best friend Lilly said: 'Just smile and don't think about it.' Now we know that something happened that she doesn't want to deal with. Then, if she reacts to, say, stepdad's touching that young neice or touching her, we'll start to get a sense of where the problem might lie.
I like the Scotch part, Mary, especially if everyone knows she doesn't drink
Yeah,  between the comment, and the scotch, it's all so clean and concise.
Mary Rosenblum:   Exactly, Ingrid. And one of her sisters can comment.. 'Just when did you start hitting the bottle?' But while we know that stepdad is the issue we won't be sure what the issue is exactly until her outburst and then we'll think 'oh, of course. We saw it coming'.  Only we didn't see it clearly enough to spoil the drama.
Excellent  but how do you plot that?
Mary Rosenblum:   Well at my stage of experience, I have the rhythm of 'when to foreshadow' down. So I can do it on the first draft, now. But when I started out, I didn't have a clue.  I learned from reader feedback. Was the dramatic scene plausible or did it come out of left field?  Had the reader already figured out what the problem was and so the scene lacked suspense? I asked my readers...these were people reading a second draft.
Did you get different readers for the 2nd draft? Who didn't know what was coming?
Mary Rosenblum:   Yep. I'm particularly careful about this with mysteries, where it's critical that readers not get the answer until the end.
So then each time the readers are fresh.
Where do you find the readers?
Mary Rosenblum:   I may only give a particular draft to a couple of people. Then I might give the next draft to one or two different readers.  I have a regular group of people I swap stories with. Other writers.
Did you advertise to find this group of writers?
Do you also have any readers that aren't able to 'look for the strings', as it were?  Meaning, not writers
Mary Rosenblum:   Moosie, I tend to use readers who are other pros. They're people I’ve met over the years at conferences, workshops and the like. We're friends and we crit each others' work.  I do have some non-writer readers.  A good reader, someone who reads in that particular genre can't critique the same way a writer can, but can sure tell you where the story does or does not work. My final mystery reader is a non writer, a woman who has owned a mystery bookstore and reads a LOT of mysteries.  If I can keep Debbie guessing, I have it nailed.
Always ask your readers for specific input. Did you understand why Kate blew up at her stepdad in the kitchen? Did it make sense or did it seem to come out of nowhere?  Since most of my fiction is character based and the climax/resolution is usually based on character decisions or actions, that foreshadowing is very important if the climax/resolution is going to make sense. Foreshadowing plays a role in both action driven and character driven fiction, but in my opinion it's more important and needs to be more subtle in character driven fiction.
Can foreshadowing also be skills acquired by the MC to accomplish the goal at the climax?
Can you clarify that last bit?
Mary Rosenblum:   That's a good example of foreshadowing in an action driven story, Charie. There, your character has to either have or acquire the abilities needed to overcome the obstacle he/she is facing. If your character pulls out a magic daggar in the climax scene and we have no idea where it came from....oops. If he/she uses a magic talent we didn't know that character possessed....oops.
Moosie, in character driven fiction, the resolution will not make sense or seem real unless it seems to be a plausible action or decision for that character to take.  So if the action or decision seems to come out of nowhere, the entire story fails. It simply won't seem real.
I received a story, for example, from a new SF writer that had this kid living in a pretty primitive environment, getting beaten up by the adults and other kids because he was kind of an intellectual wimp and longing for  a chance to do his art. But when an artist offers to take him on as an apprentice, take him with him when he leaves the village, the kid says 'oh, no, I can't leave my people'.
But we see NO reason for him not to jump at the chance. Nowhere do we see any sign that he feels that these are his people. He's a total outcast getting picked on by everyone.  So the ending does not work.
However, if we saw that he had some bond with at least one person, that he believed in something that these people represented, that it was stronger than the negative attention he was getting, then his decision would have been plausible.  Yes, he's miserable now, but he has a reason to stay in this other person and reason to hope that he can make himself a place. And he can have revealed a sense of loyalty to that particular person.
Now, his decision not to go is more understandable. He does have something he does not want to leave behind. But none of that was there, so the choice at the end was entirely without foreshadowing.  Does that make sense to you, Moosie?
Yes, thanks.
Mary Rosenblum:   This particular writer does this a lot. HE knows why the character makes the choice he does, but he does not foreshadow it, so readers sure don't get it.
So, it sounds like you have to know how your story will end, then set up the scenes with foreshadowing in mind
Mary Rosenblum:   Yes, Ingrid. Actually, when I was first starting, I planted most of my foreshadowing in the second draft.  Now I have a much better sense of when to start weaving in foreshadowing.
Yeah, I was wondering that. it would seem to be easier for a newbie to just get the first draft out, then 'decorate it'.
I've seen stories with multiple clues to foreshadow the same thing, as if the writer was unsure that the first clue would work. How much is not enough? How much is overkill?
Mary Rosenblum:   Boy that's common, Charie. By the time the dramatic element happens we feel as if we've been beaten over the head with it!  That's when you give it to a reader and ask 'where did you first figure it out'?