Foreshadowing and Plants

Eliminating the ‘Huh?’ Factor

 

By Mary Rosenblum

 

            The scene is rising to a climax.  The two childhood friends have been on a weekend camping trip together and old frictions have taken on a new dimension as weather and circumstance strand them in the wilderness.  As they finally find their way to a trail that will take them back to civilization, one of the bedraggled hikers pulls a handgun from his pack intending to shoot the other man to death. 

 

            Huh?  The readers blink, feeling as if someone just whacked them over the head.   Now where did that come from?  I mean, they were tired and scared and angry, but murder?  And how did he get a gun? 

 

            The readers close the book feeling cheated.  You, the author, pulled an ending out of a hat and your readers didn’t have a chance to guess that it was coming, and don’t have a clue how you decided that ending must have come to be. Grumbling, they go off, vowing not to read your stories again. 

 

            Think of story as a game of hide and seek between author and reader.  We readers want to be surprised, but we also want to feel that if we had just been a bit sharper, we would have figured out what was going to happen before you revealed it.  While we’re not happy if we know in the middle of the story how  it is going to end, neither are we happy when we get to the end only to scratch our heads and wonder, Now how come that happened?   It is your job as author to keep us guessing, but at the same time, plant the clues that allow us to look back and tell ourselves, Oh, I see it now!  Duh.

 

            Mystery is, of course, the highest level of reader hide and seek.   There, readers hunt for clues from page one, trying to solve the mystery before the author reveals it.  But in any fiction story, character actions and revelations surprise readers, adding peaks of dramatic strength to the story arc.  Just be careful not to pull those rabbits out of a hat…give them a real foundation earlier in your story. 

 

            Let’s look at our childhood friends stranded in the wilderness.  The end of the story erupts into violence, so the foundation for the violence needs to be woven into the early part of the story.   There are many ways to foreshadow that deadly eruption on the part of the character who pulls that gun.  Perhaps, as they reminisce, the POV remembers a couple of small acts of violence perpetrated by his buddy during their school years together and equates them with the grown-up character’s personality.  Those memories might make him uneasy, but he dismisses them.  Clearly they don’t apply now.  But they do, and when that violence erupts, we know that your POV’s memory was accurate and so was his unease…he should have paid more attention. 

 

            Now we have that gun.  If our would be killer pulls it out of his waistband when they have been surviving together for days and we saw no sign of it… readers do a double-take.  Huh?  Wait a minute?  What gun?    You don’t have to show that gun to us and you should not.  Any savvy reader will realize murder is on the way.  But if your POV notices the other guy furtively stuffing something into his pack, we’ll realize at the end that this was the gun.    Or you can let the buddy talk fondly about his guns and how he never goes anywhere without one.  And the POV, uneasy, doesn’t ask him if he’s carrying one.  Again…as that climax scene unfolds we’ll think ‘aha, he had one, of course!’

 

            There is a reverse caveat here.  The tried and true adage is: If you put a gun on the mantelpiece in scene one, you need to fire it before the end of the story.   Readers do look for clues.  Beware of putting something suggestive into your story…a gun, a sinister past…unless you intend to address it as part of the story.  Remember that window dressing can detract from your story if it distracts the reader from what is really going on.  Don’t mislead readers with details that seem like plants but are not.  If you don’t intend to fire that gun, put a pretty vase on the mantelpiece instead.  We won’t automatically expect that vase to kill someone. 

 

            Make sure from the get-go that your peaks of dramatic action have their roots buried solidly in your story.  Don’t bring a weapon, an attack, a revelation out of nowhere with no previous hints.  Don’t use a deus ex machina  ending where something swoops in from outside the realm of the story to suddenly resolve the conflict.  If Superman is going to appear and rescue our Main Character, make sure you introduce him early on in the story!  Yes, it can take some ingenuity to plant a clue without giving away your ending, but if your Main Character doesn’t notice it, your reader won’t either.   Even the barest hint is enough, as long as the reader can look back and recognize it when the story wraps up. 

 

            Remember…while we love a surprise, we also want to see where that surprise came from…after the fact!  Slip in those clues and hints so that your readers slap their foreheads and think, ‘Oh, of course, I should have seen that coming.’  They’ll love you for it.