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Foreshadowing is a very powerful tool for a fiction author. This literary device gives the reader advance hints about what will occur later in the narrative. Learning how to use foreshadowing in your fiction can give you a significant boost in terms of affective power.

The above description of foreshadowing might make you think it’s only relate to crime or mystery fiction. This is not true. As I’ll show you in this post, I use foreshadowing all the time in my literary-fiction novels.

More importantly, I’ll show you how I use foreshadowing and – even more importantly! – I’ll show you why I use it; what I can achieve with it.

How to Use Foreshadowing: Narrative, Plot, Time

Before we talk about foreshadowing, we must first talk a little bit about narrative, plot, and time. Let me repeat what I mentioned in the introduction: Foreshadowing gives the reader advance hints about what will occur later in the narrative.

Notice the emphasis; I said “narrative”, not “plot”. Take a look at my posts on linear narratives, points of divergence, and controlling the narrative pace for more details, but I can give you the super-short version here:

• Plot is the way the story unfolds from your characters’ perspective.
• Narrative is the way the story unfolds from your readers’ perspective.

If the two more-or-less coincide, you basically have a linear narrative (that’s not a great thing; see the post on linear narratives, linked above). In most fiction, however, there is a discrepancy between the two. I’ll repeat the examples from this post on linearity:

Case 1

Last weekend I went to New York and met a guy named John. Today I saw John walking down the street here, in Boston. We agreed to go fishing next Sunday.

Case 2

Next Sunday I’ll go fishing with a guy named John. I saw him today walking down the street. I’d met him last weekend, when I’d gone to New York.

Case 1 is “plot”; the way the events unfold from the character’s perspective. Case 2 is “narrative”; the way the events unfold from your reader’s perspective.

Notice how the second version packs more affective power. By changing the temporal order of the events, you effectively destabilize the narrative – the reader is made to feel confusion which is cleared only when reaching the last sentence. This even works on the narrative level – that is, the entire narrative can be offered in a non-linear manner. Take a look at my review of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce; or, to blow my own trumpet, an older novel of mine, Sleeping Son.

And now, with the key takeaway of narrative and plot having different temporal orders, let’s focus on how to use foreshadowing

Foreshadowing Only Works Post-Facto

What this fancy term means is that foreshadowing is not a proper revelation. Foreshadowing doesn’t really tell the reader what will happen until it has already happened.

Imagine a very vivid dream you once had. Imagine that you dreamed of a red jar falling and crashing. You wake up, you go about your daily business, and in the afternoon, as you park your red car, you miscalculate and hit the bumper of the car in front of you. You get out and you notice the lights of your car are broken.

At that point you remember your dream, and wonder with a certain sense of awe if your dream foreshadowed the accident. Even if it did, you would not have been able to predict it before it happened – check my article on post-hoc fallacies.

That’s how foreshadowing in literature works, too.

Take a look at the following excerpt from Wallace Martin’s Recent Theories of Narrative:

The reader is always looking backward as well as forward, actively restructuring the past in light of each new bit of information … Assumptions about causality lead to conjectures about the future; at the same time, the facts of the present lead to the construction of new retrospective causal chains … We read events forward (the beginning will cause the end) and meaning backward (the end, once known, causes us to identify its beginning).

Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1986. p.127

This last bit in particular is where foreshadowing resides.

Foreshadowing Is very Often Symbolic

Although it can occasionally be somewhat literal, foreshadowing mostly operates on a symbolic level.

That is, although a crime fiction novel might have a character (perhaps unreliable) saying (perhaps in jest) at an early point something like “I bet Mr. Jones is the murderer!” and it turns out that was true, that’s not a very skillful use of foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing is a “hint-hint, nudge-nudge” literary device. From an author’s perspective, foreshadowing is almost an “I dare you” kind of thing; you dare the reader to figure it out, hiding everything in plain sight.

But here’s where symbolism enters the picture: Although it’s hidden in plain sight, a reader can’t really figure it out before advancing in the narrative. They can’t figure it out because:

• it’s symbolic.
• it’s narrative-based, not plot-based.
• (in consequence,) it’s about meaning, not facts.

All these fall under the umbrella of a single concept: affect. Foreshadowing doesn’t tell the reader what will happen (facts) but why it happened (meaning). Deploying other literary devices, such as symbolism or flashbacks – here’s where separating narrative from plot enters the picture – the author can precisely show the reader the subtlety and “bigger-picture” facet expected in quality fiction.

Some Examples

Word of warning: I’ve chosen and structured the examples below, taken from my novels The Other Side of Dreams and Illiterary Fiction in a way that, to the extent it’s possible, doesn’t spoil the foreshadowing effect. However, merely referring to these excerpts highlights that there’s “something there”, which does take away a tiny little bit from your reading experience, if you haven’t read these novels yet. If you don’t want this to happen, skip this section and go straight to “It’s All About Showing What’s Not There”, further below.

Explaining Character Motivation: The Other Side of Dreams

In The Other Side of Dreams, early on, the protagonist has a discussion with a secondary character. On the surface, it’s not directly related to the plot – that is, the issues faced by the main characters. Yet, as part of the discussion, the following exchange takes place:

“My grandfather’s end was a bit odd,” Zahid disclosed, his eyes observing the clouds blocking the sun. “He was always a rational, intelligent man. He didn’t speak much, but his words were always thought-provoking and interesting. I have many happy childhood memories of him explaining a philosophical paradox or a story from the old days. But then, in the last couple of years of his life, he changed. He didn’t lose his mind, as many of my relatives claimed, but his behavior became baffling. He began to read naughty magazines, he wanted to play with children’s toys, and he devoured tons of sweets. I wasn’t of course able to understand it at the time, but I think he’d realized the end was near and he wanted to still taste all the things he considered interesting.”

The reader doesn’t know it at that point, but what this apparently innocent little story does is to foreshadow events occurring much, much later in the novel, affecting another character.

On the face of it, this character’s actions – near the end of the novel – appear odd, unexplained. In all probability, the reader has all but forgotten the early excerpt above – after all, it appears insignificant.

It’s hidden in plain sight, remember?

But if the reader does recall it, then the character’s actions immediately acquire an entirely different – and tragic – meaning.

It’s All There: Illiterary Fiction

This use of foreshadowing was even more… dastardly. Here I basically foreshadowed the entire narrative, though again, the reader couldn’t know it at that point.

In Illiterary Fiction, Paul is a professional reader, struggling in a world that snubs literature. Early on in the book, he delivers a literary analysis of Walking Away From a Burning Sunset by Hiroki Kitagawa.

I don’t know if you had time to click on the link above before reading this, but the link goes to my post on creatively manipulating readers. You see, there isn’t a book called Walking Away From a Burning Sunset and there isn’t an author called Hiroki Kitagawa. I made them both up for the purposes of Illiterary Fiction.

What happens in that excerpt is that Paul, the protagonist, by analyzing this imaginary book basically tells the reader what will happen in Illiterary Fiction, too! Not in terms of plot, of course – foreshadowing is not about the what but about the why, remember – but in terms of meaning.

The Book within the Book

Here are some excerpts from Paul’s analysis:

In a nutshell, Walking Away From a Burning Sunset is a story of letting go of your own disillusions. That is, it’s a story of grasping the fact that you have been fooling yourself, yet you manage to move beyond this disappointment […]

The main character, Hidetoshi, moves through life too timidly, being in a sense too polite to disrupt the brutality around him. […]

When it comes to Hidetoshi’s ambiguity, it is also worth noting the juxtaposition between nature and urban life, as there is an interesting discrepancy there. Whereas he is more vocal in the city, it is the kind of speech that is structured, organized, and ultimately coerced. He needs to play a role – talking to his boss, his friends, and even his wife. Conversely, when he’s visiting the countryside and his father’s village, he is far less talkative and yet when he does talk, it is a much more personal process, revealing a great deal more about his inner world.

Although a skillful reader could spot some parallels earlier, the foreshadowing effect is properly revealed near the end of the novel. A secondary character asks Paul what’s his name, and the latter replies: “Hidetoshi”. At the latest then, the reader should realize what’s going on.

The question here is, why? What purpose does foreshadowing serve here?

Foreshadowing Reveals Meaning, Remember

Illiterary Fiction, like my other novels, operates on many levels simultaneously. On the surface, it’s accessible and I expect anyone to be able to read and enjoy it as an interesting story – if I may say so myself.

But there is a deep symbolic level beneath it all, that delivers complex, multifaceted meanings. The complexity of these devices is such, that foreshadowing becomes necessary to highlight their presence as well as their function.

To put it simply, this foreshadowing example allows the reader – once the entire narrative is complete – to reconsider some of its aspects and decide on alternative meanings.

It’s All About Showing What’s Not There

To sum up the most important point, foreshadowing is not about revealing the plot – though that can happen too, in some sense – but about revealing meaning.

In a quality book, meaning can be multifaceted; there can be – and should be – many possible interpretations. Foreshadowing can help steer the reader in the direction of some of the more complex possibilities, that would have otherwise certainly passed unnoticed.

In some sense, to use foreshadowing is to show what’s not there. It’s not there because it hasn’t happened yet.

Like most complex literary devices, foreshadowing can be a bit intimidating at first, and certainly hard to master. But here’s the good news: We all get better with every text we write.