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How to Use Foreshadowing in Your Fiction

April 5, 2020

book, fiction, foreshadowing, narratives, symbolism, writing

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 — Foreshadowing is about *leading* a narrative journey in **both** directions

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Spatio-Temporal Ambiguities in John Richardson’s Wacousta

December 24, 2019

Criticism

academia, Canada, criticism, Gothic, symbolism, time

Note: the following article on spatio-temporal ambiguities in John Richardson’s Wacousta is a modified excerpt from the article “The ‘New World’ Gothic Monster: Spatio-Temporal Ambiguities, Male Bonding, and Nation in John Richardson’s Wacousta”, co-authored with Matti Savolainen. Savolainen, Matti & Mehtonen, Päivi (ed & intr.). Gothic Topographies – Language, Nation Building and Race. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2013

For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Scholarly work on Canadian literature has drawn attention to the Canadian landscape, and rightfully so. With the vast icy emptiness of the north and the depressing isolation of its individual settlements, it functions as a peculiar Gothic villain.

Here, nature itself becomes a monster (Atwood 3, 19, 35, 88); an “Other”, that in its sublime characteristics inspires both terror and awe, and at the same time serves the purpose of self-definition by instigating the individual’s assessing their place in this new world. This process occurs on an unconscious level, and it is here that the Gothic, as a mode, can be detected at its greatest uniqueness.

Wacousta — Canadian wilderness achieves character status in John Richardson’s novel

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Sounds in Literature: Creating Subjective Meaning

December 17, 2019

Literature

affect, literature, meaning, music, sounds, subjectivity, symbolism

After sight, hearing is arguably the second most important sense to most of us. Humans mostly use seeing and hearing to interact with their surroundings. And so, sounds in literature can be powerful in conveying meanings – particularly those subtle and symbolic.

But, as with every aspect of writing that is important, there is significant depth below the surface.

To talk about “sounds in literature” isn’t about a one-line advice in the direction of “remember to describe the weather” – sorry Ernest; I never liked your writing.

In other words, in this post I won’t tell you “remember to describe sounds in your book” – let alone how to do it. Instead, I’ll become a bit more abstract and show you why sounds in literature can be powerful and useful, and how they affect your readers.

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