If you've ever been to a magic show, you understand foreshadowing. It's when the magician starts by telling you a story, bringing up subtle music, and signaling for the stage lights to change. It's when the choreography kicks in, and the setup for the trick becomes a whole show. It is all of that flash, the lore, the mystery, and the lead up that makes the trick really land for the audience. Because the magician could just walk out, and perform an act of sleight-of-hand too fast for the viewer's eyes to follow... but it won't be the same without all the smoke and mirrors.
So when you write your book, consider your setup, and the dance you're doing with your readers to set their expectations for when you reach the crescendo of your story... because it will affect how hard your big reveal lands when you pull back the curtain!
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| Even a simple card trick needs a bit of theater to it. |
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The Prestige, And Your Plot
For those who have seen the film The Prestige, you've heard the explanation in the introduction about how a great magic trick exists in three parts; The Pledge, The Turn, and The Prestige. The Pledge is where the magician shows you a perfectly normal thing, like a bird, a coin, or a metal ring, letting you see that it is completely normal. The Turn is when something seemingly impossible happens; the bird disappears, the solid metal rings connect with one another, or a particular card vanishes from the deck. Last is the Prestige, which is where the magician reveals the final trick; they find your card, the assistant that seemed to be in pieces is whole again, and so on.
Planting the seeds of foreshadowing can be thought of in the same way.
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| Magic often happens in the margins. |
The Pledge is when you initially start planting your seeds in the story. Maybe you're looking to show your hero is going to fall, and become a villain in a future arc, so you show them having an emotional outburst, talking about a secret, or something that shows they have the capacity to be terrible or brutal. The Turn is when we see the foreshadowing begin to manifest in a material way. A concrete step down the path toward the payoff. There may be several Turns in your foreshadowing. The Prestige is when the final reveal happens, and the foreshadowing is completely paid off.
Consider one of the more obvious pieces of foreshadowing from pop culture; the fall of Anakin Skywalker. We see him as a child, being told by the overarching villain that he looks forward to seeing what will come from Anakin in the future. We see him grow, train as a jedi, and become a warrior, a general, and a hero. But we also catch glimpses of the terrible violence inside of him, the darkness, the hate, and the fear. We see him make a deal with the devil as he turns to Palpatine. In the end we see him fight Obi-Wan, lose, and nearly die, before he is resurrected as the cybernetic Darth Vader, and the foreshadowing of that arc is paid in full.
Alternatively, you could take an even bigger view of the setting for another foreshadowing; the idea of bringing Balance To The Force. The Pledge is when we are told Anakin will do this. The Turn is that when he falls to the Dark Side, he seems to have proven the prophecy false. Then after Luke's story, we see that it was through Anakin's bloodline (if not through his person) that balance was found. Prophetic plots are often a good source of foreshadowing.
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| Foreshadowing isn't just for clever navel-gazing novels, you know. |
And if you're someone who wonders why foreshadowing is even necessary in a book, well, consider books that suffer from Scooby-Doo Syndrome.
Even if you've never seen me use this phrase before, you know what I'm talking about. If you watch classic episodes of the Scooby-Doo cartoon, many times it turns out the person behind the mask is a character we've never seen in the episode, haven't heard mentioned, and there's no way we could have deduced who person was going to be under the sheet, the clown makeup, or whatever costume they were wearing. There were no clues for the audience to follow, and there was no foreshadowing about who the person was... so when it came time for the big reveal it was impossible to predict, because it felt like the writers just randomly pulled someone out of their back pocket as the villain.
That is what happens when a story lacks foreshadowing. Resolutions can feel jarring, character actions can seem like they came out of nowhere, and it can feel like the story just took abrupt twists and turns with no warning or explanation. Foreshadowing can be subtle, or it can be decidedly unsubtle, whichever suits your story. For an example of the latter, if you watch the film Automaton Transfusion one of our leads says of the jerk he deals with at school, "I'd just like to ram a chainsaw in his face," which happens by the end of the third act.
Just remember that good foreshadowing is like a good magic trick. It engages, it captivates, and the timing is everything.
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