previews, hints and flashforwards

Previews can be done well.

BAD previews, on the other hand...

I don't like that "I know something you don't and you have to read the next 100 pages to find out." It's definitely condescension on the writer's part. And fake suspense, not done very well IMHO.

Check out The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. She does that a lot.

I'm reading it right now, and it's pretty good so far.

-A.C.

HeronW said:

Midway the author drops in via the MC POV, rough recall: If I had known what was to come I would have killed the bastard.

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Well, I can imagine that this is not an authorial intrusion -- if the MC is telling his story from a vantage point in the future, then he could very well say something like this.

Like anything else, foreshadowing works when it works. I couldn't tell whether the example works without reading the novel.

Yeah, I think if foreshadowing is well so that they don't appear as previews at all...if that makes sense...then it's a good thing.

But I think you're right and that most author's do it rather poorly.

HeronW said:

Midway the author drops in via the MC POV, rough recall: If I had known what was to come I would have killed the bastard.

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Ugh. That's clumsy.

I've got some hints being dropped in my WIP that pretty clearly indicate there's something going on that my MC doesn't understand, but he's not sitting there going "oh, man, if I only knew what that meant!" - I think it's clear enough from context that my MC doesn't know what's happening, is in way over his head, and is just trying his best to handle what he can of the situation. I don't think I need to break away and say "don't worry, I'll explain all of this" - the reader and I should have an understanding, a contract that all of this will be explained by the end of the book.

I think the clumsy ham-handed foreshadowing some people do is really a signifier that they don't understand their contract with the reader, and don't recognise what their obligations are or how to meet them. That's generally a bad sign.

Foreshadows are great, but only if they're done well and not intrusively. Like I said, I hate the "I know something you don't, and you'll have to keep reading to find out" smugness of the author. Dan Brown did that (for suspense, I'm sure) a lot and that really turned me off.

I used to have some of that going on in my WIP. It made sense while I was drafting it out:

June 2008 - main character is writing / telling the story for his personal "conspiracy files" (the pre-Chapter 1 story frame shows this)

February - May 2007 - the main action of the story (Chapters 1 - 18)

So, I figured, why wouldn't the main character / narrator occasionally flash forward in his thoughts to note in his files things that would happen between February 2007 and June 2008? Two months later, I would once again find myself on that same street. Or, After graduation, Becky would finally let loose in the form of four back-to-back Martina McBride songs performed at a karaoke bar outside Athens, Georgia. I thought they were interesting little asides. My critters (SYW readers and a Very Fine Author who critiqued my work at a conference) thought differently. I had flash-forwards in the first chapters, interrupting the main action of the inciting incident, and I think they were really throwing people out of the story. I took them all out. Those chapters are now much tighter because of it. This is especially important because I write contemporary YA, and a sense of immediacy is a big focus in that genre.

I still maintain that it's realistic to narrate in that way. (Yesterday, I was telling a story to a friend about my college roommate. The "present" of the story was 1998, but I flashed forward a couple times to mention that said roommate wound up in a treatment center two years later.) But it's "realistic" in the way that dialogue with all the "um"s and "uh"s intact is realistic -- fine in real life, not so good in novels.

Cheers to anyone who can make it work, though. I've certainly seen that technique fit in some stories; it just doesn't fit in mine.

You know, now that I think about it, this really depends on your POV. When you use an omniscient POV, this sort of construct makes a certain amount of sense. So perhaps this is most productively viewed not as the practice itself being wrong, but as a potential POV shift? When you say something like this in a limited POV, haven't you made a temporary shift to omni?

Exir said:

Previews can be done well.

BAD previews, on the other hand...

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This has caused me to consider my WIP - it is a 1st person POVand in the Prologue the MC reveals a preview, so what are the signs of a good as opposed to a bad preview?

maestrowork said:

Foreshadows are great, but only if they're done well and not intrusively. Like I said, I hate the "I know something you don't, and you'll have to keep reading to find out" smugness of the author. Dan Brown did that (for suspense, I'm sure) a lot and that really turned me off.

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That's great there is no condescension on the part of my MC but what would you say is the difference between foreshadowing and 'preview'?

satori said:

Cheers to anyone who can make it work, though. I've certainly seen that technique fit in some stories; it just doesn't fit in mine.

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This is quite a revelation and I would like to hear from other writers in a similar predicament.

On a side note: how are you to create suspense without a mixture of preview/foreshadowing? Is moderation the key?

I'm really not fond of most flash-forwards, although sometimes they can work. I tend to see them in scripts or movies more often than in books I read, but they still rarely work for me. A story doesn't always have to be linear, but I find flash-forwards cut down on suspense. After all, you already know where the story is going because you were just shown.

Good foreshadowing is tough. It has to be so subtle that you don't realize until afterward what the writer was setting up.

Seif said:

That's great there is no condescension on the part of my MC but what would you say is the difference between foreshadowing and 'preview'?

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Foreshadow is exactly that: a shadow. A hint or some kind of clues that the readers can take to mean something in the future... It's supposed to be subtle. "Preview" or "flashforward" is blatant as in: "Something is going to happen, but I can't tell you now; just wait." The former is organic within the context of the story; the latter is a form of author/narrative intrusion -- a forced suspense.

Foreshadow (poor example but hopefully you'll get the gist):

"Lily walked into the store. It was a mess. Wood planks everywhere. An axe lay on the ground near a bucket of nails. Everything was covered with sawdust. She coughed and went back out to the street. She wondered where James had gone."

Preview/Flashforward:

"Lily walked into the store. It was a mess. Wood planks everywhere. Everything was covered with sawdust. She went back out to the street. She should have paid attention to the axe lying on the ground near a bucket of nails, though. And the absence of James. She would regret later on."



(speaking of which, the current season of LOST has plenty of flashforwards. It's so disorienting and confusing, but interesting because it works within the context -- it's a fantasy, with lots of unknown, time-travel, etc. etc. And also they way they present the flashforwards doesn't really say "we're not holding back from you." They can easily go overboard with that stuff, however)

I like foreshadowing that I recognize only after something happens to fulfill it. Then I can see that the author was preparing me for something so it would look more plausible when it happened.

Philip Pulman does this a lot. Both well, in His Dark Materials, and badly, in The Sally Lockheart Trilogy. IMO. I like subtle foreshadowing, like "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Great foreshadowing. I even don't mind the Phil Pulman style "So and so was going to kill a man." But that's more immediate. He never makes the reader wait 100 pages either. If he says someone's going to kill someone else, they do so within a few pages.