: Re: What to avoid when foreshadowing a death? If, for example, I plan for a character to die in the middle of the story, and let's say I'd like to foreshadow his death by dropping a few hints

I've heard it said that the ideal ending to a book is completely expected and completely surprising to the reader at the same time. The reader needs to be placed in a mode where the end will seem exactly right, and emotionally truthful, and believable, and yet also it needs to seem fresh and astonishing. Obviously it's a tough balancing act, which is why so many writers find the end of the book the hardest part to write.

Foreshadowing is a tool to build that effect at the end. You don't want the reader to feel completely blindsided and betrayed by a character's death, but you also don't want it to be expected, so you create a subtle sense of doom, hopefully quiet enough to pass unnoticed by the reader until later. What you want to avoid is hitting the reader over the head with something that needs to still register as a surprise.

Some ways of foreshadowing are to make the character particularly frail, or often sick, or (conversely) reckless and brave/foolhardy. Having those traits (in real life or fiction) doesn't necessarily mean a character is doomed, but it does make us worry a little more about him or her. If you have a first person narrator, they can also speak of the person in an elegiac manner (as in the opening to The Great Gatsby). It's also possible to use a little indirection. In The Fault In Our Stars, the main characters are all critically ill, but who lives and who dies is not necessarily who the reader is initially led to expect.

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: Re: What to avoid when foreshadowing a death? If, for example, I plan for a character to die in the middle of the story, and let's say I'd like to foreshadow his death by dropping a few hints

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: Is it acceptable to ask a question in an argumentative paper? Somewhere along the way I picked up a bias against using questions in my writing. Recently I've been reading more about persuasive

: Is it possible to do novel-scale writing on a Chromebook? I've been looking into Chromebooks for their portability and cost and was wondering what kind of writing tools, if any, exist on the

: Part of the reason we read is to learn. Fiction places us in scenarios we might never encounter in real life, but we can still learn life lessons from them. In order to best learn from

: How find an appropriate vocabulary I'm a newbie reader and often find myself needing to open the dictionary at least once every few pages. Although I'm a newbie, my vocabulary is at least of

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