: Re: How does one implement effective foreshadowing? I am a "reread reader" - that is, I like to read the same book more than once. The books I have the most fun reading again are the ones that

@Martha805

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Stories with foreshadowing that I like most are the ones that make the foreshadowing appear random at first or at the very least like an extra but unimportant detail.

If I can smell that a certain event is foreshadowing, I won't be too happy unless it takes some thinking. But if I can't understand that an event was foreshadowing in retrospective, then it was not useful to put the foreshadowing in in the first place.

So implementing foreshadowing is like walking a tightrope. There's a delicate balance between too obvious and too hidden. More importantly, you can't implement this well if you don't have clearly in mind how your story is going from A to C through B.

EDIT: If I had to define foreshadowing I would say it is the partial, but often cryptic, disclosure of information pertaining to as-of-yet unrevealed (most of the time future) events. This can happen to the reader only, or to the characters. It can be done by the storyteller or by a character in the story.

To answer your last question, the events should subtly point to Y while the character has only limited information which makes him conclude X should happen. So, in your story, you need to implement two types of information about the events, let's call them A and B. Information type A is accessible to the reader and the character. Information type B is only accessible to the reader, but possibly in a coded form. Or possibly, B could be accessible to the character as well, but so coded that he doesn't manage to decypher it. Don't take my use of the word 'coded' here too literally. It could simply be a feature of a room that you describe to the readers which contains a clue, but not obviously so, and that your character overlooks.

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