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#Foreshadowing’s #1 Job in Your Story - #HowtoWrite
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Lora SITE ADMINISTRATOR
Posts : 5907 Age : 53 Join date : 2011-07-26 Location : Southern CA
Subject: #Foreshadowing’s #1 Job in Your Story - #HowtoWrite Thu Jul 31, 2014 12:17 am
JULY 30, 2014 by K.M. WEILAND | @KMWEILAND 18 COMMENTSFORESHADOWING Foreshadowing’s #1 Job in Your Story This week’s video reveals a simple but often overlooked function of foreshadowing that all writers should be aware of.
Video Transcript: As you may have noticed (or maybe not) I’ve taken almost a six-month break from the video posts. So starting this week, I’m pleased to say that I plan to return to my old every-Wednesday schedule for the videos. And today I want to talk about foreshadowing. So what’s there to know about foreshadowing—really? Basically, it’s nothing more than an early hint of something important that’s going to happen later in the story. But here’s the really crucial thing to understand about foreshadowing—and I think it’s something we often overlook, despite its simplicity. The whole purpose of foreshadowing—its #1 job—is to tell readers there’s aplot twist coming. Now, on the surface that may seem totally non-intuitive. After all, the last thing we want is for readers to figure out what’s going to happen in the story. That’s the whole point of a twist, right? But here’s the thing about plot twists—or any other momentous moment in a story. Plot twists that come out of nowhere and completely blindside readers are not satisfactory. And they’re not satisfactory for two reasons. Reason #1: The first is that this lack of preparedness in the readers means the twist has a very large possibility of being rejected. It will fail to seem like a logical progression of events or even something that would reasonably happen in a story of this type. Reason #2: The second reason is that if we’re not preparing readers—mostly on a subconscious level but also slightly on a conscious level—to anticipate, to look forward to a surprising twist, then we’re missing a huge opportunity. We want readers to know something good is coming up; we just don’t want them to know what it is yet. And probably the easiest way to do this is to simply tell readers there’s a secret and leave at that. If you can get readers looking forward to your big plot reveal, then your foreshadowing has accomplished its #1 job with flying colors.
#Foreshadowing’s #1 Job in Your Story - #HowtoWrite