‘Twinkle, twinkle little bat…’ Sometimes, everyone needs a clue-bat. One of the joys and sorrows of Indy opening up, is that there are no gatekeepers. Yep, both joys and sorrows – because sometimes an editor could actually turn your book into something that would be a joy to read, but… because you don’t get that input you don’t fix something that is obvious to them, but not you. You see, one of the biggest issues for writers is we know where the story is going. Your reader does not. And, while they might have a vague idea, shouldn’t know.
“But Monkey, you say, over and over, the way of the foreshadow, it is pinnacle of story-teller’s art. Writer who does not do so is like a man, only using hands. Writer who does is more like monkey who can use hands, feet and tail, you said.”
(Monkey waves both empty hands, in a gesture which is supposed to convey his venerable. kindly and wise nature. He fails completely, but does not fall out of tall palm tree). “Indeed,” Monkey saith to the man — who is walking away, secure in fact the monkey does not brandish a coconut in his hairy hands. “This is true. It is an ancient and subtle art.”
The monkey looks down on the fallen man. “Like the coconut on the back of the skull, foreshadowing is one those important things which is terribly obvious AFTER the fact. It makes the event seem perfectly natural. Otherwise, it would require one those anathema – the co-incidence. You knew I was in the palm tree, that I was not kindly, that used my feet as dexterously as my hands… I primed you well, more than thrice.”
I’ve just read a book, and sadly it was not good (I will therefore not name the author or the book) – the author had written a useful piece I found doing some research and mentioned her book in the post. She’d done a comprehensive bit of research, included references — worked hard. I thought I’d buy her book as a little thank-you. The book had a good concept, a neat plot line — potentially attractive characters, no obvious typos or grammos. Prose… needed work (in dialogue, particularly), but I have read worse. BUT… she did the opposite of foreshadowing. That, oddly, is not NO foreshadowing. It was that what was going to happen was terribly obvious… BEFORE the fact. She telegraphed the entire story by page 10. (this paragraph was an example of telegraphing, as the last was supposed to be an example of foreshadowing). She attempted some foreshadowing, in text – but she did the opposite – the efforts were ‘look at ME’ – but only once. Foreshadowing, done right, is never ‘look at me’ and equally – is built up through the text, multiple times. It’s supposed to be in the subconscious, not the forefront.
I itched to rewrite – or at least give the author just a few prods in the right direction. But I can’t, and what could have been a very good book will sell relatively few copies — and it won’t be obvious to the author, because from the inside there is no difference between telegraphing and foreshadowing. The Author knows what is going to happen either way. But once you know what needs doing…
You can be a little tea-tray in the sky…
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “How I wonder what you’re at?”
Yep, one can know what to do, but not be able to do it because it’s never as easy as you’ve told it is to do what needs to be done.
What does separate foreshadowing from telegraphing?
My definitional example would be (in order):
1) Stunned by her rejection, he walked blindly away, stumbling a moment when his feet touched the rain-slick cobbles… (followed by several pages and then, at the top of the hilly street, a vendor’s cart of no particular importance begins its inexorable slide down the wet street to wreak plot-important havoc.
2) It was odd, encountering a bare fist-sized rock, here in the grassland, but she had more serious things to think about… (followed quickly by an attack scene where she remembers the rock and grabs it as a weapon).
The first is just an incidental reminder of the setting (weather) which foreshadows the doom. The “slick cobble” isn’t noticeable in that context, but it helps set up an expectation for the circumstance in which the accident follows.
The second calls attention to itself, where the rock all but shouts “Look at me – I’m unusual and you should remember me!”
If you “write into the dark”, you might not yourself know the cart accident will happen ahead of time, but then remember the rain and realize that makes a good plausible cause.
So foreshadowing can be accidentally incorporated when it sparks a plot development, or planned in passing to set up a plot development you’re deliberately crafting, or added afterwards to help support a plot development for the reader.
I think of is as equipping my guys for what might be coming. Will they -need- the plasma gun? Or will they be able to make the enemy give up just by displaying it? Or, outside chance, will that be the item that leads to a further development?
Or is it more that the author thinks plasma guns are cool, and every story should have at least one? ~:D
Hard to say. So, better to have a plasma gun and not need it than need it and not have it.
Subtle foreshadowing is done like a magician’s sleight of hand: you see the movement, but you’re distracted by everything else going on. Telegraphing is when you see the movement, without the distraction.
Obvious foreshadowing is when it’s put in such a away that you groan, knowing things are going to go to hot places in handbaskets, but not knowing when or how. Obvious Telegraphing tells you exactly when and how things are going to go wrong.
Subtle foreshadowing is mentioning the critical piece of information right before you leave them laughing at a joke, or as a minor example in the conversation about something else entirely.
Obvious foreshadowing is things like “It was going to be a perfect evening.” or “Everything was going according to plan.”
You, the reader, KNOW that’s not going to last… but you don’t know how.
Obvious Telegraphing is “All we need to do is get to the Place before the Other Guys do. Sidekick, acquire a Conveyance.”
If Sidekick calls a cab, and you go over to the Place without incident, only to find that Other Guys have been there first, it’s telegraphing. The reader will be rolling his eyes, and going “a blind man could have seen that coming.”
Now, if you promptly had Sidekick ambushed, or Sidekick stole a conveyance, and thus complicated things, then it’d be “of course you’re not going to be able to, but the increasing complications to get to the Place before The Other Guys Do is the story, and all its try-fail cycles.”
Or you can have Sidekick say, “Gee, things are nice and quiet …” And have nothing happen. Except that the characters get twitchier and twitchier, because they just KNOW that trouble is looming … and they miss something because they are tense and are perhaps watching the wrong thing. [Yes, that herring is so red it probably carries a CPUSA membership card and can sing “The International” in three languages.]
Telegraphing is when Plucky Side Character gets a letter from his sweetheart back home right before the battle. You now know that guy is going to buy the farm in the battle, for sure.
Foreshadowing is when Plucky Side Character gets a letter but doesn’t open it. Main Character opens it -after- the guy dies, and all the heartstrings get pulled at once. Main Character’s limp resolve is forged into steel by this tragedy, and he goes on to become Super Main Character Guy who saves the world and gets the girl. Or robot, in my books. ~:D
A borderland.
Too bad it isn’t a fence.
I’ve said before that I consider your book, Joy Cometh with the Mourning, a master class in foreshadowing. A crucial fact is mentioned more than three times (I lost count when I went back to look) and I missed it every time. I have spent quite a bit of time since then studying exactly what happens each time to cause the reader to miss what’s being said. What fun!
Thank you. That was more of a ‘murder-mystery’ than is typical of my work. I tried hard for that effect, and it was a major learning curve for me.
I think of proper foreshadowing as Easter Eggs – scattered artfully through the landscape. Just a single sentence, a reference, a mention in dialog. Easy-peasy, although sometimes I have to go back and install them after the story is completed.
I’m not an author, but I see telegraphing as plenty of “If only we knew” sort of things in the writing.
Game related, rather than writing related, but may have applicability.
Once I was running an elaborate Fantasy RPG (Arthurian in nature). There were times when I needed to give one player in a party information that the others should not know.
How do you do that? I know. Hand them a note. Talk about telegraphing. What I did was write up a bunch of dummy notes along with the real ones. The dummies contained a verse or two of apropos poetry (often Kipling) with instructions that stated “this is a dummy note. Read the verse, smile significantly and put it away.” Or something on that order. Sometime it said to stare at another member of the team or suchlike.
I’d frequently roll dice, frown, and had a note to a player. At first everyone was panicked when I gave someone a note. Then after I’d done it enough times and everyone had gotten a dummy, no one cared anymore. At that point I’d start handing out real “secret” messages mixed in with the dummies (which I continued to pass out).
From a DM’s perspective it worked perfectly.
Somebody was talking about Chekhov’s Gun here years ago, probably Dave, and the notion was if there’s a gun in Chapter 1 somebody needs to shoot it by Chapter 3, or similar.
In current WIP I spend a good bit of time getting MC kitted out with a pistol and some training. He’s a kid, he doesn’t know nothing, and the threats against him are considerable. But, do I want the kid to shoot somebody? That’s so expected, so boilerplate. If he does I either must go through the recovery period that a kid who shot somebody is going to have, or do what most authors do and pretend it’ll be okay. (From what I’m told by people who have Been There, it isn’t going to be okay.)
I want this conflict to be a little more removed, a lot more sinister, and to give the impression of huge political machinery grinding along. The MC is the wooden shoe in somebody’s gears, that’s why they’re messing with him.
So, Chekhov’s gun is an actual gun, and the equipping and lessons are foreshadowing, how do we use it to reveal the sinister plot against him without giving our hero the plucky kid life-long PTSD?
The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
Because I haven’t finished yet, so I don’t know how it ends.
That form of Chekov’s gun is backwards, as you likely know. The actual idea was that if someone shoots a gun in act 3 of the play, you should show it hanging above the mantelpiece in act 1 so that it doesn’t come out of nowhere. Then someone flipped it around to mean “if you show the gun in act 1, it should be fired by act 3”, which if followed blindly would result in boring stories where no unnecessary details and no red herrings ever show up.
Actually, it’s both. I myself have often had details leap out at me and announce “I am VASTLY important,” and had to work them in. There’s an art to telling whether you can treat a detail as filigree.
You can, of course, mislead about importance — all the way up to red herring status as you note. The gun might be an antique that will pay off the mortgage if sold. Or a way for someone to identify the uncle as having been in a certain military unit.
Besides Robin’s point, there’s also that– most REAL LIFE uses of a gun, the gun is never fired.
It works because the person 1) has it, and 2) the goblin thinks they’ll use it.
Actually, strike that.
The person with the gun doesn’t even have to have a gun, or KNOW that the goblin thinks they have a gun.
I have been identified as probably armed (inaccurately) and avoided as a target because of it.
It’s funny you should mention goblins. There are actual goblins involved in this case, and evil magic.
I don’t know how the story ends yet, but I did discover that nano-disassembler beats goblin magic.
The Kid gets pulled over for jaywalking, or spitting on the sidewalk. The cops realize he has a gun. No big deal in that time and place, but they have to call it in. And that’s when they all discover together that there is a hidden list of People Who Should Not Have Guns, and the Kid’s on it. Good Cop figures it’s a bureaucratic SNAFU and lets the Kid go. Bad Cop lets him go but plants a tracker on him. Complications ensue.
That’s not bad.
A little different than mine, my kid got kidnapped leaving the bathroom and dropped into the misty, haunted forest of Niflheim in his t-shirt and running shorts, with nothing but a 1911 and a bug-out kit the size of a canteen cup.
Hilarity ensues.
Good points all, and something ‘I’ know I need to get better at. Thankfully, my alpha and beta readers help ‘refine’ the story!