This year has been a dry one. For lovers of sunshine, this is great! For me and all the other gardeners we are muttering under our breath about long, hot, dry, and drought. I’ve been watching the weather forecast for the last week, as we’d had a predicted storm on the horizon. I commented to my husband that generally with these things it would predict an inch, and then with every passing day the amount would drop until finally, if we got anything, it would be barely measurable in my certified rain gauge which can capture down to a hundredth of an inch with accuracy. This storm…did the opposite. Up until yesterday it was telling us that up from the original prediction of an inch and a half, we could confidently expect to get three inches. Overnight, whenever I awakened, I could see lightning flashing in the distance through the east-facing bedroom windows. This morning, excited for free water from the sky, I trotted outside into the pre-dawn darkness and could feel immediately that it had not rained nor was it going to in the immediate future. I deflated, went and looked at the radar and saw that the big storms have slid south and east of our little town. I didn’t want flooding, like the city is probably having, but I did want some rain!

What does this have to do with writing, you may be wondering. Good question. Foreshadowing, done correctly, tantalizes your reader and keeps them moving through the book instead of setting it down and stepping outside to water the garden and likely forgetting to pick the book up again. However, you have to deliver on some of your promises. You might not want to pull the most terrible of options down onto your characters (several inches of rain here in flat, dry land will just flash off into floods instead of nurturing gardens and crops), but you do want to make good on some of the hints you’ve been dropping through the story.

Red herrings are fine, in their place and used sparingly. Never following through on any plot thread will yeild a frustrated reader, and break the trust they have in you. With so many other options available to them, why would they pick up another book of yours? Which is another thing. If you want to write a series, all well and good. Don’t end the book with no resolution at all. You should give reader satisfaction in some small ways, while leaving the larger conflict unresolved, especially if this is a longer series and the reader knows it. There are few things more annoying to this reader than to read through book after book without any conclusions, after a while wondering if any will be forthcoming at all. This is how you train readers to hesitate before picking up unfinished series. Give them a moment of joy and winning, a step up from where the book started, a glimpse of the greater victories in the future, and the readers will follow you anywhere.

I can’t control the rain. I can step back and look at my story, to see if I’m meeting the reader’s expectations based on the hints, teases, and cues I’m giving them with character behaviors, settings, and revealed motivations. I can make certain I’m giving satisfaction with the ending, and if it’s a series, some unresolved conflict, to keep them tantalized about the overall plotting arc. If you’ve stuck on a story midway? Read back through it and see if you’ve foreshadowed enough, and if you have, see how you can fulfill your promises and get back into the flow.