Types Of Foreshadowing

If you’ve always wanted to use foreshadowing in your stories, but weren’t sure what type to use, or even what they are—this blog post is for you!

Adding foreshadowing to your book is great because it allows hints of what’s coming and prepares readers for the inevitable outcome or big twist you’ll throw in at the end.

Types Of Foreshadowing

There are a few different types you can choose between or combine if you want to create the ultimate foreshadowing experience, such as…

Prophecy

This is one of my favorite forms of foreshadowing, because who doesn’t love cryptic hints of what’s to come?

With prophecy foreshadowing, you get to tell the reader an outcome of events in the story or what’s likely regarding the destiny of your MC, but you get to be all fun and mysterious about it by using fortunes and omens.

To play it up, you can be specific by laying out the MC’s entire journey using a 100-year-old story in a book, or be unclear about the road they’ll take with hints that go in directions other than the usual.

You’re really only limited by your imagination and how your book world, plot, or characters work to fit prophecy foreshadowing into your chapters.

Concrete

Also known as Chekov’s Gun, this is the most common and easiest form of foreshadowing to use.

Concrete foreshadowing is where your book will outright state something to the reader, sometimes a seemingly insignificant thing, that then pops up later—significantly.

Basically, if you mention it—whether it’s a long-lost relative, a missing trinket, a red car, or a rare book—that item/thing/person should show up and pay off their significance in another part of the story.

Ideally, this will be during the dramatic ending, in the characters cracking the case scene, or at the best/worst possible moment. But, any time you want to answer the question of your concrete foreshadowing is up to you.

Symbolic

If you prefer your foreshadowing to be subtle, this is your best option.

There will be no obvious clues in your book as you hint at things. Instead, you’ll use other elements as a symbol for what’s ahead.

A classic example of this is a character who will die seeing a crow before their demise. The crow, being a traditional symbol of death, signifies to any reader who knows such a detail that death is coming.

This is why symbolic foreshadowing is so subtle and tricky. If you’re going to use it, research symbolism as much as you can, and implement the widely known examples for your best shot of readers picking this type of foreshadowing up.

Red Herring

Next to prophecy foreshadowing, red herring is the most fun you can have with this writing trick. That’s because you get to send your characters and readers on a wild goose chase!

Red herrings exist to throw everyone off the scent, injecting all the mystery, surprise, suspicion, and intrigue that can be handled by your plot. You don’t even need to be writing a mystery to implement a red herring as it can be used for just about anything.

Let’s go for a basic example here and have your MC find a sealed envelope in their room. It’s already been mentioned that an aunt was sending something, so the reader may assume she is the sender. That is until the girl next door strongly hints at slipping something into the MC’s letterbox. Now the reader is thinking the letter could be from her. But did it even come through the mail? It’s just an envelope, with no postage marks. In fact, it looks suspiciously like the same envelope the MC’s best friend had at school at the start of the book…

Now there are three possibilities, more than one red herring, and a question the reader wants to find an answer to. Give it to them after throwing at least one stellar red herring their way.

Flashback/Flashforward

For our final foreshadowing type, it’s about using flashbacks or flashforwards (or even flashsideways if you’re going the Lost route) to tell readers the info they need to know that doesn’t happen in the current storyline.

An example of this would be using a flashback to reveal the details of the devastating car accident that led to the previously established knowledge of the MC’s fear of driving.

Or you could flashforward to the outcome of an event at a point in the story when the journey of how the characters get there, or the outcome, isn’t yet clear. This glimpse of the future should spark the interest of your readers, urging them to keep turning the page.

And now you know about the foreshadowing types you can play with when writing.

If you’re worried foreshadowing will spoil twists, don’t. When done right, it will only enhance them.

Even if readers are good enough to guess where your foreshadowing is going, pulling it off effectively should leave them smugly confirming their hunches and studying your book to see how you brilliantly pulled off your trickery. What you don’t want is readers feeling ripped off by your twists or outcomes because the foreshadowing was done poorly, or was too subtle or confusing.

Picking the right type of foreshadowing goes a long way to avoiding this, so choose wisely, and check out my Foreshadowing Tips blog post to help you nail it.

— K.M. Allan

Find me on Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads, and Threads. You can also sign up for my Newsletter to get my blog posts delivered directly to your inbox!