Key Methods for Direct and Indirect Foreshadowing in Your Story

Photo by Nur Demirbaş

Today’s post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin. Join her on Wednesday, Jan. 29, for the online class The Art of Foreshadowing.

Imagine Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in a brightly illuminated studio, or anything Goya ever painted rendered in blazing strokes of Thomas Kinkaid-style light.

In story as in art, what’s hinted at in the shadows can add intriguing layers of depth and interest.

Foreshadowing is a literary device in which future developments in a story are hinted at before they happen, presaging what’s to come. It adds dimension to stories just as shading and shadow add it to visual images: Foreshadowing can heighten suspense and tension, increase momentum, raise a story’s stakes, deepen and develop characters, and pave in key plot developments to give the story more cohesion.

But just as in visual art, the finesse of foreshadowing is in how and where you direct the reader’s attention: How much you use, where, and what effect it creates in the story. The artist achieves those results using dark and light tones. Authors have a similar palette to work with: various shades of direct and indirect foreshadowing.

Direct foreshadowing

Direct foreshadowing is the kind readers are likely to notice, overt indications of future developments in the story that are generally used to create expectation, anticipation, or dread and thus increase suspense, stakes, and momentum.

Straightforward statements or details

This is the most overt type of direct foreshadowing, where some element of the story clearly sets up a future development.

In the first episode of season two of the Apple TV show Shrinking, for instance, Harrison Ford’s psychologist character tells Jimmy, a protégé in the practice who has been struggling since his wife was killed by a drunk driver, “You can’t spend your life hiding from your trauma. If you don’t truly deal with your past, it’ll come back for you.” The rest of the season deals with the fallout of exactly that happening, both literally and figuratively.

This kind of overt foreshadowing can be used anywhere in the story: within the narrative, dialogue, the title, epigraph, even the chapter or part headings. The title of Death of a Salesman flat-out portends the play’s ending. Liane Moriarty foreshadows central story developments that result from one of the protagonists opening a sealed letter with both the title of her novel The Husband’s Secret and its epigraph about Pandora and her release of “dreadful ills” into the world.

Prophecy and premonition

These are explicit promises or statements about what’s to come in the story—even if they may not turn out to be literally true or are misinterpreted by the readers or characters.

This can be as straightforward as the literal prophecies the witches offer to Macbeth, which give him false confidence in his invincibility as king but whose meanings later prove catastrophically different from the way Macbeth takes them, or a fortune-teller who prophesies a character’s future that plays out in the story.

But prophecy and premonition can also come in forms that aren’t quite so literal, like one character telling another, “One day you’ll be sorry you treated me this way, and you’ll pay,” or the protagonist reflecting, “I had the disquieting certainty that nothing would ever be the same after this moment.”

Chekhov’s gun

The origin of this narrative principle arose from Anton Chekhov’s advice to a fellow writer: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off,” meaning writers should avoid making false promises to readers. But as a literary device it’s often taken more broadly to indicate an item or element that appears earlier in the story before playing a key role in it later.

In the recent Netflix series No Good Deed, a literal gun is used to foreshadow later events: Ray Romano’s character retrieves a revolver from a hiding place in his home and stashes it in his famous musician wife’s piano; both items later play pivotal roles in the story.

In Knives Out, the prominently featured collection of knives collected by the murder victim that viewers see displayed throughout the film plays a central role in the climax—an event also foreshadowed by the detective’s description earlier in the story of the eventually revealed killer as “Confident, stupid and protected, playing life like a game without consequence until you can’t tell the difference between a stage prop and a real knife.”

Indirect foreshadowing

Indirect foreshadowing is often more subtle than direct foreshadowing, and may even go unnoticed by readers until the later events it augurs are revealed, or upon rereading. Most often it’s used in laying key groundwork for those later developments: paving in details about the characters or plot that will make them more organic, cohesive, and inevitable.

This type of foreshadowing is also likely to be employed more liberally than direct foreshadowing, precisely for those reasons: It’s an often crucial tool for adequately developing character and plot, and can be smoothly and almost invisibly painted into the story throughout, like the shadows in a still-life, to add verisimilitude and depth.

Breadcrumbs and clues

This type of indirect foreshadowing isn’t just for mysteries and thrillers, but crucial in any genre to plant seeds for later developments that might otherwise feel unjustified or sprung on readers, or like an author device. Early in The Hunger Games, for instance, we see Katniss expertly using her bow and arrow to hunt for food—a skill that later plays an essential role in her survival of the titular games.

Threading in clues about a character’s test anxiety or panic attacks, for example, lends greater cohesion and inevitability when we later see they choke during the bar exam; clues about an estranged father and mention of the letter the protagonist wrote him that was never answered keeps his unexpected reappearance in act three from feeling like a deus ex machina; paving in breadcrumbs about a character’s paralyzing fear of heights organically sets up and raises stakes on their climactic struggle to walk onto the Golden Gate Bridge to talk their best friend out of jumping.

Indirect foreshadowing can also come in the form of a statement, but unlike direct-foreshadowing statements they may not be readily recognizable as foreshadowing until later, like the detective’s comment about the killer in Knives Out, or Haley Joel Osment’s character telling Bruce Willis’s in Sixth Sense, “Dead people don’t know they’re dead,” or a sleepless Tyler Durden at the beginning of Fight Club flat-out telling viewers, “With insomnia, nothing’s real.”

Echoed events

Earlier events or developments in a story can presage similar later higher-stakes developments. In The Hunger Games, Katniss saves Peeta from eating poisonous berries, remembering her father’s warnings about them—an event later echoed at the end with a twist, when she gives them to Peeta so both can eat them to kill themselves together rather than turn on each other, and outfox the rules of the game.

In the Ryan Reynolds movie Free Guy, video game designer Keys and his programmer buddy Mouser enter their game as characters to track down “Guy,” a non-player character gone rogue, manipulating the game environment from the real world to advantage their characters in the game. Those actions are later mirrored in the climax when Keys is on his computer in the real world programming changes to help Guy reach a key objective within the game, as Mouser works against Keys on his own computer to try to stop them.

Symbols/motifs

Using symbolic representations of events to come is a sort of foreshadowing shorthand that can create under-the-radar tension and suspense in readers. In The Godfather movie, the appearance of oranges (the fruit) in a scene indicate impending death and violence; in The Sixth Sense the color red indicates when the spirit world is brushing against the corporeal one.

Readers may not pick up on the symbolism until later in the story or a subsequent read, but it can help create a subconscious expectation or foreboding and lend a feeling of cohesion or inevitability to the story.

Mood/tone/atmosphere

There’s a reason “It was a dark and stormy night” is such a literary cliché; setting a mood or tone can be a viscerally potent way of foreshadowing a story’s later events.

In the movie Edward Scissorhands, reclusive Frankenstein creation Edward lives in a bleak, dark castle atop a gloomy hill that looks down over a cheery pastel-colored community, foreshadowing the joy, belonging, and love he finds when an intrepid door-to-door makeup saleswoman brings him down from his stark solitude in the castle to her home in the neighborhood below.

The film Shutter Island opens with the main character seasick on a ferry traveling under a cloudy gray sky and haunted by creepily scored memories of his wife, headed toward the stark, shadowy, isolated island that houses the mental institution he and his partner have been sent to investigate. The moody atmosphere sets the tone of this dark, twisty story, creating a feeling of unease and dread in readers that signals the protagonist’s slow unraveling on the island.

Finessing foreshadowing

Understanding the main types of foreshadowing is the foundation for executing it well.

Clumsily placed direct foreshadowing can feel heavy-handed and can actually have the opposite effect you intend, defusing suspense rather than accelerating it.

Inexpert indirect foreshadowing can feel cryptic or confusing to readers if it’s too vague. Or if underutilized, it can undermine the cohesion of the plot and make later developments feel inauthentic or sprung on readers.

The key to finessing this powerful device is understanding what type to use, and where, to shade in the story’s depth, meaning, and nuance.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on Wednesday, Jan. 29 for the online class The Art of Foreshadowing.