Joel asked Michael Grant:

are there any cases of foreshadowing in the first book of the gone series?

Michael Grant Well, not deliberately. I disagree with the Chekov rule ("Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.") .

I think that just feeds into the reader's tendency to recognize tropes and cliches. I don't want you to know what's coming next, I want to mess with your head, drop clues that don't mean anything, leave things untidy they way they are in real life. I deliberately, consciously include randomness in my stories because randomness exists in the real world. I want you disoriented, off-guard, caught by surprise. I want you to think you know what's coming next. . . and be completely wrong.

My literary idol, Stephen King uses foreshadowing very effectively, but he's after a different reaction than I am. I'm not much interested in people 'trapped by fate' or 'prisoners of a bad life choice.' I dislike, and am impatient with, helpless people and it comes through in my writing. I'm more interested in people trying hard to cope and having to make terribly hard decisions, sometimes the right one, sometimes not.

Also YA does have some limitations, as does any genre. YA characters have no past. If you're 16 today you've been mostly conscious for what, 4 or 5 years? Before that you lived in a child's fantasy. If characters have no past they can't very well be getting over a bad divorce or recovering from alcoholism or have a tense relationship with their kid. So, I can't use backstory as much as I might because the characters have no backstory. Mr. King can mine decades of character backstory, I get a fraction of that, which inevitably places the focus squarely on the present.

In the end, no matter how I try not to preach or teach, my own world view comes through. I believe we are defined within a sort of Venn diagram with four circles: DNA, Environment (experience), Free Will and Random Chance. I think the proportions shift constantly and the areas bleed into each other obviously, but as a way to frame and understand the world, it works for me.

Sam Temple is a creature of his DNA (tall, blonde, athletic, moderately smart), his environment (fraught parental situation, beach town, friends,), his Free Will (the decision to step up and take charge) and Random Chance (meeting Astrid.) Example of random chance? The train they come across in a later book? That's in there because I took a wrong turn driving my daughter to school and got cut off by a train.

Gotta respect the random. That's why I don't foreshadow.

flag