foreshadowing

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

Most writers and readers have at least a passing familiarity with suspense as a fiction technique, as an effect and as a genre. Hills addresses all of these aspects of suspense in this section, and in doing so makes some value judgments you may or may not agree with.

What I think you will agree with is that suspense can be a powerful aspect of foreshadowing, however you choose to approach it. I tend to agree with Hills’ assessment of the pitfalls of suspense, but it’s important to stress that this is not akin to authorial fraud. Suspense, like sex, sells. It has a reliable, predictable effect on the reader, and in a craft driven by the need to attract and hold interest it does both.

The main problem with suspense is that, like sex, it quite often obliterates all other aspects of a work, no matter how well they might have been implemented. Unbridled, suspense has the power to overwhelm any story, becoming not simply an engine of interest, but the only interest. [ Read more ]

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

At a little over seven pages this is one of the longest sections in the book. In it Hills lays out all the techniques that can be used to foreshadow the events of a story, and in so doing provides a checklist by which any author might plan and execute a story so as to increase both a sense of uncertainty and inevitability in the reader.

For example:

in description. A passage describing the place where action in a story is about to take place establishes the setting, but the description can also be colored so as to evoke a mood appropriate to the action that follows.

So: description of setting + mood = foreshadowing of action. Is this not a good thing to know? Is this not exactly the kind of thing you might want to think about when you’re conceptualizing a story, or revising your first draft? I’ll grant that technical relationships like this are often acted on at a subconscious level, but wouldn’t it be great to be able to consciously appeal to aspects of craft like this when you get into trouble? [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Foreshadowing and Suspense

WIG&TSSIP: Techniques of Foreshadowing