How to Harness the Power of Foreshadowing

What is foreshadowing and why is it such an effective literary device? From Hitchcock to Skywalker, let’s explore this source of suspense.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Foreshadowing is one of the simplest literary devices: It is merely the act of hinting at what will happen later in a story. But don’t let its simplicity fool you — foreshadowing can also be powerful. It can engage your readers, create suspense and dramatic irony, help you “earn” a shocking plot twist, make your payoffs stronger, and it can make your books eminently re-readable.

With all that in mind, let’s dive into how and why to employ foreshadowing in your writing.

Why use foreshadowing?

At first blush, telling people what will happen in your story seems like it goes against one of the core principles of storytelling: not ruining the ending. After all, one of the joys in reading a book or watching a movie lies in not knowing what’s going to happen next. So why give your audience spoilers?

Suspense

Suspense is a great way to engage your audience and add energy to your book. One of the chief ways to create suspense is through the use of foreshadowing. By telling the reader that something awful is going to happen, they can’t help but fill the ensuing pages with dread.

Here is a famous quote by the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, on how the use of foreshadowing can liven up what might otherwise be a mundane scene.

There is a distinct difference between suspense and surprise… I’ll explain what I mean. We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence.

Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock, and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene…

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.

Dramatic irony

Dramatic irony is when the audience knows more than the characters. It is essential to creating suspense (e.g., in Hitchcock’s example, we know there’s a bomb under the table and the characters do not), but dramatic irony doesn’t have to be used solely for suspense. It can also be used to alter the reader’s understanding of what’s happening on the page.

For example, take this scene:

A man and a woman reach for the same jalapeno at a grocery store. The man cracks a jalapeno-related joke. She laughs. Their eyes lock. They flirt some more, and the man introduces himself as David and asks her on a date. She tells him her name is Audrey, and she accepts. As she’s checking out, the cashier, a woman named Brianna, asks, “Did you find everything OK?” Audrey replies, “Well, if you mean the man I’m going to marry, then yes.”

OK, so this scene is fine, I guess. As it is, it reads as a fairly boring example of a romance novel meet-cute. But see how much we can change the meaning of this text by preceding it with various kinds of foreshadowing.

“Audrey met the man who would murder her at the Piggly Wiggly.” Suddenly the reader is interpreting that scene quite differently. What on the surface seems like a standard meet-cute takes on a completely different air because we know what horrible outcome is waiting for Audrey. Now we’re looking for clues about David’s dark side.

“Audrey met the woman she would marry at the Piggly Wiggly.” Oh! Well, that’s interesting. The reader is now wondering how Brianna and Audrey are going to hook up when everything about the text suggests she’s more interested in David.

“Audrey met Peter, the man she would marry, at the Piggly Wiggly.” Wait, what? Peter? Who’s Peter? Is David Peter? Is Brianna Peter? So. Many. Questions!

“Audrey met David the day the world ended.” Oh, OK. You’re going there. Welp. So much for meet-cutes. Or the world, apparently.

Plot twist

Everyone loves a great plot twist. It can elevate a story from being merely good to one that gets everyone talking about it. On the other hand, a bad plot twist can make readers feel angry and betrayed. There are several things that separate a great plot twist from a bad one, but there is one key element: a great plot twist has to be shocking but still in the realm of possibility. In other words, your twist can’t come from out of nowhere. Audiences want to be surprised, but they also want to feel like they had a chance to guess the twist all along.

Consider one of the most famous plot twists of all time: the reveal that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father in The Empire Strikes Back. This twist, while shocking, didn’t come from out of the blue. In an earlier scene, when Luke is training with Yoda, he gets into a fight with a Darth Vader-like figure. After Luke slices Vader’s head off, the mask opens, revealing Luke’s face inside.

(Also, in a much more subtle example of foreshadowing, “vader” means “father” in Dutch.)

Dropping hints about your twists will also make your book even more enjoyable on a second reading, as the reader will be pleasantly shocked at how they didn’t see the twist coming the first time around.

Make your payoffs stronger

By simply having a character tell us a phobia early in your story, we know that phobia is going to come into play later on in the story, and what’s more, it will give that later scene so much more weight than it otherwise would have had.

Consider how Indiana Jones tells us in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark how much he hates snakes. Spielberg might have just as well held up a sign saying, “Warning! Snakes ahead!”

When this scene happens later on in the film, we fear for Indy way more than we would have if he hadn’t previously told us about his fear.

Bonus: Build excitement (or speculation) for your sequels

We’ve already seen how foreshadowing can energize your readers while reading your book, but it can also get readers excited about your next one. Better still, a well-placed bit of foreshadowing can get people talking and speculating.

Again, in The Empire Strikes Back, after Luke leaves his training early, Obi-Wan says, “That boy is our last hope;” to which Yoda replies, “No. There is another.” When the question of who Yoda was referring to was left unresolved at the end of the film, fans worked themselves into a frenzy speculating who that might be, thus building even more excitement for the next film.

How do you incorporate foreshadowing?

Now we know what foreshadowing is and why to use it: let’s look at how to do it.

Dialogue

We’ve already highlighted one way to use dialogue to deliver foreshadowing (Indy telling us he hates snakes). But sometimes it can be as simple as someone saying something like, “I have a bad feeling about this,” or “You’ll be the death of me,” or “Whatever you do, don’t push the red button.” If you think these are too clichéd, that’s not necessarily a bad thing: It will cause the line to stand out from the rest of your text in a way that will catch the reader’s eye.

Details

One way you can add foreshadowing is by drawing special attention to what might otherwise be a mundane detail. This will activate your readers, engaging them in your book, and cause them to be on the lookout for the item in question to show up again.

For example, when Harry Potter meets Xenophilius Lovegood in the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One, Harry — and by extension, the audience — focuses on a pendant he is wearing.

When this symbol appears again, we know it’s important (we later learn this is the symbol for the titular Deathly Hallows). We also know who Harry and his friends will have to visit to learn more about it. This momentary bit of not-so-subtle foreshadowing draws us in, alerting us that there is a mystery surrounding this symbol and making us eager to look for it.

The book’s title

Giving readers a sense of what’s going to happen right in the title of your book can get them excited and let them know what they’re in store for (e.g., Murder on the Orient Express, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or even Snakes on a Plane).

Imagery, symbolism, and metaphor

You can use these literary techniques to hint to readers the true nature or even the fate of a character.

For example, if you meet a charming stranger but then call our attention to the fact that he’s wearing a t-shirt with a snake on it, you may be giving the reader a hint that he can’t be trusted.

Surrounding a character with various symbols of death can alert the reader that that character will either die or be in danger. Throughout the classic gangster film Scarface (1932), director Howard Hawks constantly associates “X” with death, as seen here:

And here:

So we are primed to — perhaps unconsciously — know that when an X appears on or near a character, they are marked for death.

What is direct (and indirect) foreshadowing?

Many people like to suggest that there are two kinds of foreshadowing, direct (overt) and indirect (subtle). But I feel that drawing the distinction between the two is more confusing than useful. Instead, I think it’s just important to know that you can be as obvious or as subtle as you want in your use of foreshadowing — and it’s probably a good idea to mix it up a bit. Drop one obvious hint (through dialogue, for example) and maybe a few more subtle ones, perhaps through symbolism. That way, you can reward readers for picking up on these more subtle hints when re-reading your book.

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