Why Openings Are So Hard

We have had some good discussions in my workshops about why openings are so hard to get right. The basic trouble is this: We writers need to get the story going (meaning, get into a scene) while at the same time filling in the requisite background information so that our reader can catch up with the characters and with the situation in progress. 

This requires us to step in efficiently with our narrators, in summary, to quickly and deftly sneak in the information readers need in order to understand the opening scenes and the forward movement of the story. Generally speaking, you don't want to start with pages and pages of summary narration, or you'll risk losing the reader. At the same time, if you don't adequately ground the reader, he or she is going to be equally lost.

For an example of a writer doing the job right, let's look at the opening of Julia Glass's novel Three Junes. Glass swiftly sets up the situation: Paul, who has just lost his wife Maureen, has joined a vacation tour to Greece. The characters are painted in swift, economical strokes. Here's an example: 

The husbands treat him [Paul] as though he were vaguely leprous. Jack finds the whole thing amusing: "Delightful, watching you cringe." Jack is their guide: young and irreverent, thank God. Reverence would send Paul over the edge.

And so, with a strong narrative hand, Glass quickly establishes her characters, and where everyone in the party stands, and by page two we are into the first major scene, where Paul spots a "sunstruck girl with a touch of the brazen," who reminds him of Maureen.

So, to sum up, openings are hard because you are trying to do two contradictory things at once: Introduce background and situation; and move the story forward. It can be done. You just need to be swift and efficient with your narrator, as is Julia Glass in our Three Junes example above.   

The Many Uses of Summarized Dialogue

Summarizing dialogue: This is one of the most important and useful techniques available to fiction and memoir writers. You must master where and when to use summarized dialogue if you don't want to look like a rookie. 

The basic concept is not a difficult one. Character speech, or dialogue, can come into a manuscript either directly, usually in quotation marks, or as filtered through the narrator, by having the narrator summarize or paraphrase the dialogue.

Here's an example taken from Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction that uses a mix of all three methods: direct speech, paraphrased speech and summarized speech:

They differed on the issue of the holiday, and couldn't seem to find common ground. (Summary) She had an idea: Why not some Caribbean Island over Christmas? Well, but his mother expected them for turkey. (Paraphrased) "Oh, lord, yes, I wouldn't want to go without a yuletide gizzard." (Direct)

This is a good example, because it shows how these different approaches to dialogue are often used in tandem, in order to pace a scene, and give priority to the few pungent lines you really want to zing home in direct dialogue, such as the line above about the "yuletide gizzard." 


This "pacing" aspect is the most commonly acknowledged use of summarized dialogue, but there are actually a number of other uses for this important craft technique, including: setting up the context for a scene that will include direct dialogue; providing distance for the reader from an overly "hot" argument or scene; revealing the attitudes of speaker and listener; shortening and making more palatable speeches where someone is going on and on about something; and providing an artful level of "prose compression" (sometimes to comic or poetic effect).


I am not going to try and provide examples of all of these different applications of this useful craft technique, because there are many wonderful samples already compiled for us by Bernays and Painter in their book of exercises for writers, What If. See the chapter "Telling Talk." I often use these examples in my classes.

I did, however, want to take one particular example from What If, because it is directly relevant to a problem we had with a manuscript submission in my fiction workshop. In this manuscript, there was an extremely hot family argument going on, which most of the readers in the workshop found difficult to take. However, the argument was very important to include in the manuscript, and could not simply be cut. I suggested the application of our "summarized dialogue" technique. Here is an example from What If that Bernays and Painter have taken from Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick, which solves a similar problem in this way to comic effect:

So this ordinary patrolman drove me home. He kept his eye on the road, but his thoughts were all on me. He said that I would have to think about Mrs. Metzger, lying cold in the ground, for the rest of my life, and that, if he were me, he would probably commit suicide. He said that he expected some relative of Mrs. Metzger would get me sooner or later, when I least expected it--maybe the very next day, or maybe when I was a man, full of hopes and good prospects, and with a family of my own. Whoever did it, he said, would probably want me to suffer some. I would have been too addled, too close to death, to get his name, if he hadn't insisted that I learn it. It was Anthony Squires, and he said it was important that I commit it to memory, since I would undoubtedly want to make a complaint about him, since policemen were expected to speak politely at all times, and that, before he got me home, he was going to call me a little Nazi c--------r and a dab of cat---t and he hadn't decided what all yet.

Note that, if rendered in direct dialogue, this conversation would be long, tedious, overly hectoring and basically unreadable. However, by filtering the dialogue through his narrator, Vonnegut achieves several distinct things: The tedious quality goes away because we readers now have enough distance from the conversation. Also, we are given a swift, smart report of some of the emotions in play which we otherwise might miss ("too addled, too close to death"). And there is a pleasurable--and in this case humorous--prose compression that occurs. A painful dialogue becomes something short and fun to read.

So consider giving this important technique a try the next time you have an overly "hot" scene or run of dialogue, or if someone is going on and on about something.

Creating Dialogue for Nonfiction

"But what if I don't remember the exact words we said!" I often hear this cry of distress from the memoirists I work with. (This is the single most common concern next to, Can I say mean things about [fill in name], and get away with it?) Not to worry. There are several techniques we can use to help us create compelling dialogue for nonfiction essays and memoir, even when our memories are spotty. One of the most useful things to do, if you don't remember the exact words people said, is simply to put your dialogue into summary. This relieves you of the problem of having to come up with exact quotes, in quotation marks.


So, for example, you could write, He told me that I should go home to my mother. Rather than writing, "Go home to your mother," he said. You can then save the direct quotations for those few pungent lines that you really do remember exactly.


Another useful device for creating nonfiction dialogue is "compositing." It is generally allowed--in dramatizing for memoir or essays--to roll several conversations into one, or to consolidate dialogue that may have occurred over a period of time. In creating dialogue for nonfiction, I also encourage my students not to be shy about having their characters say the sorts of things they usually said, or the kinds of comments they always made.

Often in memoir, we are writing about people--such as family members--whom we know so well that it's pretty easy to put words into their mouths. I tell my students to be brave about re-creating these characters for us on the page. You know more than you think you do, I say. Just get your scene with dialogue down on paper, and then step back and look at what you've written.  Now ask yourself: It this a fair and accurate representation of what happened? If so, you are done. If not, then start deleting anything that feels inaccurate or misleading to you.


One thing to keep in mind is that all memory, to some extent, is a re-creation. Unless you are one of those rare people blessed with a photographic memory, your task in writing memoir is to get down, as best you can, the way you yourself remember things. Other people may recall things differently. And part of the exploration of memoir is the search for what we remember, and why. It can be fascinating, for instance, and an endless source of exploration, to discover that you and your siblings remember things completely differently.

If you really get stuck, and simply cannot remember, as for example with a scene from when you were eight, this still should not prevent you from coming up with an effective dramatization. This is where the imagination can kick in, and you can fill in what the scene "must have been like" based on what you know. 

The key here is to be clear with the reader when you are starting to invent or imagine. Put a little disclaimer right in the text, such as: My memory is spotty, but I picture my mother with her bouffant hairdo and shirtwaist dress, serving breakfast to my brother and me . . .. If you are going to do this kind of thing a lot, you might consider putting some sort of disclaimer right up front in the preface of your memoir as to the amount of inventing or conjecturing you are doing. Or, if you are writing comedy, the amount of exaggerating or embroidering you are doing. What you don't want to do is to mislead the reader. In the end, it is all about NOT misleading the reader. See my related post on using disclaimers in creative nonfiction.

This post is expanded and updated from an older post.

The New Dystopians: The Importance of Immediacy

Unless you have been living in a cave (or a post-apocalytic missile silo), you are probably aware that genre fiction has been selling like hotcakes on the Amazon Kindle. Authors are pricing these books cheaply enough to encourage potato chip-like consumption, and they usually offer a "series," with the first installment priced free, or for 99 cents, in order to "lure in" new readers.

It isn't clear that the authors of these books--many of them Indie authors--are making much money at these prices, but there's always the prospect of building an audience for the future, or possibly scoring a movie deal or a TV series. (There have been a handful of breakout hits that have gone on to be optioned as movies, or offered publishing deals, which of course is the real fantasy for many Indie writers.)

This has all led to no end of handwringing among the literati, on Twitter and elsewhere, about the destruction of literature as we know it. It is, we are told, the death of the literary novel, what with all of that erotica, romance, horror, and sci-fi jamming the browse categories and bestseller lists online. Authors formerly considered strictly "literary" have jumped into the fray, such as Justin Cronin (of The Passage trilogy), whose work has been scathingly assessed in the New York Times.

I thought today that I would take a look at a couple of these so-called "penny dreadfuls." Are these genre books any good, or are they just so much sensationalist drivel being churned out by a bunch of cheap hacks? And--even more provokingly--why are readers devouring these books like Halloween candy? How dare they?

I don't know much about romance or horror, but I did grow up reading a lot of science fiction or "speculative fiction" as it is more broadly called these days, and many of the novels that were derided back then as being "mere genre sci-fi" have held up rather well as literature. I'm talking names like Atwood, Vonnegut, and Le Guin. So I thought that I would take a look at a couple of the "dystopian" novels that have been selling especially well as of late.

The two books I'm going to examine are The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins and Wool, by Hugh Howey. The Hunger Games started out as an unassuming YA book for Scholastic back in 2008, became a breakout hit, and then of course grew into a series of novels and a major motion picture. Howey, for his part, is a true Indie author, and published Wool as a long short story or short novella directly to Kindle in 2011 via the Kindle Direct Publishing program, where it too grew into a hit and, again, the inevitable series followed. Howey's work recently made headlines when director Ridley Scott (of Alien fame) optioned Wool for a movie. Howey has since signed a "hybrid author" deal with Simon and Schuster, whereby the publisher will distribute print books while Howey retains his digital rights, even as the books and movies come out. (That deal really got the Indie authors salivating.)

My ambition today is not to "pile on" criticizing these books. The truth is, I enjoyed reading both of them. Rather, my goal is to look at what these books do, and how they do it. This is a creative writing craft blog, after all. And I don't know about you, but if books are selling well, I certainly want to know why. What are they doing, I wondered, that is making readers respond so positively?

The first thing you notice about both of these books, once you crack their digital spines, is their--for lack of a better word--"sense of immediacy." The narrators of both books hold an extremely tight, almost interior focus on their characters. Here's an example from the opening of Hugh Howey's Wool, where his character Holston climbs up the inside of a buried silo:

The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do. While they thundered about frantically above, Holston took his time, each step methodical and ponderous, as he wound his way around and around the spiral staircase, old boots ringing out on metal treads. The treads, like his father's boots, showed signs of wear. Paint clung to them in feeble chips . . ..

And so on. The entire novella transpires at this extremely close distance, with great physicality.

To see exactly how close and immediate this writing is, compare this excerpt from Wool to a more traditionally distanced third person, such as this writing from the opening of Ursula K. Le Guin's 1968 A Wizard of Earthsea:

He was born in a lonely village called Ten Alders, high on the mountain at the head of the Northward Vale. Below the village the pastures and plowlands of the Vale slope downward level below level towards the sea, and other towns lie on the bends of the River Ar; . . . The name he bore as a child, Duny, was given him by his mother, and that and his life were all she could give him, for she died before he was a year old.

The Hunger Games goes even further than Wool, since it is written in the first person, present tense, effectively destroying nearly all narrative distance. Here's a sample:

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim's warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping. I prop myself on one elbow. There's enough light in the bedroom to see them. 

This extremely close distance, adopted by both Wool and The Hunger Games, is not an approach that I would ordinary recommend to my writing students. Such writing often verges on interior monologue. And an interior focus can feel very claustrophobic for the reader, and can make it hard to keep things grounded in space and time.

However, the claustrophobia that results can actually work for you with a dystopian novel, where the point of view underscores the oppression the characters are experiencing. Margaret Atwood did something very similar in The Handmaid's Tale in 1986, and the "new dystopians," if I can call them that, seem to be drawing rather heavily on her playbook--though even Atwood, you will note, has more "observational" and temporal distance. Here's a sample from the opening of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale:

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there . . .. There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh. (underlining added) 

The other thing that these novels do is that they build an almost unrelenting sense of suspense. In The Hunger Games, for instance, the main character Katniss Everdeen goes from test to test in her gladiator game, which constantly place her into taut moral quandaries where any warmth of feeling she might experience towards her fellow characters poses an instant threat to her very life. We are catapulted from one such dilemma to the next with very little room for observation or reflection. Howey's main character similarly wars inside himself between hope for the future and fears of his own suicide as he climbs up his buried silo towards the outside world chasing after his missing wife.

So are these novels any good?

I actually thought that Howey achieved a lovely "poetic" moment towards the end of Wool. I won't spoil this moment by describing it. (I did have a little trouble getting grounded as a reader in place and time at the beginning of Wool, which--as noted above--is not unexpected.) I think that the popularity of The Hunger Games with readers probably speaks for itself. On the whole, I think that if these novels have a deficit, it is that they trade so much in "what's going to happen next" that they often fail to establish the kind of perspective and insight we expect from more literary books. I certainly felt that with The Hunger Games where the moral situations, while interesting, remained largely unexplored. And I never felt that either of these novels achieved quite the political or sociological resonance of A Handmaid's Tale or Fahrenheit 451. Again, though, I read only the first books in these series, and it should be pointed out that many of these newer genre scribes are very young, and are developing as writers before our eyes. I think that Howey, in particular, bears watching because he has an interesting sensibility.

So what can we, as writers, learn from these books?

Well, plenty. I think that the new dystopians show us the kind of vivid immediacy that it takes to hold the attention of a reading audience in a digital age. While I was charging ahead reading The Hunger Games and Wool, I was never once tempted to check Facebook or Twitter. You can call these books escapist or sensationalist if you want, but their success is evidence to me that readers do in fact read differently in this digital era. Contemporary audiences are far more prone to distraction than their predecessors were, when YouTube and cheeseburger-obsessed cats are just a click away.

What these successful genre books remind us, is that it's possible to catch and hold the attention of even the itchiest reader. This is a lesson that perhaps writers at the "literary" end of the spectrum need to give greater heed.

Talking Forks and Trilobites-How Objects Can Embody Feelings

In my workshops, we have been discussing how character emotions can be embodied by external objects. I handed out an example from Thomas Hardy's "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (1873) (which I took from David Lodge's The Art of Fiction).  This example demonstrates how the emotions in play--in this case fear of death--may be amplified and elaborated through the use of an object or image external to the character.  In this instance Hardy uses a Trilobite:

At first, when death appeared improbable because it had never visited him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of anything connected with his past.  He could only look sternly at Nature's treacherous attempts to put an end to him, and strive to thwart her.  From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a hollow cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which enclosed the bay to the extent of nearly a semicircle, he could see the vertical face curving round on each side of him.  He looked far down the facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him.  Grimness was in every feature, and to its very bowels the inimical shape was desolation.  By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock.  It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their place of death.  It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.

In this example, we see how Knight's fear of death is explored and amplified by his encounter with this grim little crustacean with its dead, stony eyes. This is so much better than the alternate passage one can imagine, penned by a beginning writer, which would say something along the lines of, Boy, was he ever scared!

Charles Baxter has a wonderful piece on this writerly phenomenon of projecting emotions into objects, called "Talking Forks: Fiction and the Inner Life of Objects," in his delightful and rather zen-like book of craft essays, Burning Down the House. Baxter points out, among other things, that writers often take too limited a view of the way a character's feelings may be projected upon his or her surroundings.  To quote Baxter:


"No law dictates that the setting should always express [only] the feelings of the characters.  Too often, however, it does. Call it the fallacy of the objective correlative, the setting that can only express the feelings of the characters. A sad man sees sad trees.  A murderous man gazes upon a murderous lake."


Baxter urges a broader view than merely this one-to-one relationship between character and object. "If objects reflect only the characters who look upon them, they have nothing to tell us."


In short, we need to consider that objects may be able to teach us things, or may express something that is out of reach for a character. So, for example, a sad person might see only a sad tree, but he might equally see how everyone around him seems blithe and happy. Or a woman who has lost her faith might observe a tall and reverent stand of trees. The key here, in amplifying and elaborating upon a character's emotions, is to have the character who is experiencing strong feelings constantly be in touch with his or her environment, so that the strong feelings become externalized, and we don't have that horrible experience of being trapped inside a character who is having a powerful emotion--a particularly bad thing in the third person, where this can be very claustrophobic for the reader.


The final thing to note about this point of craft is that we writers have more than a little control over which objects appear within the purview of our characters. When I teach the Hardy example, above, I often get the impression that the participants in my workshops think that the Trilobite somehow "just got there"--as if the writer had nothing to do with it.  It doesn't seem to occur to anyone that Hardy made the artistic choice to put the little crustacean there. But powerful objects like this do not often find their way into our narratives through happenstance. We need to cast about for what is available in our settings, and place useful objects nearby where our characters can find them.  In other words, we need to take a more forceful hand in finding our own Trilobites and our own tall reverent trees.


No treatment of this topic would be complete without mention of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, and so I will close this post with an excerpt from that novel which both illustrates and comments upon this technique. In the following passage, Mrs. Ramsay sits knitting at bedtime, alone after a long day, looking out at the lighthouse from her family's seaside home. She is aware of her own stillness and deep consciousness, and that eventually, as she puts it, "It will end, it will end." So here is Mrs. Ramsay, finding something spiritual out there in the darkness. She has just accomplished "something dexterous" with her knitting needles--

and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at--that light, for example.  And it would lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind . . .  which she would repeat and begin adding to it, It will end, it will end, she said.  It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the Lord .  .  ..  She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart .  .  ..

This is only a part of this lovely passage.  If you have not already read To The Lighthouse, I urge you to do so. Woolf has taken the inner life of objects about as far as any writer has, and she is, by her example, one of our finest teachers.

This post has been updated and expanded from an older post.   

Tense Problems in Writing Memoir

This past week I did a manuscript edit for a fellow who is deeply involved in scientific research and is writing a memoir about his experiences. He has been having a great deal of trouble with his tenses. I thought I would do a post on this subject because this is a very common problem for memoirists, especially those trying to recapture the intensity of the past. There is a constant urge to move into the present tense, and then there is trouble moving back into the past tense, which usually is how the main story is narrated.

To start with, let's examine why there is this urge to drop into present tense in the first place when we are writing memoir and personal narrative. I think the urge arises from the fact that we are often retelling very important and visceral personal stories, and we want to capture the immediacy of what we went through--and the sense that we have brought that immediacy forward with us through memory into the present. Present tense seems to capture this for us, and it feels as if it is putting us squarely in the middle of the remembered dramatic scene that we are trying to render for the reader, and so as we compose we find ourselves slipping into the present tense. It just seems a natural thing to do. However, because this is material that actually happened in the past, the reader will read our present tense scenes as being in what is sometimes termed "the historical present."  So, for example, the reader may know that a scene happened back in 1996, but they read it in the present tense feeling that they are being placed back there, into that scene, and into the immediacy of that past moment. 


So is there anything wrong with doing this?  That seems to be the question the writers I work with want to ask. The short answer is "no"--the historical present is a very useful device both in memoir and in fiction, especially to recapture an intense dramatic moment, and it's something that a lot of well-published authors regularly do. However, there are some rather specific pitfalls that you need to be aware of as a writer if you are going to engage in this technique.

You need to beware of putting your whole memoir or first person narrative into the present tense. The reason for this is that the present tense basically gets you "running alongside" the drama as narrator, and when you compose this way it makes it very difficult for you to "step back" and provide the kind of background and summary narration that most memoirs and first person narratives are going to require. So that means that if you are going to use the "historical present" you are probably going to be talking about having to move in and out of the present tense, and for the most part will be writing your memoir in the past tense, where summary narration and movements through time are going to be easier to handle.  And here's where most memoir writers get into real trouble:  Because of where your narrator is standing, it is actually very easy to make the move from past tense into the historical present. However, it is quite difficult to get back out again. 

This is because the narrator, as we have noted, starts to "run alongside" the dramatic narration in present tense. (I do this, I do that, she tells me this, she tells me that.) But then when you shift back into past tense, the narrator suddenly has to move back to narrating about all of it in the "past" of the story, which has the effect of changing where the narrator is standing relative to the story and the reader. Readers often have a very difficult time making this switch. They feel a jolt when you shift where the narrator is standing, and they recognize that "something awkward is going on here." A big oops for the writer.


So what can a writer do about this problem?  One answer is simply to force your whole manuscript into past tense and just not use the historical present at all. This is certainly is an answer if you are having a lot of trouble with this issue. Many memoirists in fact end up doing exactly this. However, I think this is an unsatisfying answer, because the "historical present" is such a useful device. I think a better approach is for the writer simply to be aware that the switch out of present tense and back into past tense is just a hard switch to make, and to try and do it somewhere that the reader expects a switch in time or narration mode, such as at a white space break, a section break, or where one chapter ends and another begins. Sometimes you can pull off the switch at the end of a paragraph, or where there is a run of dialogue that puts some distance between the present tense and past tense material. For an example of an author using both past tense and present tense, but mostly segregating those different modes in separate short chapters, take a look at Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth. Also take a look at the short memoir story "Bonanza" in that collection, where Beard begins in the past tense, and then switches to the present tense to recall an intense memory and stays there for the remainder of the chapter. (This is clearly an author who understands the problem.) 

Another approach that has been successfully employed by memoirists, is to put everything happening in the present time into present tense, and to put all of the past material into past tense.  For an example of this, look at The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.  There is a sort of naturalness to this approach, because the stuff that's "happening now" is in the present tense, and the things "that happened in the past" are in the past tense. However, this approach doesn't capture the effect that we have been talking about, of things that occurred in the past--and sometimes the distant past--of having a sort of real present immediacy when they are recalled.  And that, of course, is why we all get into this trouble in the first place. 


Hopefully this post has given you some different possible approaches to try.  With each memoir, I think it's helpful to try different things and see what seems to work best.  Just beware of those shifts out of present tense and back into past tense. They are tough to pull off.

Please note that this is an update of an older post. 

Fun with Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is one of those craft concepts that always seems harder than it really is. However, in order to understand foreshadowing, you need a good grasp of how the narrator functions in the story. 


The narrator is the "speaker" or the "teller" of the story. In most instances, the teller of the story--whether in first or third, fiction or nonfiction--knows the past, present and future of the story. (There are exceptions, see below.) Generally speaking, though, in memoir and first person fiction, the first person narrator has lived through the story and can tell about it in retrospect, all the while building tension and projecting forward to what's coming because he/she knows how the story is going to end. Similarly, with third person narration the narrator is generally considered to "know the future of the story." This is usually part and parcel of limited or full omniscience, and so the narrator can "cast forward" to what's coming. Most storytellers, however, don't want to "give away the ending." So, generally, foreshadowing is about giving us a sense of the trouble that's coming down the road in order to build suspense without giving away all the goods. 


Of course, sometimes you want to give away all the goods, especially if you are relating an "end foretold" type of story. For an example of what this is like, take a look at the opening of Howard Norman's beautiful novel, The Bird Artist, which reveals a murder in the opening paragraph. The effect of this "giving away" is to shift the focus of the story from "what will happen" to "how and why it happened." Note the principle here that when the narrator "gives away" information about the future of the story, the effect is to shift the focus of the story--and specifically to control what questions are foremost in the reader's mind. So foreshadowing can be a powerful tool for controlling dramatic focus.


The kind of foreshadowing we usually see in fiction and nonfiction stories is less dramatic than giving away how the story ends, and is usually limited to directing the reader's attention to specific dangers and troubles at hand. There are many methods for doing this. I think it will be helpful to provide some examples here, so please bear with my fractured version of Hansel and Gretel. Let's start with a passage that has little or no foreshadowing:

On a bright, sunny day, Hansel and Gretel entered the woods.

Here we have very little tension because we don't yet feel the presence of any specific trouble. Now let's add some foreshadowing, using scenic description and narration:

On a bright, sunny day, Hansel and Gretel entered the dark and scary forest. The trees stood so close and tangled that as soon as the children were no more than a few feet inside, already they had the sense that they had lost their way, though at that point they easily could have turned back.

In this passage, we can feel the suspense of the story rising because the reader's attention is being directed to the possibility that Hansel and Gretel will become lost, and to unspecified "dark and scary" things that might lurk in the forest.


Now here's another example that employs dialogue between the two characters to provide foreshadowing:

On a bright, sunny day, Hansel and Gretel entered the woods.

"I don't know if this is such a good idea," Gretel said. "We could get lost, and some of the kids say there's a witch living in here."

"Oh, shut up," Hansel said. "Don't be such a coward."

Gretel would have turned back, but she didn't want Hansel going alone.

Here, the dialogue directs the reader's attention to the possibility that the children might get lost or encounter a witch. Also we see that Gretel is going outside of her comfort zone in order to stay with her brother. 


The action of the story can also be used to foreshadow:

On a bright, sunny day, Hansel and Gretel entered the woods. Gretel was reluctant, being afraid of getting lost, but Hansel said he would drop bread crumbs so they could find their way out. This seemed like a good idea to Gretel, but she couldn't help peeking back, and when she did she saw little birds flying down to eat the bread crumbs.

Note how effective action is to build tension. As with everything else in fiction and memoir, it's better to dramatize where possible. 


Here's another example that actually "gives away" the ending. You probably don't want to do this unless you are trying to tell an "end foretold" story or are going for ironic or comic effect:

On a bright and sunny day, Hansel and Gretel entered the dark and scary woods. Of course they would get lost and, eventually, end up being eaten by the witch who lived there. But they were young and stupid, and so we shall begin by cheering them on as they foolishly charge ahead.

The point to take away from this discussion is that there are many ways to give the reader hints of what's coming, and doing so directs the reader's attention and focus towards specific dangers and troubles, thereby building suspense.


So what about the exceptions I alluded to above, where the narrator or speaker doesn't know the future of the story?


You sometimes see this in fiction when the story's ostensible teller is placed in a position where he or she can't know the future, such as in certain present-tense stories, or where a first person narrator reports in from various positions along a designated route, or writes a succession of letters. For an example of this, take a look at Kazuo Ishiguro's wonderful novel The Remains of the Day. Writers should realize, though, that this kind of limitation on the narrator is a mere conceit. It is still possible to telegraph what's coming, through narration, description and action, even when the rules of the fiction constrain the future knowledge of the story's ostensible "teller." To take an example, here is Gretel, writing in her journal:

We have have been walking all day, and have just reached a large clearing in the forest. No sign of the witch yet, but you can't be too careful. It's starting to get late, and I'm hoping to convince Hansel to stop and camp here for the night, but I think he wants to keep walking until we lose our light, even if it means that we may have to sleep in a tree.

This is a narrator who doesn't know the future, but note that she can certainly tip us off to the dangers at hand, and anticipate the future, which acts to foreshadow the story quite effectively. For a story that does something like this, but with a twist, take a look at Andrea Barrett's luminous "Servants of the Map," which employs an interesting hybrid third-person-present-tense-narrator/first-person-correspondent-narrator to tell a suspenseful story.


So do you need more foreshadowing in your own work?


You might, if you hear your workshop readers complain about "being bored," or that your story isn't "carrying them." Often in this case you have failed to give enough direction and focus to your story. The addition of a bit of foreshadowing can raise the level of suspense, focus the attention of your readers, and keep them turning the pages.

For more reading: The Paris Review has done an extended Interview with writer Andrea Barrett about the art of fiction and her life as a writer. It is well worth the read. 

Please note that this is an update of an earlier post.