Tag: Foreshadowing

A short excerpt — I’m on a roll on a difficult part

I have a couple hours to write before work today, and I want to get moving, because my mind is playing with a difficult part/concept: What if your first memory is of being full-grown, but totally bewildered by your surroundings:

The faded man sitting next to me introduced himself as David Burris, Valor’s son and Justice’s brother. It seemed odd to me that he looked as if he could be Valor’s father, not vice versa. Then he asked a question, a nonsequitur that nonetheless resonated more than a stranger’s question should have:

“What’s your first childhood memory?” he asked, his gaze searing into me.

My mind spun in panic — I had no childhood memories. I couldn’t get to them. The first thing I remembered in my life was a dream of standing up in my parents’ living room, in the old house where they used to live before they disappeared from society. Durant — my father — wasn’t there, but that wasn’t surprising; I had always known he came into my life later. Three people sat in the room: my mother; plump and curly-haired; a man, tall with long black hair and implacable eyes; and another woman, short and slender, smiling like a grandmother. My mother and the man were bundled up in bathrobes and blankets like they’d just come in from the cold. I couldn’t understand. I stumbled away.

“Come here,” the dark-haired woman said, with a curious gesture of her — I looked down at what I quickly learned was my hand. “Let me look at you.”  

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px; font: 14.0px ‘Courier New’}

I stepped backward. “Here” came with the woman’s gesture toward herself. “You” — I guess that meant me. 

*******
So this is obviously written in first person, and the person is a Nephilim but doesn’t know it. Nephilim are born full-grown and biologically learn very, very quickly such that in a week, she understands everything in that room and shows proficiency. But, at the moment she describes in the memory, she knows literally nothing. So I have to write the scene dividing her observations into two parts: things she can describe and understand at the time of reflection, and things recalled at that exact moment. Tough, huh?

Thanks for reading, friends.

Foreshadowing in the Forest

This was me at the library/coffee house at Northwest Missouri State University yesterday, soaking up ambience and writing on Prodigies (and not, as my husband suggested, pierogies.)

Grace has just been — liberated? abducted? by the prodigy Ichirou and his chaperone, Ayana. Not that Ichirou needs a chaperone, because the Ichirou that retrieves her from her dorm room has grown five inches and grown rather kawaii (cute) in the nine months since Grace last saw him. After officially withdrawing Grace from Interlochen Academy and helping her pack, the three embark on a tense van ride where Ayana refuses to discuss the reason they’re fleeing to a secluded cabin.

The three talk around the “elephant in the room” — or rather, van — which leads to discussions of cultural differences between Grace’s blunt questions and Ayana’s indirectness; discussions of how religion and death are perceived in Japan; and Grace’s revelation of how she lost her parents.

The most fun part to write was Ichirou’s brief speech about how men in Japan will not eat sweet desserts because they will be thought of as less masculine — while eating a plate of French toast swimming with butter, syrup, and whipped cream.

Obviously this took a lot of research on Google (best search of the day: Japanese death taboos). That’s not what I want to talk about today — instead, I want to talk about foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing is a storytelling technique where the writer hints about a later occurrence in the story. It’s best to do this with subtlety,  so the hint doesn’t tell the reader what to expect. Later, when the actual event happens, the astute reader will say, “Hey, wait a minute, didn’t I read earlier that — ?”

Chekhov’s Gun is a related principle of storytelling that advises the writer that any object introduced to the story that doesn’t have immediate purpose should be employed in the story later, and that things not important to the story should be trimmed away.  I’m not a strong proponent of this — if Tolkien took away any unnecessary scenery in The Lord of the Rings, the trilogy would be a brochure.

The reason I mentioned foreshadowing, though, is because what seems to be a conversation to develop characters further can also drop in bits of foreshadowing. In the section of my book I described briefly above, there were three bits of foreshadowing.  No, actually four. I know where those tidbits will blossom in the book, so I could foreshadow. (You may even remember reading about one earlier.) Wait a minute — that’s how foreshadowing works.