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.