right back at it with silver bullets in our shotgun-hatchet
Assuming you saw my last post, you already know what we’re doing here. (If not, go look, I can wait a minute) In short: mashing ‘delete’ to improve your story’s quality. If you’re new to writing, destroying your own work may be hard to accept; I know it was for me. If you’re an old pro… probably it’s still pretty challenging.
Eventually you cross that threshold where you get that your words are endless, the font of your imagination boundless, and it’s okay to give up on a bad idea: more will come. They’ll be better anyway.
But still it can be hard sometimes to spot the monsters. You’re creeping down a murky hallway and they’re standing behind a door where you walk right past them.
So here’s me, the person in the front row at the theater shouting, They’re right there! and scattering popcorn everywhere.
Episode 2: What could possibly go wrong?
The evil that is heavy-handed foreshadowing
A good story uses foreshadowing, but it’s subtle. It’s so different a beast from the titular monster, I would call it by a different name: creating expectations. Foreshadowing is sometimes so heavy-handed that it feels extratextual, like it belongs in a footnote. *
*This is the character arc this person will be traveling.
Nota bene, foreshadowing poorly done doesn’t turn your reader against your story, it turns them against you. It can come off as a passive-aggressive attack against your own character, and few things are more off-putting. You’re the god of this tiny cardboard-bounded universe, and what manner of god mocks its own creations for failing to predict their fate?
Consider:
“Love was a delusion, and Carolyn knew she would never be one of those fools who threw away their freedom in favor of monogamy just because it felt safe.”
To be clear, if this is a thriller and Carolyn is a lawyer pursuing a coven of witches on a mission of vengeance in Detroit, consider my complaint withdrawn. Interesting character development. Go Carolyn!
However. If one of the major plot points of your story is that Carolyn is going to learn better, you’ve just given me a precis of the plot, and you might ask yourself why I should bother reading the novel.
Contrast this to:
“As she jogged through the park, Carolyn’s gaze passed across a couple standing arm-in-arm beside the pond, watching the paired swans. She snorted, rolling her eyes as she turned them forward.”
You’ve conveyed the precise same information — your protag thinks commitment is for suckers — without voicing a judgment. You haven’t just told me her opinion, you’ve gotten me invested in it. When I read that passage, my reaction is, ‘Smug dick. What makes you think you know better than the rest of us?’ I’m not just primed for Carolyn’s comeuppance, I want to watch it happen.
In sum, as you edit your story, keep an eye out for instances where you set up a truth with the intention that it fail. This is fantastic technique, but you want to be sneaky about it. Ask if there’s a way to convey this information so you aren’t laying out a rug just to yank it out from under someone.
You don’t want to be Lucy; everyone’s rooting for Charlie Brown.
Congratulations! You’ve turned your characters around so they aren’t running up the steps of the abandoned sanitorium going, What go could wrong?
Next week: the spooky truth about Vacuous Rhetorical Questions.
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