Blatant foreshadowing: Beware! Beware! Beware!

A danger in blatant foreshadowing is robbing your story of dramatic suspense.

I flagged this the other day, when I first spoke about blatant foreshadowing:

In fiction, you’d weigh up whether the loss of dramatic suspense was a worthy price for such blatant foreshadowing. But with memoir, the reader already knows the writer has survived to tell the tale, and no dramatic suspense is lost. In fiction, blatant foreshadowing stops readers turning the pages. In memoir, it keeps them turning.

While we know the memoirist survives no matter how horrific, challenging, or insurmountable his or her journey seems, we don’t know the outcome for any other character.

In Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky, makes the mistake of giving too much information too soon. When her adopted daughter talks to Sandy’s parents, Sandy foreshadows how important her parents will become in her daughter’s life. This is followed with Sandy’s anguish as her daughter sees her birth mother for the first time since they separated, and then the bureaucratic red tape she has to jump through to organise passports and visas.

Beware! What could have been a chapter where the reader connects to Sandy’s anguish is spoiled because we already know things will work out right.

Foreshadowing through metaphor

Blatant foreshadowing is easy. You spit out what you’re going to say and you can assume your reader will get it. Foreshadowing through metaphor presents more of a challenge for writers, and is more satisfying for readers even if they’re unaware consciously why.

In Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky, at the start of Chapter 23, Sandy explains an apsect of her graduate diploma. She undertook a visual literacy topic because of her background in voter education, studying how different cultures perceive different drawing techniques (trust me, you’d be surprised!). Her niche is so specific she supplies background information so the reader can understand it.

Whether or not she intended it, this explanation of her study becomes a metaphor for the rest of the chapter as she explains an African custom that a Western audience will not comprehend. Indeed, she finds the custom difficult to understand.

Sandy has prepared us at the start of the chapter for what will follow. It’s a subtle move and a challenge to pull off, but she executed it well.

Foreshadowing: Nuggets of intrigue

By the end of this post, you’ll know how writers use foreshadowing to keep readers turning the pages and to prepare readers for what is to come.

But first, let me define foreshadowing and give you an example.

Foreshadowing is an aspect of the hook. Writers give readers a heads-up about what’s to come. This means the writer is making an assumption about point-of-view, namely that the story is being relayed to readers from some point in the future after the events of the story.

In fiction, you’d weigh up whether the loss of dramatic suspense was a worthy price for such blatant foreshadowing. But with memoir, the reader already knows the writer has survived to tell the tale, and no dramatic suspense is lost. In fiction, blatant foreshadowing stops readers turning the pages. In memoir, it keeps them turning.

Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky gives an example:

1992 was the Queen of England’s Annus Horribilis. It was also mine. I had hoped that I could leave behind the disappointments of Sizwe and start afresh. But not only did they follow me like a stray dog, other heartbreaks and betrayals were to litter my path. Yet I was unaware of all this as I unpacked my few belongings… (p.302)

The last sentence provides the entry into the narrative of the chapter. This far into the book we care so much for Sandy and the characters in her lives we want to know what’s gone wrong and why.

Another example of foreshadowing is this post itself.

Giving the bigger picture

How easy is to get lost in a memoir where a reader is given so many details to keep track of?

Sometimes, a short paragraph or section allows you to pull the camera back and give the reader the bigger picture.

Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky does this, after a chapter that’s been a whirl of comings and goings:

So I entered the second half of the year enjoying my new home and the growing community in which it was located, with both work and home groups providing stretch and purpose… All was well in my world as I celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday and I was very, very happy. (p.275)

From Sandy’s memoir, and my manuscript, I can see that this summary to help readers get their bearings is best used when a lot of changes have happened in a chapter or a long section or a lot of new information has been introduced.

The secret of humor

No matter how heavy the topic covered in a memoir, humor needs to be woven into the story to balance the darkness.

In the third draft of my memoir, I didn’t give a thought to this critical balance. The darkness is unrelenting, and while it reads fast, it’s not pleasant. Finding the funny moments – and they did happen no matter how horrible things were – gives readers the chance to surface from the doom and gloom before diving into it again.

Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky shows the whole section doesn’t need to be funny to balance the harsh reality. In this excerpt she describes the aftermath of a run-in with the army:

We filled Robbie in on our way up Sweetwaters Road and he roared with laughter at the thought of us both standing frozen in the driveway. I also found it funny in the retelling, though it took Nat a good week before she could look back on it and laugh.

She also shows that rather than seeking to write it in a funny way, you can illustrate how readers can respond to the situation through how characters react.

A matter of pacing

Pacing in a memoir gives readers a chance to recover from emotional events. My memoir deals with sexual and emotional abuse, so without balancing the heavy sections with lighter sections, I’ll lose readers, and may well lose hope of a publishing deal. Last year, a couple of girls at the bookshop read it and described it as ‘dark.’

Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky also deals with the heavy stuff: Witnessing South Africa toward the end of the apartheid era. After a particularly heavy chapter or section, she’ll find a way of lightening the next section. When Sandy goes on a Christmas holiday in London after her roughest year so far, the reader is as grateful for the break as Sandy is.

Yet even when she’s away, she contrasts living in the West with living in South Africa. It’s the use of contrast that keeps the lighter section connected to the main story and is something for me to consider in how I place sections in my memoir.