Aftshadowing
Nov. 6th, 2007 11:59 amI've noticed recently that I don't do foreshadowing very well. Eventually, I have to foreshadow, so I go back in and tweak things and eventually have a story that makes sense going forwards.
What I do have instead is aftshadowing. A character will say something in an offhand way, or an incident will come out of my fingers and onto the page, that I'll then have to justify later with some explanation. In a scene I wrote recently, Caprice is reviewing her email and one of the messages is from her brother, who's heading from Earth to Mercury and is stopping at Mars on the way. Caprice says, "I was never very good at orbital mechanics." And her uncle says, "Yes, that was one of the records at the academy you allowed me to keep."
Great. I have three things in this brief exchange which will need explication or exploitation sometime later in the book. But I have no idea how I'm going to do that. They're foreshadowing for things I haven't even thought of yet!
*Sigh*.
What I do have instead is aftshadowing. A character will say something in an offhand way, or an incident will come out of my fingers and onto the page, that I'll then have to justify later with some explanation. In a scene I wrote recently, Caprice is reviewing her email and one of the messages is from her brother, who's heading from Earth to Mercury and is stopping at Mars on the way. Caprice says, "I was never very good at orbital mechanics." And her uncle says, "Yes, that was one of the records at the academy you allowed me to keep."
Great. I have three things in this brief exchange which will need explication or exploitation sometime later in the book. But I have no idea how I'm going to do that. They're foreshadowing for things I haven't even thought of yet!
*Sigh*.
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