Narrative thrives on the promise of friction, tension and disturbance. Opening with a foreshadowing sentence or paragraph can heighten the reader’s interest in what’s to come. It’s the signal that change is underway, and that the order of things will be disturbed. Foreshadowing creates anticipation of story-events to come, be they psychological, emotional, or physical.
In your writing practice, you might find that using a foreshadowing opening sentence helps you figure a way to focus and contain the story to come.
The foreshadowing lines might indicate an event that took place in the story’s past; something that has already happened and is going to have consequences to come. Or it might be indicating an event yet to take place.
For instance, in this example from a short story by Miles Franklin Award winner, Tara June Winch, the narrator tells about a visit home that ends with a death. ‘Wager’ opens at the start of the son’s visit to his mother’s place. From this point on, no matter where the story goes, the reader knows a death is inevitable. And yet the story isn’t crime fiction or thriller genre. It’s a drama about relationships, class and culture:
“By morning someone would die, but at that moment I couldn’t have known.” —Tara June Winch, ‘Wager’, in After the Carnage.
Or this ironic opening line by Neil Gaimon in his story, ‘The Hidden Chamber’. Gaimon is almost winking to his readers, who well know the author’s capacity for surprise and horror.
‘Do not fear the ghosts in this house; they are the least of your worries.’
neil gaimon, ‘the hidden chamber’, Fragile Things
The opening of Meg Rosoff’s YA speculative novel, How I Live Now is an example of retrospective foreshadowing. The narrator has lived through the events, and is now looking back at what she (older and wiser) knows to be the most critical of them (meeting her cousins/the war) and who was involved (cousin Edmond):
“But the summer I went to England to stay with my cousins everything changed. Part of that was because of the war, which supposedly changed lots of things, but I can’t remember much about life before the war anyway so it doesn’t count in my book, which this is. / Mostly everything changed because of Edmond. / And so here’s what happened.” — Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now
There’s much subtlety present in Australian writer Jessie Cole’s memoir, Desire. The following lines come from the second paragraph of the book’s opening, after a short and vivid description of fireflies at night in the forest. There’s promise of eros, of tension and precarity to come:
“The first night I spent with my lover was like standing amongst the fireflies. Desire incandescent, but the knowledge of its fleetingness always in the room. I thought, I may never see this man again. I thought, the memory may be all that remains. And I tried not to let that knowledge change me. I tried not to pre-emptively grieve. Be here now, I told myself. Be here now.” — Jessie Cole, Desire: a Reckoning
A foreshadowing opening can be subtle, pointing to events, but also working at the level of metaphor and suggestion. Ernest Hemingway’s opening line in A Farewell To Arms is a hint at most. It reads:
‘The leaves fell early that year.’
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms
The effect of the earliness of the autumn leaf fall is tonal and emotional (though a contemporary reader might now think immediately of climate change). The foreshadowing is one of mood, of implication. There’s no need for a reader to notice the symbolic link between that line and the postpartum death of Catherine Barkley and her stillborn baby, which come later in the novel.
The paradox in Meg Wollitzer’s novel, titled The Wife, is clearly stamped on this foreshadowing opening:
“The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, we were thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusion of stillness and tranquility. Just like our marriage.” —Meg Wollitzer, The Wife
Within the body of the narrative, foreshadowing continues to create anticipation of story to come. It’s an essential component of horror, thriller and gothic genres.
These next two examples are little more complex in terms of their temporal organisation. In both, the narrator is foreshadowing the importance of past events that still hold uncertainty or ambiguity for the narrator. The lines suggest that the narrator is going to try to work out the answer to the problem of the past in the story to come:
‘I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen.’ —Anne Enright, The Gathering
‘Although it has been years since Eve and I were friends, I despair that I will ever shake her.’ —Diana Reid, Love and Virtue
Opening with a foreshadowing opening line or passage may not suit your story. It’s not present for instance in the opening of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Carol. The first pages establish the main character Therese’s workplace, at which she will first encounter Carol: ‘The lunch hour in the co-worker’s cafeteria at Frankenberg’s had reached its peak. / There was no room left at any of the long tables…’ These lines almost insist that everything is as it should be.
A foreshadowing opening sentence can help you figure a way to focus and contain the story to come.
Foreshadowing is something you might like to experiment with. You can use it as a generative writing tool, to challenge yourself to lean in to the promise of what is yet to happen. A foreshadowing opening sentence can help you figure a way to focus and contain the story to come.
Opening sentences are often written very early in the process. They’re often more revised and rewritten than anything that comes later in the short story/novel/essay. They’ve emerged early, before the writer has found their way into the characters, or the narrative style, or the deeper themes underpinning the initial idea.
A wonderfully useful piece of advice I received from the short story writer Jean McGarry many years ago, was to return to the opening sentence and the first paragraphs at story’s end, and see if the narrative had met the promise made in that opening.
I’ve applied this reading technique to my own writing practice, and employ it when reading other writers’ works in workshop and mentoring settings. I ask myself, where did the narrative open, and where has it landed?
Where does the narrative open, and where has it landed?
