Foreshadowing and setup

Foreshadowing and setup aren’t quite the same thing, though they’re often talked about as if they were. The same thing happens with payoff and consequences. Each pair has a lot of things in common, and sometimes the same event or bit of information can act as both foreshadowing and setup, or both payoff and consequences. This is, of course, a very efficient and effective way of writing, but it does tend to confuse things when people start trying to analyze stories.

The chief thing that each of the pairs have in common is obvious: timing. Within any linear story, setup and/or foreshadowing have to come before whatever they’re setting up or foreshadowing; payoff and/or consequences have to come after. You can’t foreshadow something after the fact, nor can you set it up in Chapter 5 if it already happened in Chapter 3. (Nonlinear storytelling makes mice feet of everything related to a normal linear timeline, including cause-and-effect plotting, setup/foreshadowing, payoff/consequences, character development… but that’s a whole different series of posts.)

The difference between foreshadowing and setup, to me, is that setup is necessary and foreshadowing isn’t. Foreshadowing is a hint that something is coming, and it usually isn’t explicit. Obi-Wan doesn’t say, “I think this trade negotiation mission is a set-up and they’re going to attack any minute;” he says “I have a bad feeling about this.” The new governess doesn’t arrive at the isolated mansion on a bright, sunny day to find a shiny modern glass-and-steel summer home; she shows up in the middle of a thunderstorm (usually the worst one in decades) at an ominous, old Gothic structure. The eventual murder victim didn’t attend the party in pastel pink; they were the only person wearing blood-red.

Motifs, omens, odd bits of seemingly throwaway dialog or action, symbols, setting, weather, timing, all can hint to the reader that something interesting/exciting/dangerous/important is on the way. This can add tension to a story in places where things are dragging a bit…but it is hardly every necessary. Foreshadowing is about possibilities which may or may not come to pass. Take out the foreshadowing, and the story still works, even if it is poorer. Sometimes throwaway dialog is just throwaway dialog.

Setup is necessary.

Chekov’s famous quote says that if you hang a gun on the wall in Act I, somebody better use it in Act II. Setup is the flip side of that. If a character is going to snatch a gun off the wall and fire it in Act II, it better have been hanging quietly on the wall in Act I. Having a gun simply appear right before it’s needed looks much too convenient to be anything but sloppy plotting.

The detective’s summary at the end of the murder mystery, where he/she lays out all the clues and how they add up to that person being the murderer, falls flat if the reader hasn’t been shown the clues until right then. The big set-piece battle at the story’s climax doesn’t work if the writer forgot to mention that various armies have been marching for days to get there on time. The scene where the Navy S.E.A.L. disarms the bomb in the nick of time doesn’t work at the climax if we didn’t know going in that the character was a S.E.A.L. with bomb-disposal training (though it could work at the beginning of the story as an introduction to the character).

Eighty percent of the time, when a reader thinks “Wow, that came out of left field!” it is because of a lack of setup. The other twenty percent of the time, there was setup, but the reader missed it for one reason or another–the setup was too subtle for the majority of readers, the reader was missing cultural subtext or other information that the writer assumed everyone reading would have, the reader was reading so fast that the setup didn’t register until their second read-through, etc.

Neither foreshadowing nor setup have to be written before whatever they’re pointing at. In a short story or novel, the writer can go back and add a line or a paragraph to the early part, once they’ve realized that a scene needs to be set up and how many guns they have to hang on the wall to make it plausible. Series are more difficult, because quite often the best place to foreshadow or set up something that one is writing in Book 3 would have been in Books 1 and 2, which are already in print or production and can no longer be changed. If the writer is lucky, there are throwaway lines or incidents in the earlier books that can be reinterpreted so as to retroactively imply setup that wasn’t actually intended at the time of writing. If there isn’t anything that useful, the writer will probably have to set up things very early in Book 3, possibly with a flashback, or come up with a good in-story reason why this particular setup information has been kept secret until now.

Speaking for myself, foreshadowing is nearly always something that happens in my work without my conscious intention—it’s there by instinct, and I don’t often recognize it until someone else points it out. Setup is something I’m more conscious of, whether it’s deliberate “I need to mention the goldfish in here somewhere, so I’ll have it established well before it starts to be significant in chapter 10” or the equally conscious “I need them to pick this lock…wait, didn’t I mention that she always carries lace crochet hooks? [flipping back several chapters] Yes! I did! She can use those and I won’t have to put in any new setup!” (This sort of accidental setup is something that I find works particularly well, when it happens, because if I didn’t expect the crochet hooks to be significant when I put them in, the reader isn’t likely to leap to the conclusion that they’ll be significant the minute they first appear.)