Foreshadowing: A literary device, or guessing ahead, by which an author hints what is to come. - Wikipedia .
Right.
I like to drop hints for my readers, inside the context of my fics, to give them an idea of what might happen later on.
I try.
I do.
It just really confuses me when I get readers that point out odd things like one review I had. It went along the lines of:
'You'd think the characters would remember one another given their history... and one character seems to have changed... he acts differently'.
Long story short, two characters met once in the past. My fic is set about four to five years after that encounter. They meet again, and one character gets deja vu, thinking they might know the other character, but can't place their face or first name.
Perfectly plausible right?
At least to me.
I tried to be fairly obvious without being
obvious that they knew each other with the foreshadowing in reference to their brief shared past, one character has the dejavu moment, while the other gets real nervous, when they meet again.
So I'm not sure if I wasn't obvious enough or if the foreshadowing, however subtle was just too subtle, for the reader to catch.
If anything it's both frustrating as a writer and incredibly amusing too.
My question to other authors out there is:
Do you foreshadow events in your fics?
How did you use foreshadowing?
Do you think your readers picked up on the hints, or were they confused by them, or did they miss the hints entirely?
~ Pyre