On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [118]
Where were the diamonds, the cold elegance? And she wasn't as tall as he'd guessed, though high heels and a low camera angle could account for that. There'd even been a merry twinkle in her eyes when she'd bantered with the little girl.
If she'd been involved in her late husband's activities, that twinkle would disappear fast enough when she found herself staring at prison walls during a fifteen-to-twenty-year sentence. Though now, after meeting her, the thought didn't fill him with the same sense of satisfaction that it had before.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing heightens suspense by hinting at action that is yet to come. If you foreshadow correctly, the readers will be able to accept events that otherwise might strike them as illogical, unbelievable, or coincidental. By properly preparing your readers, you eliminate the need to explain what's going on when the event actually takes place. For instance, if the elevator is going to crash, make it creak a time or two first—the hint to your readers will make them anxious to see what happens. (Of course, if it creaks and creaks and then doesn't crash, your readers will feel cheated.)
Even relatively unimportant action can benefit from foreshadowing. I planned to get a hero and heroine into an intimate and embarrassing position by having her trip over a carpet seam, upset his office chair, and fall on top of him. But that's an awfully convenient outcome—one that might make readers say, "Yeah, right, like that would really happen."
So I planted two bits of information ahead of time. Well ahead of time—almost a hundred pages before the chair upsets. On her first visit to his office, the heroine notes that the hero's chair "looked as if it were defying gravity," and that it "tipped back alarmingly." The second foreshadowing appears just a couple of pages before the crash, when the heroine comments about the state of the hero's office furnishings, and he replies that the carpet may be slightly threadbare, but it's clean. When the heroine trips over a loose seam in that carpet just a few minutes later, the readers are well prepared.
The trick in foreshadowing is to give the readers all the information they need to figure out the book's secrets, but to do so in such a way that they won't succeed in doing so. Each bit of foreshadowing should have at least two outcomes, with the real one a trifle less obvious than the red herring you want your readers to pursue. For instance, if you want your heroine to observe the hero getting angry at a comment that's made to him, you can put in two comments—one that would annoy anyone, another that seems innocuous. The heroine will assume that the annoying comment is the one he's reacting to, and she'll pass over the second one. But the readers have heard it, so when the truth eventually comes out, they'll be prepared when they find out that the seemingly innocent statement is the one that actually caused the trouble.
Foreshadowing can be presented in narrative, action, or dialogue. You can mask it by slipping it in among a lot of other details, or by surrounding it with humor to distract the readers from the importance of the clue.
Foreshadowing can also be present in what a character doesn't do or say. If the hero, seeing a baby crib in the heroine's apartment, asks, "Do you have children?" and the heroine answers, "I keep my friends' kids a lot," the readers are unlikely to notice that she didn't really answer the question—and only later will the implications of that nonanswer become apparent.
Foreshadowing can even be presented straight out, if there are several possible interpretations of the hint and you emphasize one of the alternatives instead of the real thing. This kind of foreshadowing is like a magician's sleight of hand, when he draws your attention to one hand so he can use the other one to manipulate the white rabbits unseen. You can draw the readers toward a false interpretation while guiding them away from the correct one.
In this selection from my sweet traditional romance The