Hi! I've been at it writing my second-ever project for a while now, and I think I've gone totally overboard with the foreshadowing. Let me explain... My story is built on the concept of consciousness and subconsciousness, and the story itself centers around a girl who fights a mysterious silhouette she calls "The Spirit" during nights when there is a full moon. The idea here is that the girl is actually fighting her subconsciousness, which represents the conflicts she has with herself both literally and metaphorically. That's of course not revealed until the end when she finally confronts "herself". There are some mechanics I made up to support this concept (with some spirit theory and actual physics) but that's irrelevant atm. So the thing is, I think I may have hinted at this a little... too much. Firstly, during early in the story, the MC's acquaintance, who discovered her secret a few days beforehand, manages to deduct (as an observer of her fights) that much of the damage she inflicts on the spirit, is also inflicted to her in similar places. There is no reason to believe anything here, but it might give the impression that something of the sorts is going on. Secondly is at the mid-point of the story when her soul is being torn right out of her body by a dragon, who wants to consume her life force (referred to as Aether in the story) to gather energy for his own goals. She watches her lifeless body drift farther apart as her (the soul) is taken away, until her own presumably empty body suddenly comes alive and rescues her, right after confronting her with accusations of self-neglect and self-dishonesty since she basically went ballistic fighting the dragon purely for egoistical reasons with no regards for herself and others. If you are curious as to why she rescues her, that's a bit complicated, and irrelevant to my question so just ignore it. It doesn't link the spirit with her other self in anyway, but I don't know, I feel as if this is a bit too much foreshadowing, even if I had waaaayyyyy too much fun shocking my character with her own empty shell of a body suddenly coming to life. Any opinions?
Interesting topic. I caught myself doing the same thing and ended up backing a bunch of stuff out. Now I wonder if I backed out too much. I guess the editor will have to tell me if I'm blessed to get that far in the publishing process.
We earn readers' attention with our characters and plots. If they're not already our fans our big concept won't matter to them until the end A girl who fights a spirit on the night of the full moon - that might be a good start, don't get me wrong. But to answer if there is too much foreshadowing, we need the character arc to be set out clearer. I'll try and rearrange from the OP's post:- ===== MC secretly fights a spirit on the night of the full moon [hmm... don't they all?] Her supporter/friend-type character discovers the secret and reveals MC is hurting herself in the process [...] A second antagonist starts killing the MC She wins anyway (during an out-of-body experience) and chastises herself for various things [...] ===== I might have missed things in a hurry, it's just a method of highlighting how any loose ends appear to other forum users - loose ends make it harder to offer useful advice. Also, something to consider: it might not be foreshadowing? We're taught in school to recognize that technique - in the UK around ages 14-16. But it's quite difficult to execute. What's more common is that while we're working out what story we want to tell, our minds repeat patterns within the story structure. This is pernicious and has to be edited out for all sorts of reasons, e.g.:- - repetitions of similar characters become confusing to the reader - the reader feels deja vu - it multiplies the word count without advancing the theme (i.e. until the ideal structure emerges) Not enough of the story arc is described in the post for me to flag it as a criticism, but the approach is to ask "does this story really need a dragon if it's got a full moon ninja silhouette lady?" I watched the Coraline cartoon yesterday (not read the book) and even though it's Neil Gaiman that has a whole superfluous extra ending that pushes all the same buttons twice
Opinions? I always have opinions. One thing that leapt out at me was her friend making the connection. Better the bruise is noticed a time after the fight, when earlier in the narrative the heroine dealt a particular nasty blow to her subconscious avatar in that same spot. That's what people prefer: drop clues, let them form hypotheses, even throw in a few red herrings for fun. They will want to read on to see if they're correct, and it's most satisfying when they are but had to work for it. The second scene you mentioned could also be subtler. Sue me, but from this vantage point it seems more indulgent than anything—the author eager to point out carefully planned character flaws via reprimand. Her soulless body could still unexpectedly animate, but not say anything at all, leaving her only to speculate on what happened. Perhaps she saw a hint of intelligence in her body's eyes for just a moment, but so briefly that she's not sure if she just imagined it.
You're actually spot on. He spots it after they recuperate from the fight inside an empty apartment, where he notices the major injuries. That's a good idea actually, there might be ways to make it subtler. I was definitely really excited about the scene so I'll have to think it through with more logic and less emotion. It's her acquaintance who practically comes out of nowhere and insists on helping her. He is unreasonably persistent, but there is a reason for that, in that he is actually a manifestation of her desire to receive help with the insanity of her situation. But he isn't just any random person, he is actually a grown-up version of a boy who died during early in her childhood, but forgot due to memory loss from a meningitis infection which she, again, subconsciously manifested to forget. She is a pretty lonely genius who spends her days working/studying after that, and that's a major point of her development, her discovering that being with others isn't just negatives. She doesn't win, the other side of herself simply helps her escape the dragon because they've got no chance of winning. The overly simplified reason behind giving her help instead of abandoning her is how they can't exist without each other since they are essentially just two sides of one thing. There's more to that conceptually tho. The dragon is an antagonist at first, definitely, but he reforms and becomes a key aspect to defeat the master mind (the primary antagonist of the story) who hides in the shadows and pulls the strings to enable all this conflict, including the MC's battles with herself. The master mind is the Greek Goddess Eris, by the way, and what she is essentially doing is dramatizing the MC's life to unnatural lengths as part of her experiment to take her abilities to the next level. After all, she's seeded discord between others, but she hasn't made strife with one's own-self. So, how does he help to defeat her in the end? In the first place, the dragon is a soul of a deceased human who Eris enraged by manipulation. He goes around town killing "greedy business-people" out of personal spite, which is what the MC tries to stop. He's got his own conflict which the MC helps to solve, and as part of atonement, he gives up most of his life-force to revive the one's he killed. As a result, his existence is shrank down to a katana the MC wields thereafter. He literally becomes a sword. In the first place, the MC is manifesting parts of herself as individual entities out in the materialized world because she subconsciously taps into the ample amount of Aether (life-force) which Eris gave her as part of her plan. When in the end that's taken away, right along with her powers, her sword isn't affected as it isn't something she manifested. She stabs Eris with it, and the sword shatters her soul from deep inside, since it still technically possesses human consciousness. I haven't actually written the ending yet but I plan it to be something along those lines. So yes, the story is more than a "Girl Versus Herself" kind of situation. It's pretty complicated much like my first book (I'm the 350k sci-fi idiot if you remember) which is why I avoided making the post too lengthy by keeping it down to the bare minimum. In my mind, I set out what I was foreshadowing, and when I foreshadowed it, but I guess that wasn't enough. I tried to amend some details as briefly as I could to avoid a lengthy response. For my next project, I'm definitely not making something this complicated. I imagine you'll say that I could, in fact, have just kept it a "Girl Versus Herself" story without coming up with complicated concepts and masterminds to add more backbone to the whole thing (That's not always necessary, I think). There is honestly a lot I haven't covered here, including the spirit concepts that enables much of the mechanics. But I'll finish this anyway, since I like what I've done so far.
