Foreshadowing

If a man is going to shoot someone in Act III, he must acquire a gun in Act I.

You’ve probably heard that, or something similar to it, before. It’s an old maxim that explains foreshadowing. Things cannot happen in a story just because you want them to, or need them to. If Mary is going to shoot her husband, she cannot just pull a gun from her purse at the necessary moment. The reader needs to know where that gun came from and how it got in her purse. Events must spring logically from events that have come before them. And it’s your job as a writer to set up those events by preparing the reader now for things that will come later.

There are several types of foreshadowing.

Blatant: Here, you’re telling the reader straight out what your character will be doing in the future.

Her mind was made up. She would kill her husband tomorrow.

Implied: This makes clear what will happen in the future without coming right out and saying it. It implies an event through action or dialogue, but is still pretty obvious to the reader.

She picked up the photograph of her husband, and with marker in hand, drew a fat, black X through his face.

Subtle: This is less obvious. It’s slipped into the background carefully so that it’s barely noticed.

She hurried down the street to the bar where she’d have to pry her husband from a sticky bar stool yet again. She passed several strip clubs advertising Girls! Girls! Girls! and a pawn shop window filled with the belongings of others - rings, watches, a tv and pistol, two guitars. And then there were the porn shops . . . .

You can also work foreshadowing into your manuscript in several different ways.

Through Dialogue:

"It’s going to be a tough game tonight. Do you think we’ll win?" Kevin asked.
"Of course we will," Tom said. "Jack’s back from visiting his Grandmother. We can’t lose with him on the team."

"Who are you asking to the dance?" Jake asked.
"I’m gonna ask Sue," Tom said.
Jake shook his head. "Bob already asked her. She’s going with him."
Tom smiled. "I think Bob’s going to be disappointed."

Through Flashback:

Let’s say your character has to swim out into the ocean to save someone from drowning. At some point before this event, you can add in a flashback to his days as a Navy Seal or swim coach to establish that he has the capabilities to swim the distance and rescue the drowning man. But don’t just use the flashback to establish he can swim. Make it do double duty. Perhaps we learn in the flashback that he once failed to save someone else from drowning, which is why he drinks now. Then when he swims out to save the drowning man, there will be no guarantee that he will succeed. You create tension and suspense.

Through Description:

You can use description to foreshadow an event that will happen in the same scene instead of a later one. Leonard Bishop, in Dare to be a Great Writer, compares it to the background music in a movie. If you’re just listening to a movie instead of watching it, you can still tell when something’s going to happen because of the change in the background music. In writing, instead of changing the music, you change the writing. Slowing it down and dwelling on the description will tip off readers to pay attention. Something is going to happen.

Mary slid out of the car with her groceries and headed for the house. She slipped her key in the lock and turned it. She stiffened. It was already unlocked. Had she forgotten to lock it?

She opened the door slowly and stepped inside. The curtains were closed and the room was gray and filled with shadows. She crept silently across the carpet and set her bag of groceries on the couch, listening for the slightest sound. Everything looked the way she had left it. Her purple sweats hung over the back of the sofa, an empty coffee cup sat on the coffee table beside the jigsaw puzzle she had been working on. She stepped carefully toward the kitchen and suddenly stopped. Looked back. The puzzle! There had been two pieces missing in the sky. Now there was only one.

And, of course, you would have set up this scene by foreshadowing it earlier before Mary ever went shopping. You would have shown her working on the puzzle, searching through the box for those two pieces of missing sky.

If you use it wisely, one bit of foreshadowing will lead to another, which will lead to another, which will do more than set up a future event. If done well, it creates a thread that strings your novel together, that creates tension and suspense, and that advances your plot. It might even foreshadow a book sale.

Poetry Friday: Memory

Another forgotten poem by New Hampshire's Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

My mind lets go a thousand things,

Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,

And yet recalls the very hour--

'T was noon by yonder village tower,

And on the last blue noon in May--

The wind came briskly up this way,

Crisping the brook beside the road;

Then, pausing here, set down its load

Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly

Two petals from that wild-rose tree.

And really, which memory is more valuable?

Poetry Friday is being hosted this week at Check it Out!

Women of Wednesday: Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala Sha)

Today is the birthday of Zitkala Sha, born Gertrude Simmons. Born in 1876 on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota, she was the daughter of a Sioux woman who was abandoned by her white husband. Simmons was the name of her mother’s second husband.

Gertrude’s mother distrusted the missionary schools but Gertrude was a bright girl who insisted on getting the best education she could. She attended a Quaker school off-reservation as a child and then, after trying the local normal school (teacher’s college) and finding it too limited, she earned a scholarship to Earlham College in Indiana. She was a talented violinist and won a scholarship to the Boston Conservatory of Music. 

In 1899, Gertrude was hired to teach music at the Carlisle Indian School. This set the stage for her life’s crusade. The forced “civilization” of Indian children at the Carlisle school (and others that followed its model) has been well-documented. Gertrude worked simultaneously to give her students  the best education she could (her school band won a trip to the Paris Exposition in 1900) while writing articles under her Sioux pen name which decried the treatment of the students in the Indian school.

Her writing eventually cost her the teaching position, but she obtained a contract from the Ginn Publishing company in Boston to record and compile Sioux legends. Back on the reservation she met a young Lakota artist, Angel de Cora. Angel illustrated Zitkala Sha’s book, and with Zitkala Sha’s encouragement, also wrote and published a number of her own stories.

Zitkala Sha married a Lakota man, Raymond Bonnin, in 1902 and had a son in 1903. Her husband worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the family was frequently relocated. She continued to write and kept up with her music – in 1913 while living in Utah she collaborated on an opera.

Zitkala Sha opposed many BIA policies and encouraged Indians to work together across tribal lines, rather than dissipating their political strength in fighting about tribal identities and prerogatives. Her activism cost her husband his position, and together they moved to Washington DC and became activists for Native rights and women’s suffrage . Zitkala Sha wrote and edited for numerous publications. Her book Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft, Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery (published over the names of two white men) contributed to the political shift that eventually resulted in the Indian Reorganization Act – a law that prevented continued selling-off of Indian lands (which had suddenly become valuable for the oil underneath them). Late 20^th-century Native sovereignty movements can be directly traced to her work. In 1926 she co-founded the National Council of American Indians and was president of that organization until her death in 1938. The Council was based on her desire to see all Native American working together: a major focus of the group during her lifetime was the campaign for voting rights for Indians, which many states denied until the 1950s.

Gertrude wrote that music was her first love, but she felt the obligation to work for the rights of American Indians was more important. It is good to know that she had the chance to see her opera, The Sun Dance, performed on Broadway in 1938, shortly before she died.

Raymond Bonnin had been a Captain in the United States Army and so Raymond and Gertrude are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Mentor Monday: Revising, Part 3

Finally: Proofreading!

At long last, we arrive at the polishing point in our editing process. You will have picked up many, many copy-type errors in the previous rounds of editing. Still it is important to take this final step, the once-over, just for typos and such scouring. Sadly, an over-looked spelling error will leap off the page and display itself in bright bold print to the first reader, planting doubt about your professionalism and, perhaps, your scholarship.

Now my first suggestion is also a confession. My very best tip for proofreading is my husband. My husband is not a writer, his knowledge of English grammar is negligible, and he is unfamiliar with most of the subjects I’ve written about. BUT – he is an eagle-eyed reader, picking up everything from the extra comma to the awkward phrase to the misspelled county. As an added advantage, he cares about my success, and he’s available at odd hours of the evening when I’m likely to be needing a proofreader. Unfortunately for you, he’s not taking new clients. But I would recommend finding a personal proofreader (PPR), if you can. And I would recommend NOT using that person to read interim drafts of your work. Part of what makes my husband’s review effective is that he is coming to the material completely raw. He has no previous phrases in his head which might gloss over the actual text on the page. And he’ll notice an awkward or confusing statement that I’ve missed, precisely because he doesn’t know what the piece is about.

Even before you pass off your manuscript to the PPR, or in those inevitable crisis moments when the PPR is in Tanzania when you’re on deadline, there are some other proofreading tips and tricks you can manage on your own.

Give your manuscript the gifts of Time, Paper, Space and Sound. Each will help hone the final copy.

1. Time: Never try to do a final proofread on a manuscript you’ve been working on for hours. You need fresh eyes. It’s best to wait at least a day; at minimum, take a walk or a coffee break.
2. Paper: Working on the computer gives us a wonderful freedom in the editing process, but ultimately your work is going to be read on paper. Read it on paper at least once before you send it off.
3. Space: Take the paper copy and read it in different place than you wrote it. This heightens your attention to detail.
4. Sound: I’ve recommended reading aloud before. Several proofreading tricks are much more effective when you are listening as well as looking at your words. And turn off the background noises when you’re proofreading. You need to concentrate!

First of all, check for your personal demons. We all have them – the words we’ve been spelling incorrectly since the third grade. Do a “find all” for your most-common misspellings. (I almost never recommend doing a global find-and-replace. Most word-processors will replace the target sequence wherever it appears, including in the middle of other words. So if you change your character’s dress color from “red” to “blue” and do a global find-and-replace, you’ll find that a number of unexpected substitutions have occurblue. (In fact, if you have done a global F&R on the manuscript, you should add those kinds of mistakes to your proof-reading checklist.)

The one global F&R I would recommend is for the double-space-after-a-period. If you learned to type back when we called it typing, you were taught to double space after the end of a sentence, and your fingers probably still do that. This is no longer standard. Since punctuation marks are not typically part of standard spelling, you can safely run “replace all” for the double space after a period, a question mark and an exclamation point.

Other things to look for with the “find” function:

1.  Any detail that you changed from one version of the piece to another (nicknames, for example).
2.  Auto-correct errors, especially names and acronyms changed to common words
3. Homonyms: Spell-checkers will not flag you for using the wrong version of there/their/they’re or to/too/two. And while you’re at it, pay particular attention to its/it’s. (Remember, if you could substitute “his” for “its,” it does NOT need an apostrophe.)
4.  Stylistic choices: Some words are always compound words, some are always hyphenated, but in many cases these are style choices. You want to be sure you have followed your publisher’s guidelines, if you have them. If not, default to the AP Stylebook. But check! Even if both proofread and proof-read are acceptable, using them interchangeably within your manuscript is not.

Turn on the “show/hide” option and look for random carriage returns and any other unexpected formatting marks.

Now – print out the manuscript! It is difficult if not impossible to do a really effective proofreading job on a screen. For some reason, errors “pop” on paper.

Now is when you can try this often-suggested trick: Read the manuscript backwards, which forces you to think about each word individually.

Things to look for:

1. Random capital letters.
2. Doubled letters (which can easily become tripled). Also – is it REALLY a double letter? (Hopefully your spell-check will have picked those up, but watch for them anyway.)
3. Transposed letters, especially if the scrambled version is also a correctly-spelled word. (Most of us have one or two words we frequently transpose: add them to your list of things you search for with the “find” function.)
4. Commonly confused words: Accept/except, effect/affect, lay/lie. Backward and backwards do not mean the same thing. Neither do beside and besides. Toward and towards, however, are interchangeable.
5. Consistency with hyphens, compound words, serial commas, line spacing and indentations. Again, follow publisher’s guidelines or the AP Stylebook. Double-check the spelling of every name. If you find an error in a word you’ve used more than once, make a note to do a “find” for the incorrect form when you go back to the computer to make sure you’ve caught them all.
6. British/American spelling: if you read a lot of material published in the UK or Canada, you may find yourself using perfectly good spellings that your editor will consider wrong! If there are words you use frequently for which this is an issue (judgement/judgment), add them to your F&R list.

Finally, double-check every number: dates, prices, addresses. Numbers are so easy to type incorrectly, and no mechanical checker will find your errors! Also check any instance of million/billion/trillion.

Go back to the computer, fix the errors you found on paper, and you’re ready to SEND!

Some helpful websites:

General proofreading tips:

http://www.lrcom.com/tips/proofreading_editing.htm

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/8-proofreading-tips-and-techniques/

http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/the-readers-lament/

There are a number of lists of commonly confused words on the internet. Here’s one good one: http://homepage.smc.edu/reading_lab/words_commonly_confused.htm

British/American spelling comparison:

http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/british-and-american-spelling

I highly recommend owning the AP Stylebook (and getting an updated version every few years) but in the meanwhile, the ever-helpful Purdue Writing Lab has a quick-check online: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/735/02/

Poetry Friday: The Fawn

        
Sunday morning and mellow as precious metal
The church bells rang, but I went
To the woods instead.

A fawn, too new
For fear, rose from the grass
And stood with its spots blazing,
And knowing no way but words,
No trick but music,
I sang to him.

He listened.
His small hooves struck the grass.
Oh what is holiness?

The fawn came closer,
Walked to my hands, to my knees.

I did not touch him.
I only sang, and when the doe came back
Calling out to him dolefully
And he turned and followed her into the trees,
Still I sang,
Not knowing how to end such a joyful text,

Until far off the bells once more tipped and tumbled
And rang through the morning, announcing
The going forth of the blessed.

                    -- Mary Oliver from Twelve Moons

Gathering Books is hosting today, and it's worth a looksee!