User blog comment:Sprinklemist/Writer's Workshop: Characters/@comment-1874924-20100425021755

The ground rules for noncompetition stories are a little different than for competition fics, but I would expand on Sprink's treatise on the value of subtlety.

Subtlety tends to go hand in glove with the literary device of foreshadowing. For those who don't know the term, foreshadowing means hinting at what's going to happen before it happens. Foreshadowing works best when subtle, and can be unsatisfying if it's too blatant, because its purpose is to give the reader the satisfaction of "figuring it out" for himself.

The earliest TDI episodes have examples of what I thought was heavy-handed foreshadowing, telegraphing the imminent departures of Ezekiel and Eva. I realize that the heavy hand may have been necessary in those cases, because we didn't really know the characters yet; but I still found it unsatisfying.

Foreshadowing tends to deal more with story development than with character development, but it may affect character development as well, hence its relevance to this Workshop.

SPOILER ALERT:' Those who haven't read my short story,’’ Legacy, ‘’may wish to skip the rest of this post until they have read the story.

In my own story, Legacy, Heather has matured as well as aged in the years since the competition ended. I state this more or less explicitly at first, as part of the process of showing the changes that time has wrought, but I reinforce it more subtly at various points later in the story. I do this because the story's dramatic climax would seem random at best, and implausible at worst, without that maturity.

Likewise, in the flashbacks to the night and aftermath of Gwen's death, I give several indications that Heather isn't really the soulless sociopath she pretends to be. I then detour to a "where are they now" chapter, letting these hints percolate in the back of the reader’s mind, before dropping the other shoe: Heather's maturity, and the fact that she really does have a heart, have set the stage for Heather's gesture of remembrance, which is the story's dramatic climax.

I use foreshadowing in other ways as well; but they are matters of story development rather than character development, and so are beyond the scope of this Workshop.