Foreshadowing in online serials

Predicting the future

As I close in on the finale of my weekly serial Tales from the Triverse, I’m thinking a lot about foreshadowing.

I publish my serials as I write them, week-by-week, which makes setting things up for the future uniquely challenging. I don’t have the luxury of going back and editing a finished manuscript before anyone sees it.

This Notes exchange with

Emily Woodhouse

back in August made me focus in on the process of foreshadowing and setups in online serials:

How do you make sure Chekhov’s gun gets a mention in act 1, which you’re already publishing, if you haven’t yet written acts 2 or 3, and perhaps don’t even know what’s going to happen in them?

The sensible thing is to not write an online serial that you’re publishing as you go, but that horse bolted a long time ago. I adore writing in this form, and publishing in this way — and I’m meeting more and more of you who feel the same. So what techniques can we employ to make sure our stories have coherent resonance from start to finish?

First up, let’s rewind a bit.

Why foreshadowing is good for stories

Fiction is a collection of made-up things. Characters, plots, settings. Even if you’re writing a story set in the modern day, it’s still a fabrication. Given that it’s all emerging from your imagination, what’s wrong with simply making it up as you go?

It’s the difference between a satisfying tale that has a through-line of some sort, and a sequence of random events.

If you get a 6 year old to make up a story, it’ll be a slightly mad arrangement of “this happens, then this, then this, and this, and then this, and this…”, each new thing tacked onto the end of the last. That’s how we all start, I think, as storytellers.

It’s a fun thing to do, spinning silly stories that have no deeper meaning but which can still be very amusing on their own terms: you can get these amazing Storycube dice to help with that kind of on-the-fly mash-up.

Roll a dice, get an image prompt, carry on with the story. It’s very difficult to build themes into this mode of storytelling. Even harder still to have something at the beginning resonate with something at the end. Extremely gifted oral storytellers can do this, of course — people who can tell a captivating story around a campfire, or run a tabletop roleplaying game that becomes more than the sum of its individual events.

Longer-form stories usually require a bit more structure. A reader or viewer or listener wants the overall story to feel like a coherent piece. There has to be a reason to read an entire novel, or watch an entire TV series from start to finish, because they’re big time investments. That means the story has to have a spine of sorts, holding it all together, upon which everything is built.

Hence the Chekhov’s gun thing, whereby every story element is continually contributing to the whole. If a gun is introduced in act 1, as the audience we know that it’s going to be important later in the story. It is dissatisfying if it doesn’t become relevant. Similarly, if a gun is not introduced in act 1, but suddenly plays a pivotal role in act 3, it can feel like a cheat.

As with all rules, this one can be bent and broken. You can play with audience expectations precisely because of these expectations.

The ‘gun’ is an overly dramatic example, but the concept applies to everything in the story. You don’t usually want to get the sense that the writer is just making random things up on the spot. For a story to have any kind of verisimilitude, all the pieces have to slot together like a puzzle. Done right, the audience won’t consciously notice: it’ll simply feel satisfying.

‘Foreshadowing’, then, is the deliberate placing of characters, props, plot points, themes and so on, at points in a story ahead of when they will become overtly relevant.

By design, this requires the writer to know what’s coming up later in the story.

How sensible people do foreshadowing

Normal people write their entire manuscripts first, then go through several rounds of editing and rewrites, and only after that process does anyone get to read the thing.

This makes foreshadowing nice and easy. Once the complete manuscript exists, it can be assessed in its entirety. The text can be manipulated to ensure that critical points are seeded ahead of time. Important elements can be threaded back through, even if the writer didn’t include them in the first draft. It’s a luxurious way of writing, whereby everything can be perfectly balanced, character arcs are precisely timed, themes and subtext is laced throughout, and pacing is exquisitely handled.

I’m entirely useless at writing this way.

It’s not about writing skill¹, but about productivity. My brain rebels against the idea of working on projects in private. If nobody is there to see it, I can all too easily abandon a project in favour of something new and shiny. Drifting away from a project is something that happened to me repeatedly in my 20s.

Once I switched to writing serial fiction, and publishing as I was writing, it flicked a switch in my brain and I haven’t stopped since. I’ve written three novel-sized stories and am in the back half of my fourth. Knowing that there are readers out there already — even just one person — is enough to keep me coming back to the page.

The complexities of writing a live serial

There are many ways of doing serial fiction. Many people still write the whole thing ahead of time, finesse it, and only start publishing once it’s 100% ready to go. As I just noted, that doesn’t work for my brain. Others find a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, with a buffer of several weeks or months. I tend to publish as I go.

Anyone that isn’t writing the whole text up front is going to run into the issue of foreshadowing. Character arcs are difficult to plan and execute. Plot points need to be embedded early so they can resonate later, but you won’t necessarily know what all of those are at the start of the project.

Novels don’t offer much practical help. They can be representative of what a serial aspires to be, but the process is so different that they’re almost functioning as different mediums (unless you’re writing your entire manuscript up front, as noted).

I tend to look to television for inspiration. My go-to example is 90s science fiction show Babylon 5, but any TV show with a long-running plot over multiple seasons will do the job. A television show’s first season will be produced and broadcast before subsequent seasons are even written. Back in the network days of 22-episode seasons, the show might start airing while the season was still in production.

You can see how it correlates much more with the experience of writing serial fiction and publishing it online.

To go back to Babylon 5, it achieved some remarkable things with its foreshadowing and long-term planning. Bearing in mind that science fiction shows rarely got past a single season back then, B5 seeded a huge amount of plot points and character moments in its first season — its first episode, even — which wouldn’t pay off until the second or third season. Sometimes you’d be aware of it, with new information presented as a mystery. Other times it would be a seemingly innocuous background detail that would later turn out to be of vital importance.

Point is, it makes a story feel deep and important, and like everything matters. You have to pay attention. It’s rewarding when a detail you remember from earlier becomes relevant later on. This sort of storytelling happens all the time in novels and movies, because they are singular creations that are fully formed at the point of release. It’s less common in television, and therefore more remarkable when it works.

Writers of online fiction, whether you’re publishing on your own newsletter, or on Wattpad or Tapas or elsewhere, face the same challenges and opportunities. An online serial can last for weeks, months or even years, with readers coming along for the ride. If you are able to reward their attention and patience with a resonant story, they’ll love you for it.

How to actually do it, then?

It’s a magic trick

My understanding of magic (by which I mean illusions: real life stuff) is that it relies a lot on sleight of hand and distraction. You’re looking in one direction while something clever happens over there, and the end result feels like something impossible just happened.

Writing an online serial often feels like this to me.

Photo by Liza Pooor on Unsplash

I do quite a bit of planning for my serials. Knowing where my story is going is vital, even if I change the route along the way. If better ideas present themselves during the writing, I’ll happily alter the plan. But I’m never directionless.

It doesn’t matter how much planning I do, though, because a lot of writing is about discovering. The details only come out as you get to them.

Tales from the Triverse is a story which I think hangs together fairly convincingly. It doesn’t feel like it’s made up on the spot, and there are elements from the earliest chapters in 2021 which are now paying off in late-2024. For readers that is hopefully highly satisfying: it feels like the time they’ve dedicated to reading the thing is being rewarded and respected.

Back in October 2021 I didn’t really know what I’d be writing in November 2024, so how come a supporting character from back then is now more relevant than ever? How is it that a monster first mentioned as an aside in December 2023 is now the title of a major storyline?

Part of it is simply planning ahead. But that makes me sounds more clever than I am. It’s not like I had a perfect vision of the entire four-year story in the shower one day, fully-formed and ready to go.

That’s where the magic trick part come in, and where Emily’s quote from Neil Gaiman becomes relevant. Gaiman talked about writing comics and how you sometimes have to throw a ball in the air so that you can catch it months later. That’s absolutely true, but that still sounds a bit too neat and tidy.

For me, it’s about throwing multiple balls into the air. It’s an entire juggling act, with new balls being chucked into the air every week. The magic trick part is that readers won’t always notice how many balls are being thrown.

They also won’t notice how many are dropped.

Of all the balls tossed into the possibility space, I’ll only catch some of them. The ones that end up being really important, and resonant, and fit the story being told, as it’s evolved over time.

The idea is that the reader notices the balls that have been caught, and thinks ‘wow, that was a really clever bit of foreshadowing!’, or ‘I can’t believe the writer planned all of this ahead of time!’

Meanwhile, there are discarded balls rolling around on the floor, but nobody notices them. The writer is the magician, making sure that the audience is looking where they want them to look.

Sometimes I’ll have an inkling that I might want a specific type of character somewhere down the line. Perhaps I have a vague sense that I want an epic showdown between elemental forces towards the end of the book. Maybe I think I’ll probably want a monster to show up a year or two down the line. And so I’ll throw some balls in the air, really high, and I’ll forget about them for a while, until it comes time to catch the important ones.

The others I simply let drop.

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Actual photograph of a writer of serial fiction.

Thanks for reading!

Hope that was of interest, and hopefully useful to anyone else having a go at writing serial fiction. Especially if you’re doing it on the fly, like me.

I should note that I don’t necessarily recommend this as the optimum way to write a long-form story. If you’re able to create the entire manuscript up front and run through multiple edits and re-writes, that’ll likely produce a more polished piece of work. But there’s undeniably something thrilling about a serial taking form in front of your eyes, knowing that the creators are solving problems and conjuring the story into being while you’re watching.

Meanwhile, some things I’ve been enjoying:

• The Origin Story podcast from

  Ian Dunt
  and Dorian Lynskey is consistently brilliant, and their two-parter on AI has been especially fascinating. Highly recommended listening.

• I found this article on personification in writing fascinating, and ended up going down a rabbit hole of my own work. I’m not one for hard-and-fast rules in writing, but it is always useful to have our habits pointed out, if for no other reason than to help us be conscious of what we’re doing (or not doing).

• T K Hall
  ’s articles are always worth reading, being some of the most honest and unvarnished accounts of being a writer. There are a lot of brutal truths in there, but always presented in a hopeful and useful manner. ‘When to admit defeat’ is precisely that, and makes me want to dig further into how we decide which projects to work on, and which to discard or delay. Any projects is a major commitment of time, and none of us have very much of that.

• Ted Gioia
  has his finger on the pulse so often that he’s starting to restrict blood flow, never more obvious than in this piece reposted from 2022 that seems to have entirely predicted events of 2024.

Right, that’s it from me today. Have a good week, everyone!

1. That’s a whole other problem.