Editing Foreshadowing (section)

==Related concepts==
Foreshadowing is often confused with other literary devices.

A [[red herring (plot device)|red herring]] is a hint designed to mislead the audience. Foreshadowing only hints at a possible outcome within the confinement of a narrative and leads readers in the right direction. 

A [[flashforward]] is a scene that takes the [[narrative]] forward in time from the current point of the story in [[literature]], [[film]], [[television]], or other media.<ref>{{cite book|author1=Ulrike Spierling|author2=Nicolas Szilas|title=Interactive Storytelling: First Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2008 Erfurt, Germany, November 26-29, 2008, Proceedings|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vIkhA9zuvSUC&pg=PA156|date=3 December 2008|publisher=Springer|isbn=978-3-540-89424-7|page=156}}</ref><ref>[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/flash-forward flash-forward - definition of flash-forward by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref> Foreshadowing is sometimes employed through characters' explicitly predicting the future.<ref>Philip Martin, ''The Writer's Guide to Fantasy Literature: From Dragon's Lair to Hero's Quest'', p 146, {{ISBN|0-87116-195-8}}</ref> Flashforwards have scenes shown out of chronological order in a [[nonlinear narrative]], with chronology in an [[anachronism#Art and literature|anachronist order]], such as to make the reader or the audience think about the climax or [[reveal (narrative)|reveals]].

[[Chekhov's gun]] dictates that everything superfluous must be deleted. In relation to foreshadowing, the literary critic Gary Morson describes its opposite, '''sideshadowing'''.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Morson|first1=Gary Saul|title=Sideshadowing and Tempics|journal=New Literary History|date=Autumn 1998|volume=29|issue=4|pages=599–624|doi=10.1353/nlh.1998.0043 |jstor=20057502|s2cid=145159406 }}</ref> Found notably in the epic novels of [[Leo Tolstoy]] and [[Fyodor Dostoevsky]], sideshadowing is the practice of including scenes that turn out to have no relevance to the plot. That, according to Morson, increases the verisimilitude of the fiction because the audience knows that in real life, unlike in novels, most events are in fact inconsequential. The "sense of structurelessness" invites the audience to "interpret and question the events that actually do come to pass."<ref>{{cite news|last1=Calixto|first1=Joshua|title=LET'S TALK ABOUT ROSA VAR ATTRE, THE IMPOSSIBLE ROMANCE OF THE WITCHER 3|url=http://killscreendaily.com/articles/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-attre-impossible-romance-witcher-3/|access-date=3 August 2015|work=[[Kill Screen]]|date=3 August 2015}}</ref>