I just saw the word prolepsis in a book review, and it made me think. Narrowly defined, it means stating a thing as true before it actually is (“dead man walking” would be a classic example), but more generally it refers to foreshadowing.
You know, like reading a novel that starts “It was the summer that changed my life.”
This struck me, because I never do this, which was certainly not a conscious decision.
Also, I just did do it in what I posted a few minutes ago. So, encountering this word made me think.
One way of looking at it is that I shouldn’t do it, because I don’t do it — that’s done by writers who are different types of writers than me. This is obviously not a valid basis to make any artistic decisions.
(As always, I take inspiration from Robert Altman, who spent the last chunk of his career in movies deciding which projects to film based on, “Well, I’ve never done that before.”)
And I think the foreshadowing fits here, because this is the first thing I’ve written in decades where the narrator isn’t Marshall or third-person me. And Mike, the narrator, worries very much about the future, and he would tell the story that way.
Or possibly it’s just because I wanted to juice things up a bit, to reassure readers that the torturing of the characters (so often recommended these days by web-based fiction experts) will soon begin.
The story started here. The torturing is coming soon.
My 8th graders are starting story writing soon. I can’t wait to use the word prolepsis on them. 🙂
I use foreshadowing (or the broader sense of prolepsis, if you prefer) sometimes, but I try not to use it too much. A little bit of it goes a long way.
There’s also analepsis (flashbacks). I use those sometimes though when one of my stories goes into the past, it tends to stay there for a while. Maybe I learned that from Dark Shadows, which sometimes spent months and months in the 19th century.