A couple of months ago, I took my children to see the new Lego Ninjago movie at the cinema. For those people unfamiliar with the movie (like, perhaps, most people who don’t have a child under the age of 12), the plot revolves around five trainee-ninja teenagers who must learn the ways of Spinjitsu and defeat the evil Lord Garmadon. The movie opens with our heroes foiling Lord Garmadon’s attack against the city of Ninjago by piloting giant elemental-themed mechs.
There’s action and adventure and ninjas—the trifecta for my sons—and all was going well. Then, just as they easily win the battle, one of the heroes exclaims, “As long as we have these mechs, we’re unstoppable!”
It was at that moment that my ten-year-old son leaned over to me and said, “That means they’re going to lose their mechs, and have to beat Garmadon without them.”
What I said was, “Let’s keep watching and see.”
What I thought was, “Yep. We may as well leave now. We already know how the story will play out. That’s the most heavy-handed foreshadowing I’ve ever seen.”
[SPOILER ALERT: The heroes lose their mechs, and have to beat Garmadon without them.]
Later that night, I was watching some particularly good stand-up comedy. As the set drew to a close, and I was laughing much more loudly than I probably should have been while my children were asleep in the next room, I found myself thinking about the art of the callback. That, in turn, led me to wonder about the relationship between foreshadowing and call-backs.
Are they related?
One sets up future events, and the other references past events, sure. But does that mean they’re linked?
Fair Warning
This is the third time I’ve tried to write on this topic. Each of the last two months, I got about 500 words into an article, and then realised that I had no idea what I was talking about. Or, rather, that I couldn’t get my thoughts to line themselves up in any kind of coherent order.
I’m still not sure I’ve got it all worked out in my head, but I’d love to hear what other people have to say on the topic. Consider this a conversation-starter, rather than any kind of definitive statement on the topic.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing as a literary or narrative technique is defined as dialogue, action, or an event that:
- sets the stage for a story to unfold and gives the reader a hint of something that’s going to happen without revealing the story or spoiling the suspense.
- prepares your readers on a sub-conscious level for what’s coming, without allowing them to guess the ins and outs of the plot twist.
- creates suspense, builds anticipation, or hints at what will come later.
In other words, it’s when we hint at future events—preferably in a more subtle way than happened in my example above!
Foreshadowing, then, is primarily related to plot. We can use mood, descriptions, dialogue, etc as our means of foreshadowing, but the purpose is to build anticipation—or pose questions—about plot events. When foreshadowing is done well, we don’t even notice it until the future event happens, and we think, “Oh! Of course! I knew that was going to happen!”
Foreshadowing starts what I like to call a Line of Eventuality. Once something has been foreshadowed, it must come to pass; the line must be completed. No matter what direction the plot heads in after the foreshadowing has been done, it must eventually return to the foreshadowed event.
Callbacks
When we think of callbacks, we generally think of comedy; stand-up comedy routines, or sitcoms, or sketch comedy, or whatever. But, as with most comedy techniques, they can be used in other types of writing as well, to great effect.
A callback is described as either a relevant reference to an event that takes place earlier in the narrative, or a way to tie the loose ends of a later, seemingly unrelated, joke into a previous joke. A callback, when used well, reminds the audience of a previous reference and not only elicits extra laughter from the new joke, but also increases the humour-value of the original.
And that, of course, is what callbacks are really all about—they remind the audience of a previous emotional reaction, and draw those past emotions into the present at a heightened level.
In order to be successful, a callback has to do three things:
- Immediately bring to mind a previous scene, event, or piece of dialogue.
- Recall the emotions from that previous moment—whether they be laughter, grief, excitement, fear, whatever.
- Reinforce the same emotion in the current scene.
A callback, then, isn’t a plot event, but an emotional one—a way to heighten emotional buy-in between present and past stories or scenes.
Foreshadowing vs Callbacks
Which leads me back to where I started. Are foreshadowing and callbacks merely description of the same technique from opposite sides?
If we look at it from start to finish, we see foreshadowing of a later event, but if we look at it from finish to start, we see a callback to a previous scene?
The more I think about it, the more I think the answer to that is no. But, the two techniques often overlap in interesting and unexpected ways.
Consider, if you will, what happens the moment you’re watching a Star Wars movie and you notice Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber sitting on a shelf. That simple image may be both foreshadowing and a callback.
- It’s foreshadowing the fact that Luke is going to make an appearance in the movie–if not now, then soon.
- It’s a callback to previous Star Wars movies, where Luke was the hero.
Seeing that lightsaber both sets the stage and increases anticipation for a future scene, and summons up all the emotional resonance of previous scenes (movies) where Luke has engendered an emotional response.
It can work on the other side of the Line of Eventuality, as well. Perhaps the event that was foreshadowed includes a callback to the original foreshadowing, and summons forth the emotional resonance of that scene.
But it’s also very possible that both foreshadowing and callbacks operate independently at different points in the story.
What does this mean for us?
Possibly nothing. It’s entirely possible that I’m over-thinking something that everyone else takes for granted.
But it occurs to me that while we, as writers, spend a lot of time making sure we include appropriate foreshadowing–that we use it to increase tension and create believable reasons for character to behave in certain ways–we don’t often think about the way we use callbacks.
We use them. Without a doubt.
But do we use them consciously? And do we use them in the best possible way?
I have no idea. But I’d love to know what you think.
Have you ever thought about callbacks in your writing? Do you think callbacks and foreshadowing are related?
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About Jo Eberhardt
Jo Eberhardt is a writer of speculative fiction, mother to two adorable boys, and lover of words and stories. She lives in rural Queensland, Australia, and spends her non-writing time worrying that the neighbor's cows will one day succeed in sneaking into her yard and eating everything in her veggie garden.
Nice piece, Jo. I can certainly relate to starting and abandoning essays like this one multiple times–I’ll probably do it with this response!
I think that, while they are related, they foreshadowing and callbacks are not the same. I like your distinction between them, that foreshadowing is related more to plot, and callbacks to emotion.; that seems to be a good way to distinguish them.
For me, I know I have tried to be more conscious of effectively using foreshadowing. The trick is to do it without being too obvious. As a writer, I’ve seen “behind the curtain,” so I watch and read and think like you and your son, guessing (though it often doesn’t take much guessing) at the “file that away for later” moments. Callbacks are also something I try to use, though I never thought of it that way. Though now I will!
Jo–Whatever your misgivings are about this post, I’m happy to read it. It gives me a new term. Foreshadowing I know, but the only way I ever heard “callback” used was in relation to actors called back for a second audition.
As you describe it, the device is an important one in the writer’s tool bag. I use it a lot in my current project: the central character’s own words keep coming back to haunt him. He wrote about others, and they shun him for it. Since passages taken from what he wrote figure in the story, you could say they are callbacks that also foreshadow.
Thanks again. You taught me a useful new term.
Thanks, Barry. A few people have mentioned that they’d not heard of callbacks before. It makes me wish I’d spent more time explaining what they are, and giving a better example. One of those classic cases where you forget that not everyone has had the same experiences you have.
I love that you could relate callbacks to your own work so quickly. Isn’t it great when you realise you’ve been doing something all along, and now you have a term for it?
Well done, Jo. Thank you for giving me a concrete way to think about foreshadowing and callbacks. I appreciate the way in which you make a clear distinction between the two. I find it very helpful.
Thanks, Nancy.
Thanks for posing these questions and offering your insights, Jo. I like to think of callbacks in terms of what happened in the past that informs the character’s developments and foreshadowing as tipping the reader off about future events. As Lisa Cron writes in her excellent book, Story Genius, the main character must start the story with a misbelief that will cause her to make decisions that prevent her from reaching her goal. The transformation process relates to the character discovering her misbelief and then making a change. The misbelief is directly related to events in her past that shaped who she is (back story). Foreshadowing is tricky in that it must be done with great subtlety and deftness. There’s nothing worse than an author foreshadowing something significant on page 50 and the reader knows exactly what’s coming. Thanks for sharing your insights with us, Jo.
One of the things I came up against when trying to write this post was whether I was just giving a new name to something that already had a name. In the end, I decided that (in my opinion) callbacks and misbeliefs are different things. I’ll lay out my reasoning, and you can see if you agree, or if I’ve miscalculated somewhere.
As you know, I’m a HUGE fan of Lisa Cron’s work. Learning about misbeliefs, and how they impact on the present, as well as how they shape the protagonist’s transformation in the story was a lifechanger for me. But…
The way I see it, a misbelief is still something that works in a forward direction.
Inagine that your story has scenes:
A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J … … … X – Y – Z
The misbelief was formed in scene C, and you start the story (ie. page one of the manuscript) in scene H. In scene X, the character overcomes her misbelief.
Now, all the things that happen before scene H obiously affect everything that happens after the story started — including the misbelief. However, those ripples work their way forward through the story. Although scenes can refer back to the misbelief through flashbacks, etc, they’re just telling the story in an out-of-order way. That is, it’s not so much a callback to a previous event as it is simply taking that previous event and moving it wholesale in the storytelling process.
eg. “I went to the store yesterday. It took me ages to find somewhere to park my car, and then I had to walk almost two kilometres to the supermarket. Keep in mind that I sprained my ankle last week, so I was in agony. By the time I got to the supermarket, I could barely stand up.”
In that (admittedly lame) story, mentioning that I sprained my ankle isn’t a callback — it’s simply bringing up backstory at a particular point in the narrative for greater effect. I could just as easily have toldthe story in chronological order and moved that “scene” to the beginning, ie. told you that I sprained my ankle first, and then talked about going to the supermarket.
A callback, though, is something that calls back to a previous thing that happened in the story as it’s told — not the chronological series of events.
A stand-up comic can’t do a callback to a joke that was told before the audience arrived — she can only call back to a joke that the audience heard earlier in the show. (Okay, technically the comic could call back to a joke from before the show, but chances are she wouldn’t be a stand-up comic for long.)
That’s not to say that something about the misbelief couldn’t possible ever be a callback — it can — but it can only be a callback to something that the reader (not the character) has already experienced, and had a reaction to.
If our stand-up comedian tells a joke at the beginning of their set and no one laughs, then doing a callback to that punchline at the end of their set isn’t going to elicit a positive response from the audience the second time around. But if the first time, they got a chuckle from the audience, the second time around they’re going to get a bigger laugh.
I think (or, I wonder?) the same goes for other emotions. Let’s say that in your third scene, you show a mother’s terror when her daughter gets kidnapped, and all she finds is one of the child’s pink shoes. The shoe is described in detail, and is found half-buried in the mud. You play up the symbolism and so forth. (Possibly even cleverly foreshadowing that the child will eventually be found buried.) The reader, at that point, is feeling fear and grief. Skip ahead to the nineteenth chapter, when the detectives are getting close to finding the kidnapper. They’re walking through the woods to an old cabin where they think the girl is being held. Every word has been carefully constructed to build tension. The lead detective catches sight of something in the bushes, and investigates. It’s a single pink shoe.
At that point, you don’t need there to be blood stains on it, or for it to be torn, or any other detail. The presence of the shoe, alone and outdoors, is an immediate callback to the earlier scene — and reinforces the fear and grief that was elicited the first time around.
The original scene isn’t foreshadowing — well, not in terms of this, anyway — it’s a completely scene on its own. But by calling back to that scene, we can bring that emotional content into this later scene, and amp up the tension far more easily than through any other method.
At least…. that’s my theory.
I’m pretty sure this comment is now longer than my original post (!), so let me know what you think. Are callbacks and misbeliefs basically the same thing from different angles? Have I over-thought and over-analysed to the point of incoherence? Or are callbacks an entirely different beast?
Hi, Jo. Sorry for not being more clear. I didn’t mean to suggest that a misbelief and callback/back story are the same thing, A misbelief is thr thing in a character’s back story that prevents her from reaching her goal. Thus, it is a part of her back story, but there are other elements there, such as family, upbringing, relationships, etc., that go into the back story. Callback is recalling something from a character’s past that has some relevance to the story. Your example of the pink shoe is a good one. It serves as a powerful emotional trigger for the reader. The author doesn’t need any other back story to remind the reader. Thanks again for an insightful post,
You raise an interesting point about intentionality. If only we could believe that time is not a linear progression, but a self contained bubble, and we, each one of us, exist within one, then foreshadowing and callback would not be, for everything is in that one moment.
However, our world is not so structured. We have past and future times. So there is foreshadowing. Because, as you say, it is consciously set up, we have to learn how to use it to the best advantage. Thus there are reams of articles and lessons describing the value of that technique. It even masquerades under different names: dropping hints, leaving clues (subtle, and not so subtle). What we really are doing is opening the reader’s eyes to coming events.
Callbacks? Maybe we should use your article as a wakeup call to consciously add callbacks to the arsenal of tools available to a writer. Raise the ignored callback with articles explaining what it is, what it achieves, how to use it. Just as all writing lessons speak of the value of foreshadowing so should we now talk of ‘the callback’. Our lives, and writing would become infinitely richer if, standing in the present moment, we could control the past and the future consciously.
Hi Jo,
Loved this post! Thanks for the effort in making the third try!
I think both techniques/tactics are instinctual to a good storyteller, who ‘feels’ when the audience’s mind is beginning to wander. Whether the callback is straightforward (remember how your mom…) or a nearly subconscious visual cue, like your example, I believe each has a specific purpose and accomplishes different things.
For example, if we need to foreshadow a large event that will suck up lots of page time, then we need to foreshadow some smaller events and use callbacks to sustain the story until the arrival of the ‘big reveal’.
I loved your opening example — no kids here — but can sure relate to the aside from yours — and so cool, they don’t care that they know what’s going to happen! That’s part of the fun and boosts the bonding, ’cause they have the inside scoop. Obviously, you aren’t an ‘insider’ and had to be clued in. ;o) lolol
You made me laugh, Maria. :) Pretty sure my sons are now old enough that they think I’m clueless about just about everything!
I think you’re absolutely right that these things are instinctual to most of us — probably because of the number of stories we’ve heard, read, and seen in our day.
Jo, I thought your explanation was helpful, and did make distinctions between the two, though there could be some overlap. In the last book I wrote, the protag has a cuckoo incident where his hat gets abused in a weird, amusing way.
My co-writer and I ended up having something crazy happen to his hat at least four other times, and though it wasn’t a plot advancement in a structural way, it was expressive of the character’s eccentric manner. Now I know to call that a callback.
There was some foreshadowing early on that the character’s propensity toward drink and his bad decisions following drink would play a major part in the book, and that is a plot hammer later in the work, when he gets hammered, and foulness befalls him, more than once.
Thanks for bringing light to the shadows.
I too found this post useful! Thanks for staying with it.
In thinking about the distinction between foreshadowing and callbacks, I’d suggest that callbacks are, as you say, about RESONANCE.
It’s when something introduced earlier suddenly means more, or means something else, when it’s brought back in another context. Maybe it’s more about WHY, but I can imagine it also answers questions about WHAT.
For example, that sponge cake on grandma’s table, it could come back later as the reason your heroine has such horrific diabetes and feels betrayed by her family (a WHY), or it could be the vehicle for hiding the file that she’s going to use to break out of prison (a WHAT). In either case, it wasn’t really foreshadowing anything, it was only there, and then came to mean something else when it came back.
I think it’s a useful distinction!
I never heard of the term callback, so appreciate this post. I’ll save it and reread it and see how I can apply it.
Hey Jo,
Wonderful essay. You are fab.
Years ago, a friend gave me a book that I read halfway before losing. I’d placed it atop a row of books and it slid behind them, only to be found much later when I was reorganizing my shelves. By then, I’d forgotten the details of what I’d already read, and knew that I’d have to start from scratch to get back into it, so on my TBR pile it went.
In the meantime, they made it into a movie.
Now, it’s not like the book was so compelling that a movie wouldn’t do it justice, so I just watched the movie instead of finishing the book. Besides, it starred Octavia Spencer and Sam Worthington, so I figured it might be even better. The book and the movie were/are The Shack.
< SPOILER ALERT! >
I won’t go into all the details of the movie, but in a nutshell, a man spends a weekend with God, trying to work through the grief over the loss of his daughter. Pretty good movie, no matter your beliefs.
On the way to meet God at “the shack” — the place his daughter was murdered — Mac, the protagonist, lost in thought, runs a stop sign and narrowly escapes being hit by a red semi (that’s a road train to you). :) *Foreshadow alert!
Well, he arrives at the shack, meets God, Jesus, and Sarayu (“Breath of Wind”), wonders if he died (“Do you feel dead?” asked Papa, or God), yadayadayada, works through all his shit, yadayadayada, sees his daughter happy on the other side, more yada, and then is given the opportunity to stay. “Now Mac, you have the option of staying here with Missy, or going home to your family. Either way, Missy will be fine.” Needless to say, he returns to his family.
On the drive back home, at that same intersection, he’s lost in thought again. You would think the guy would’ve learned his lesson and kept his eyes on the road at that lonely intersection in the middle of nowhere, but nooooo.
SLAM!
The red semi crashes into him and he awakens in a hospital, only to find that the crash happened on the way there, not the way back. Yadayadayada, the movie finishes.
NOW…was the second incident with the truck a callback, the completion of the foreshadow, or both?
You make me think. That’s good. <3
Hey Jo,
I loved your post and the diagrams. I think you gave very concise definetions of the two terms, although, I must admit, “callback,” was new to me. I like it. Thanks for sharing.