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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35666
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35666
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I don't think it is universally true that foreshadowing should be close to the event. For example, Frodo's inability to cast the Ring into the Cracks of Doom is foreshadowed by his inability to cast it into the fireplace in Bag End, right in the beginning of the Lord of the Rings. Or, another example: the end of Jim Butcher's "Changes" is foreshadowed from chapter 4 onwards, and by the beginning of chapter 11, I no longer had any doubts. The book has 49 chapters.

However, key to the discussion is your statement that

> other matters were more pressing.

You cannot foreshadow everything all at once, and the foreshadowing should be organic, sitting within what you're telling at the moment. It shouldn't stick out, it shouldn't have a large "this is foreshadowing" spotlight pointed at it. If that means you should move a scene to a different place, go ahead and do so.

Remember also your story doesn't need to be linear. You can even tell of an event in a way that suits a development of a particular idea, and then some chapters later return to the same event (by means of a character remembering it, for example), and add some more information about it, following a different idea this time, foreshadowing additional things. For example, Naomi Novik's _Uprooted_, chapter 6:

> Unfortunately, the willingness to learn magic wasn't the same thing as being good at it. [..] After another three days of letting the Dragon set me at healing spells, all of which felt as awkward and wrong as ever, I marched down to the library the next morning with the little worn journal in my hand and put it down on the table before him as he scowled. "Why won't you teach me from this?" I demanded.

And in chapter 7 there's a return to the same incident, from a different perspective:

> I hadn't seen anyone from Dvernik since the beacon night. Danka had sent the fire-heart back to Olshanka, with an escort gathered grimly from every village of the valley [..] They looked at me and saw someone out of a story, who might ride by and be stared at, but didn't belong in their lives at all. [..] That was the day I had taken Jaga's book down to the library, and demanded that the Dragon stop pretending I had any more gift for healing than I did for any other sort of spell, and let me learn the kind of magic that I could do.

The first instance follows the logical line of the MC learning magic. The second follows the logical line of the MC's relationship with the place she came from. The different focus allows to add information, and foreshadow different things, instead of cluttering all at once. In a way, it's examining two threads of the story separately, though they might be twined together, instead of allowing them to become a tangled mess where you can't follow either one.

Original score: 3