Plot, Character and Second Sight

Why take the easy route when you can smash together plot, character and Second Sight? My fantasy series centers on precognition or prescience, the ability to perceive future or distant events. If only it warned me of the giant plot holes in my near future…

‘Madame Violet’s Psychic Readings: closed today owing to unforeseen circumstances.’

Giving a character powers of premonition is the ultimate tool of foreshadowing. It’s the art of the flash-forward. It cranks up the tension and suspense like few devices can. It also threatens plot disasters the size of a super-massive black hole.

Second Sight begs many questions about a character:

• What does she know, and when?
• When the bad guy turns up, how come she doesn’t know it’s him?
• How does she not know how the story ends?

Foresight indicates predestination.

Wrangling premonition is a similar struggle to wrangling time-travel. Premonition clashes horribly with Cause and Effect.

Can you change the future you foresee by changing circumstances in the present? Because if you change the present, you don’t get the future you just foresaw. So how can you foresee it? See?

All ‘change the past to save the future’ plots (such as The Terminator series) struggle with this. Minority Report tied itself in knots over this.

So I’m playing my ‘Get out of jail card.’

The character’s psychic ability is inherited from one side of the family. Her half-blood heritage makes it unreliable, fragmentary, difficult to contextualise. As an outcast, she has no wise mentor to explain how it works.

Maybe she sees the future. Or parts of it. Or versions of it.

Sliding Doors

Let’s twist it further using the Sliding Doors McGuffin. Let’s say my character’s Second Sight shows moments of significant choice; forks in the road where the outcome is dependent on the character’s decision at that moment. Turn left, happy ever after. Turn right, enter the lion’s den. Now you have foreshadowing, tension, conflict and revelation.

Let’s say her precognition cuts out at crucial moments. We have instant cliff-hangers.

Now those forks in the road of Destiny, Fate or Fortune can be used to spear the character with sharp dilemmas. Should she act or not? What’s the right choice? Is there a right choice? What are the consequences of one over another? Can she save another character from a death worse than fate? Or herself?

In Book Two, I add a twist. It shows how a wrong choice leads to a mirror-universe, to an evil version of the same character in the future. Because we all revel in the Evil Twin trope.

Unreliable precognition isn’t just a problematic character trait, it creates inescapable dilemmas and hard choices. Here is an asset to twist or enable the plot.

I can see it’s all going to work out fine. Unless it isn’t.