: Re: Is it bad to suddenly introduce another element to your fantasy world a good ways into the story? I'm writing a novel with many POVs, and this is a very flexible story. It started out with

@Holmes449

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As other Answers mentioned, this can be done is a valid way for world building, however you can also make it a complete shock and turn it into a plot twist.

There are many bad ways to do this, but there are also many good ways to do it.

If you make it a shock to everyone all the time, then it's a bad plot twist. You will lose the readers ability to be surprised and will assume that you only wrote the book to try to insert as many "shock value" jumps as possible. While this might work for some horror genres, it doesn't necessarily work anywhere else. Also, too many plot twists can make the book hard to follow.

Making the shock a sustained but short surprise can work when introducing something. The initial shock being that something exists, then the sustaining medium being the explanation why it's "normal" to the people who know the secret.

There are plenty of stories like "Alice in Wonderland" and "Peter Pan" that start as a normal version of this universe, but end up in a fairy land of wonderment and fantasy. It wouldn't be too hard to take those stories and extend the beginning of them so the fantasy aspects are later in the novel.

For instance, Alice could have a long story of how she has imaginary friends, takes her real friends on imaginary adventures, and then halfway through the book finds out there actually is a magical realm where she has real adventures. The current story only hints at those early adventures, because it wants to get to the fantasy aspect.

The story could even extend afterward to Alice bringing her friends to Wonderland to prove that it's real, they have more adventures, and even continue through her adulthood. "Through the Looking Glass" was an example of how this could happen.

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