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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48617
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48617
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

> Is there any way to do this without alienating the reader, who may well have invested significant time in the previous part of the story and feel cheated as a result?

No. This violates common story expectations too much for readers, and that will not be enjoyable, it will be alienating.

It is too much time to spend on making a single point.

There is a common misunderstanding amongst beginning writers that the typical story structures (3 act, 4 act, Shakespeare's 5 act, the Hero's Journey) are **prescriptions** for making stories, but they are not: They are **descriptions** of how tens of thousands of **successful** stories have been constructed for millennia, they are **generalizations** of what generally works in story telling, what humans like in stories. The stories they describe, with millions of others, were set down long before Aristotle or anybody else decided to study them and look for commonalities.

Interestingly, after identifying these structures in popular stories, we also find that most stories people _don't_ like are missing something from these structures. Also, we can find psychological features that these structures seem to represent. The audience (readers or viewers) like it when heroes have to struggle, when heroes have flaws they must overcome, when heroes have setbacks, or reach moments of despair that they seemingly may not overcome. They like danger, they like action.

The OP's premise here violates several fundamental rules of story writing. What a story opens with is expected to matter to the rest of the plot. (The OP has everything wiped 1/3 of the way through the story, so very little matters, which is what the OP specifically worries about -- rightly.)

The MC should be introduced early. If everything is wiped, the MC becomes a different person, or perhaps isn't even introduced in the first 1/3.

1/3 of a book is too much for the reader to just throw away, this is a betrayal of their trust in the author. The "dramatic effect" sought could be achieved as a retrospect, or with little setup elsewhere, and probably more effectively: The god-like antagonist can make just a town vanish, and just a handful of people remember it; gaslighting them and making them think they are insane for remembering something in such great detail with zero evidence of it. Or anything like that.

The beginning of a book sets up the MC, and their normal world, and that is what readers expect to happen in the first 10% to 15% of the story; around the 20% to 30% mark, the MC should be forced out of their normal world. (In movies this still happens but it can happen somewhat faster; an MC and their normal world can be conveyed very quickly with actors, visuals and audibles that don't have to be described to the audience). In the first five pages, the MC should be interacting with at least one other person.

Trying to subvert the tropes of the first 20% of the story is not for beginning authors, it is for authors that are already making a living from writing fiction and have a following willing to tolerate such subversions because they trust the writer to deliver _like they have done before._

Even then, only about 10% of readers are "lead risk takers" that will buy something nobody else has read, and nobody has critiqued. If a story gets bad reviews from these risk takers, it just doesn't go anywhere.

No author that is not already making a living from their existing books should subvert a trope on a whim, this approach will not work. It will get bad reviews, and those will stick with you throughout your (probably short) career.

Readers have concrete expectations for the beginning of a story. Effectively none of them are reading so the author can introduce them to innovative story structures. They read so somebody else (the author) does most of the innovating imagining for them, of the settings, the rules of the world, the characters and their problems and how they resolve them. They like twists **that make sense in retrospect** , IMO The Sixth Sense was the most masterful twist ever, and upon re-watching the movie makes perfect sense -- I just missed it, like almost everybody else.

Authors write to assist the reader's imagination, hopefully to immerse them in the story, hopefully to surprise them, but there are still rules. Deus Ex Machina is certainly a surprise, but they make **no sense** given the story leading up to them.

Sudden personality changes can be a surprise, but they must be supported by the story leading up to this transformation. In _retrospect_ a twist or surprise must make sense, that is the rule.

In addition to failing to meet the other requirements of an opening, this "twist" will not make sense in retrospect, it appears arbitrary. Yes, the reader will feel cheated, and I don't believe there is any writing technique to prevent that outcome.

Original score: 1