Paradigm Explosion

The best fantasy novels set up a paradigm early on in the book, explaining how the magic works and setting up a terrible dilemma that gets worse and worse as the climax approaches. And then, just when it seems that things are the worst, the protagonist refuses to accept the paradigm anymore. The dilemma that has been set up and the terrible choice that it appears there is no escape from, are all rejected, and a completely new way is found out of the problem to resolve the climax.

I love this because I feel like it is the way that real life works. When you are caught in a paradigm, the only way out is to be able to see that this paradigm is not the only way of viewing the world. If you can reject it and see an entirely new way of living, then you are going to be able to find new solutions, and perhaps even happiness.

Which isn’t to say that finding a new paradigm is easy. It isn’t. And the best books show this, too. There is a cost in rejecting the old paradigm. Sometimes that cost is literal, and it is paid in blood and tears. Sometimes the cost is giving up certain people who are clinging to the old paradigm. Sometimes the new paradigm demands that you walk away from everything you’ve ever known and enter a new world where you have to start over and learn from the beginning again.

You die in a very real way and have to learn to live again as a new person. Fiction shows us how to do this because we all go through it in real life and we know how real and important it is. There are plenty of people who stick with one paradigm all their lives, and simply live with the dilemma and accept the horrible choice that it entails. But paradigm shifts are the way that we all are made new.

Of course, once the paradigm shifts, it’s really hard to write a sequel. Because while it’s true that many people go through multiple paradigm shifts in a lifetime, it’s difficult to make readers go with you again when you’ve destroyed the world that they already bought into and loved. Some writers can do it, but not many. It’s a huge breach of trust to the reader to destroy a paradigm that has been set up for so many pages. And another broken trust to make us love a character who has been wounded and remade.