This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast. I hope you enjoy this

week's episode, Understanding the Normal World of a Story's First Act.

No matter their genre or focus, stories are about something happening, a shift in the status quo.

Where the characters begin is not where they end. this may refer to their

refer to their literal physical surroundings

or to a more metaphorical state of being or very possibly to both. Whatever the case it is

important for authors to understand the idea of the four worlds which are represented within a story's structure.

The normal world of a story's first act is perhaps the most referenced of the four, fully understanding it and the other three can help you visualize

a powerful story progression for your characters. Regular listeners of this podcast may have noticed that I use the terms normal world and adventure

world quite often in discussions of story structure.

I've written some before about the normal world. of the second act, particularly because the word adventure can be a

misleading when viewed as anything other than symbolic, I want to provide a quick resource that

examines exactly what is meant by this term.

And bottom line, the adventure world is not something belonging only to adventure stories.

However, while brainstorming this post, I kept coming full

circle to the realization that if the first and second acts are worlds under themselves, then surely the third act should be as well. And so what

started out as an idea for a single post has turned into a four-part series, which well discuss the normal world of the first act, the

adventure world of the second act, the underworld of the third act, and the new normal world of the resolution.

The terms normal world and adventure world are derived from concepts in the hero's journey, made famous by Joseph Campbell in the hero with a thousand faces,

and originally distilled for writers in Christopher Vogler's The Writers Journey.

All these decades later, of course, we can find a multitude of riffs off the Hero's Journey

and further developments of it.

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