This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the Helping Writers' Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, Understanding the New Normal World of a

stories resolution.

A stories of a story's resolution.

A story's resolution is a tiny section of the overall story.

From the perspective of structural timing, the resolution represents 2% or even less of the story's total

running time. Some stories give it the generous portion of as much as a

few chapters, but in other stories the resolution may be implied more than

shown given as little as a quick summarizing sentence or two. So why are we spending a whole post investigating the symbolic world of the resolution?

Simply because the new normal world of the story's resolution is in many ways what brings the entire

picture into view. Over the last few weeks this series has been exploring the

symbolic lens through which each of the three acts of a story can be viewed.

So far we've talked about the normal world of the first act, the adventure world of the second act, and the underworld of the third act and today

we're finishing out the series with the new normal world of a story's resolution.

I have long used the terms normal world and adventure world to describe the respective essences of the first and second acts. Although the specific terms are not found in

discussions of the Hero's Journey, both are based on the psychological principles

found in the archetypal transformation of the hero's journey, as originally codified by Joseph

Campbell in the hero with a thousand faces.

He talks about the ordinary world, the hero departs, the adventurous quest that comprises

the main conflict of the tale, and the descent into the innermost cave that correlates

with the structural low moment of the third

plot point and the third act. He also talks about the return. One of the key

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