How to Write Your Novel's Second Quarter

hey guys it's ellen brock novel editor i hope you're all doing really really well this is the third video in my advanced structural series if you didn't see the other two videos they were about the status quo and the debate in the first quarter i recommend that you watch those first for more context and just a better understanding of what we're talking about in this video so if you haven't seen that i would recommend that you check that out first but today we are going to be talking about the second quarter or the first half

of the second act if you prefer um three-act structure over four-quarter structure so in other words we're going to be talking about the section of the novel that's between the first plot point and the midpoint so that's what we're covering today and a lot of writers a lot of people i've talked to clients have told me that they find this to be the hardest section of their novel to sort of plot out or edit that they just feel like it's either too fast or too slow they just can't really get this quarter to feel right

or to seem like it's plotted well so we're going to talk about that today um it's a little bit uh maybe ironic that this section is uh so difficult but i completely understand why it's actually the simplest section structurally um i guess it sort of depends on what you conceptualize as simple but there's not as much going on in this section and that sort of creates this um challenge with figuring out what you know what to put there because it's not as simple as sort of the setup you know you need to establish so much

you need the disruption to happen you need the debate to happen in the first pop one and it sort of feels like a lot to fit into the first quarter and then uh normally for most writers they tend to know sort of how they want the climax to play out or sort of what the conclusion is going to be but this middle section can be really really challenging because it just doesn't have the same sort of framework and it doesn't sort of have the same sort of intensity as the other quarters or the other sections

of the story so i am going to be using films as the examples in this video i will be breaking down novels in the future and sort of focusing on one novel so we can sort of talk about and look at the structure but i will be using films today uh if you're worried about spoilers i will be giving somewhat spoilers nothing not nothing too dramatic i'm not going to give away like every play-by-play of the whole film but if you're worried about spoilers i will be giving spoilers for the hunger games oculus uh big

uh the woman in black disney's the kid harry potter and the sorcerer's stone liar liar little miss sunshine and 127 hours so if you haven't seen those films or you're worried about spoilers um you can watch them and come back another time so let's talk about the second quarter so what is going on in this section so we had the disruption we had the debate so the character sort of thought about or decided you know what am i going to do in response to um this big disruption in my life they made a decision they

sort of took some sort of action to lock in so the first plot point sort of um you know maybe they made a commitment to somebody or maybe they moved to a new location they did something to sort of lock in and commit so now we have this second quarter and they're in a lot of ways sort of uh having a second set up phase so they're sort of re-acclimating um or not reacclimating acclimating for the first time to a new environment in a new circumstance so that's really what we are looking at in this

quarter and what we're really going to be focusing on so uh it's somewhat common to refer to this as entering the upside down world and i personally really like that term because i think it emphasizes sort of the key component of what's going on in this section sort of what the focus is and that's this chaotic experience of sort of adapting to and understanding this world that's very very different from the world they came from a good example of this is the hunger games so in the first quarter katniss is in her own district it's

very poor it's a sort of you know living hand-to-mouth lifestyle and then when she enters the capital it's radically different this is a a crazily different environment for her and instead of being a sort of um surviving based on being able to get food and being able to sort of like you know physically acquire and fight for what you need uh it's a much more socially focused environment you know it's a lot about playing the game the right way and getting sponsors and interacting with the other competitors and so it's a very different way of

being in the world it's a very different environment so that's sort of the big upside down world for katniss is uh the capital so we might see this play out in a number of different ways often a new location is used to either emphasize or create the upside down world so for example in little miss sunshine in the first quarter we meet all the characters um which is a family so we meet the kids and the mom and the dad and the uncle and and the grandpa and we meet them all and they're basically all

striving for their goals separate from each other so they're kind of uh living sort of parallel lives they're not really interacting a whole lot they're sort of keeping their own space and that's basically subtext um but you know that's basically what's going on but once the um the the girl the child olive gets invited to go to this pageant for circumstances which we don't really need to get into specifics they all have to go in this broken down van and go on this road trip so the second quarter sees them start the road trip so

what was a very separate sort of life has completely changed now all of a sudden they're all forced together they all have to interact with each other and they're on the road so they're not at home in their usual environment so it might be uh tempting to sort of view this upside down world as maybe something that's more radically different than it needs to be so we're talking about a circumstance here where um it is radically different you know they're on a road trip they're all having to interact with each other but you know there's

not space aliens or or magic or something so it doesn't have to be this sort of extremely different environment um it just has to be an unusual circumstance something that's very different from what they from what the protagonist was dealing with before so another common way that this might play out would be actually to not change locations but instead to show how the change in circumstances that occurred sort of what happened with the disruption how it changed um the character's life how that plays out in the same locations a really good example of this is

the film liar liar in uh that film the protagonist fletcher we meet him in the first quarter and he goes about um his daily life interacting with his wife or his ex-wife and his son and his um colleagues his secretary you know his clients at work he's a lawyer so we see him go about all of these elements of his life and he lies at every turn in every circumstance the disruption happens when uh he is no longer able to lie suddenly it's physically impossible for him to lie he just he cannot tell a lie

at all no matter what so in the second quarter we see all of those same people all of the same locations all of those same circumstances reoccur but now he can't lie so the upside down world isn't a literal new location but it's a very different circumstance because now all of a sudden lying isn't possible so the consequences are completely different what he's able to do is completely different and so he has a very different way of operating in the world so the upside down world doesn't have to literally refer to a new location it

could also refer to a a different circumstance or just being in a very um disrupted states you know it could be gaining a magical ability it could be um it could be space aliens or the introduction of a major unusual element but the location doesn't necessarily have to change for that to be the case so the key is that the protagonist's current way of thinking or being in the world it's not going to fix this new situation so what they've been doing their their current tactics um you know sort of operating within their flow or

within their um false belief that's not going to work it's not going to solve the problem so that's really what we're going to see demonstrated in the second quarter is that they're not going to fix things by staying the same really good example of this is in the kid disney's the kid if you haven't seen that movie basically russell is an adult he's um very selfish self-absorbed you know he's a successful image consultant but he's a very very selfish person and um the disruption occurs when he meets a little boy which turns out to actually

be himself at eight years old so in that circumstance then in the second quarter he has to sort of deal with the fact that this kid is here and he doesn't really want to deal with that but we don't see him suddenly become selfless and suddenly care about this kid he's still operating within the same paradigm or the same viewpoint he's still very selfish he doesn't treat the kid very well he sort of mocks him for crying and basically calls him a loser and he's he's not nice so we're not going to see the character

suddenly um change or develop what we're really trying to demonstrate in the second quarter is that this current way that the character is the way that they operate and the way they function in the world it's not going to work that's not going to solve the kid's not going to go away because he's mean to him and he yells at him and he tells him to leave and get out of here the kid just keeps showing up again so what we're seeing is that's not going to work he's going to have to change in some

way this isn't necessarily extremely obvious for example in the film oculus in in the beginning tim is at a sort of institution he uh was sort of perceived to have had a mental breakdown relating to a mirror from their childhood and all these negative events that he attributed to the mirror and he sort of went through a treatment to come to the conclusion that um actually there was nothing supernatural going on so all that happens basically before the film even starts but we see him sort of commit to helping his sister with destroying this mirror

even though he doesn't really believe that it's haunted and in the second quarter we see him maintaining that stance so he's trying to convince his sister of practical real world real world explanations for why the negative events that they experience as children happen to them so you know the dog dying um he died because he got sick because it was a real reason not a supernatural reason um we don't see him suddenly deciding oh yeah you know what the mirror is haunted we don't see him change his stance and we do get the impression which

becomes clearer later on which is really the point that i am burying here but what i'm trying to say is it may become clearer later on that in this second quarter um the current way of being isn't solving the problem so he does eventually realize that the mirror is in fact haunted he does not realize that in the second quarter and that emphasis then can still be on how his current paradigm or his current way of thinking um isn't working it's not going to solve the problem to believe the mirror is not haunted isn't going

to fix things it's not going to make him better it's not going to make his sister better it's not going to get rid of the mirror but that might not necessarily be extremely apparent in the second quarter so i hope that i explain that well enough that you get what i'm sort of saying here so it just doesn't necessarily have to be extremely obvious often we will see a downturn in intensity in the second quarter it could be right at the beginning of the second quarter it could be a little bit into the second quarter

but we typically see a sort of down turn in intensity or the intensity is dialed down and that's really because the character is adapting to a new situation they need to sort of step back and assess so they might need to gain information organize their items um and get introduced to different characters or new people they need to sort of get the lay of the land so this is where i was mentioning this is sort of like a second setup phase so there's often a sort of downturn in intensity some writers might worry about that

and sort of freak out a little bit and think okay well now it's getting boring you know it's not interesting enough but if you skip over this part um and you don't have that downturn in intensity you will not have the not it's not impossible but it will be much more difficult to set up everything that you need to set up and to sort of give the feel of what this new upside down world is all about because while the character is figuring things out the reader is also figuring things out so skipping over this

section can be uh tempting but it's ultimately detrimental so some good examples of how this uh sort of intensity could sort of take a downturn um in 127 hours aaron is um he's hiking he's biking he's sort of a very outdoorsy kind of guy he falls into um i suppose like a ravine and a rock pins his arm so his arm is sort of crushed against the rock and the ravine and he's trapped we see a sort of initial like panicked reaction to this of course like you know like what am i gonna do and

then he sort of accepts the situation he's like okay i'm in this upside down world though i am stuck you know what am i gonna do now you know what am i gonna do now that i'm definitely stuck here and there's no like easy escape at that point we see him sort of look around assess the situation he sort of lays out his belongings and the things he brought with him so he sort of looks at you know the food he has the water he has the supplies he has so we see him sort of

assessing the situation um sort of figuring things out another good example of that is in the woman in black so in the woman in black um arthur the protagonist he gets hired to go through some paperwork at um the sort of mansion of this deceased woman and um for i i think for um for her will or i can't exactly recall i think perhaps for her will or something he needs to go through all this paperwork so he arrives at the house at the at the um beginning of the second quarter the beginning of the

second act so that sort of um you know the entrance into the upside-down world is sort of you know he crosses the threshold into this haunted house but we see a fairly significant downturn in intensity here where he sort of puts his around the house looks in the rooms you know he sort of checks how the water is running and he gathers up all the papers that he needs to look at and gets them all at the dining room table and so we see a natural sort of assessment of the situation occurring here again it

can be tempting to think well this is going to be too boring we need to sort of skirt past this but you do need to set up those new locations and establish what the circumstance is so it is important to in in most cases it is important to have a somewhat of a downturn of energy level it's not a hundred percent of the case um for example in liar liar we don't see a massive downturn in energy it's a comedy it's pretty um you know it clips along pretty nicely but it's not uncommon to see

a fairly significant downturn in intensity or energy level at this point so that is something that you can expect and to not worry about often other characters are going to be integral to getting the character sort of up to speed on what's going on so this may involve introducing new characters it may involve already established characters providing information for example in oculus the sister sort of gives tim the brother a rundown of everything having to do with the mirror all the history she's uncovered everything the mirror has ever done all the people who have died

associated with it so that gets him up to speed uh we will we also see this in harry potter and the sorcerer's stone we see a number of characters helping harry to get up to speed on what's going on and to introduce information so your side characters are often going to be very integral um in in establishing the information that's necessary we will also see in this section typically any remaining characters that need to be introduced will be introduced in the second quarter it's pretty rare to see new characters introduced after the second quarter so

typically this is also your sort of um your time to establish friends enemies bullies um competitors people who are going to be involved in the story and involved in the life of your character so for example we see that in the hunger games katniss sort of meets and gets a little bit not a ton but gets a little bit of information about the other um competitors she doesn't i suppose she gets a fair amount of information about them but she doesn't really interact with them a whole lot so but they are introduced so we sort

of also see her kind of establishing her relationship with peta and how they're gonna sort of compete together and we get more of a development of that dynamic as well um another example is in big so in big uh josh is 12 he wishes that he would be he could be an adult that he could be big and he wakes up and he is an adult so his um upside-down world is the adult world and we do see him then getting introduced to significant characters in the second quarter so we see him meet his boss

who's sort of a supporter of his his um business rivals so this is a guy who's going to be sort of an enemy and we can kind of we start to get the sense that you know this guy's maybe bad news we don't get a ton but we get some sense that this guy might be sort of a bully character he also meets his future girlfriend um but the romance doesn't develop very much in the second quarter either so the characters need to be set up you don't necessarily have to go as far as um

substantial character you may or may not have substantial relationship or character development but but for the most part we should at this um quarter be getting sort of final character introductions and sort of getting uh the full cast list of who is going to be involved in this story so with all of that said what does the protagonist actually do in this section and i think that's really where people get tripped up so the primary conflicts in the second quarter are going to have to do with a sort of stumbling fish out of water adapting

to what's going on sort of vibe so a lot of it is about the tone or the vibe that is created so we will see later on in the third quarter a much more capable proactive vibe we are not going to get that here in the second quarter the character is largely going to be stumbling around and what they're going to be butting up against is trying to figure out you know how do i exist in this world how do i function in this world how does this world function and um because the character is

still still feeling pretty resistant to any sort of change they mean honestly in most cases they're not even really thinking about changing or um only maybe perhaps some little glimpses of of you know maybe my way of being isn't 100 right but they're really not thinking about that very much so it's a lot of figuring out how to be in the world within their own paradigm or within their own flaw or false belief sort of trying to figure out you know how can i be me as i already am not changing anything and function within

this world so there's going to be a major fish out of water sort of element to this and that can play out in a lot of different ways um for example in liar liar it plays out as very comedic and goofy and silly he ends up sort of you know trying to lie about the color of pen and he writes blue all over his face and it's silly this could also play out as very dramatic so in um the hunger games katniss you know she needs to get sponsors and she needs to figure out how

can i um exist in this new world you know how can i play these social games that i'm not used to playing and if i don't i might die you know i might not get the sponsor so it's a very dramatic sort of way of playing it out it could also play out as scary or creepy for example in the woman in black arthur sort of gets a sense you know this town is is odd and i just want to do my job you know he's not shifting um he's also worn by another character you

know don't go chasing shadows his own wife um passed away so he sort of has a a little bit too much interest perhaps in the supernatural and um so he's sort of warned uh about not meddling with that kind of thing and he's warren stay out of house and all this but he wants to operate within his same sort of paradigm he's not looking to change he wants to do this job he wants to maintain you know what he already feels and when he already believes we're not looking at major changes but he butts up

against a lot of people in a lot of circumstances because of that so you know katniss struggles because she doesn't want to play this social game she does but she doesn't change her feelings or her thoughts about it and that's really what i think can be a little bit tricky or a little bit uh troubling with this section when you're trying to figure out what's actually going to happen in the second quarter we're not going to see the character changing how they feel or think about it but we are going to see uh perhaps them

acting in ways that may seem out of character and i'm going to get into that a little bit more later on in the video so all of this work of sort of building relationships gathering information figuring out um sort of the way this world operates the limitations of this world what they can do etc all of that will eventually lead to the midpoint so i'm going to talk about sort of half the midpoint this time and half of the midpoint next time so i'm going to touch on the midpoint in both this video and the

video about the third quarter so the midpoint causes a shift that gives the character a clearer path or a more specific direction to go in for um the third quarter so that's really where we see this this difference between the second and the third quarter so in the second quarter the it's not that the characters aren't doing anything but they don't know really what to do and so they're not really doing anything that's um highly effective they're not really they're not conquering their demons they're not facing the pro the antagonist um they're not you know

they're not going head-to-head they don't really know what's going on and they don't really know what to do the midpoint is a realization that's usually a mix of both plot and emotional realization i'm not really going to touch on the emotional realization piece in this video they're going to have sort of a realization of the about the plot and that's sort of going to give them direction um sort of steering them where to go um so a good example of this is in a liar liar so in liar liar fletcher uh he has a lot

of fights with his ex-wife regarding him not showing up to to meet their son to to have um you know father-son time and he'll say he's going to be there and then he never shows up we know that that's happening um in the second quarter we know that that's primarily like like um sort of going to be the crux of the film and sort of the big problem but that isn't defined until the midpoint so at the midpoint um his ex-wife tells him you know this is your last chance if you don't show up this

time we're moving to boston you're never gonna or almost never gonna see your son again so it makes what was definitely present um into something that's very defined and very very specific so he has a very clear path so at that point it's okay i have to show up or i'm going to not be able to see my son anymore so in the third quarter that's a very defined path his path is not really defined in the second quarter it's more about coping and adapting to the fact that he can't lie he does try to

show up um but uh he fails to show up but there isn't this this specific um consequence it's important to note that this doesn't mean that the protagonist will be correct about the realization at the midpoint often the character will have a realization at the midpoint that's not accurate so you don't necessarily have to lead to the correct answer so the second quarter doesn't have to lead to a midpoint that gives them the accurate or correct answer in many cases they're going to get an inaccurate answer or they're going to come to a realization that's

not um actually putting them on a path towards success so a good example of this is in the kids so at the midpoint of the kid um russell comes to believe that his child self is there the reason his child self has appeared to him is because he needs to make this kid into a winner that this kid is a loser and he's getting bullied and that the reason this kid is there is so that he can fix the kid and turn the kid into a winner and teach him how to fight this ultimately ends

up being not at all why the kid is there but that's the midpoint realization so that defines his path um into the third quarter so in the second quarter he is resisting he's adapting he's not wanting to change he's not really wanting to um you know improve himself he just wants to get rid of this kid as fast as possible the midpoint sort of defines his bathroom of sort of saying okay well the kid's not going away so how i'm gonna make the kid go away is that i'm going to turn him into a winner

and stop him from being a loser so he is wrong about that so you don't have to feel that the midpoint has to be accurate and sometimes a midpoint realization that is wrong is going to work much better than a midpoint realization that is correct especially if you need to draw the plot out a little bit or if you're if you struggle with plot lines that are too short or don't have enough complexity i know i already mentioned but i really want to emphasize that this does not mean that in the second quarter the protagonist

isn't doing anything or that they're waiting for the plot to happen to them it's they are still proactive it's not that they're sitting around not doing anything they just don't really have any information or any way to make meaningful progress so they are doing things but it's usually things that align with their flaw and things that demonstrate that they don't really have any idea what's going on so a good example of this is in the kid he tries to go to a doctor to get pills because he thinks the kid must be a hallucination if

i can take pills the kid will just go away so he is sort of trying to make the kid disappear basically yes his boss can you make this kid disappear you know when he yells at the kid he tries to make him leave he's not um he's not doing something that makes necessarily defined sense so it's not as if he got information that said well if you could just make the kid go away then he would go away and then your problem would be solved he's just sort of assuming um and sort of taking this

path a path of least resistance of if i can push this kid away or i can take pills and make the kid go away then i won't have to deal with him anymore so that's what the bulk of his conflicts have to do with um as well as the kids sort of interrupting his life disrupting things so it's it's that disruption um created by this upside down world and that's what he's really fighting against so in a nutshell the second quarter involves the character taking their first shaky steps into the upside down world trying to

figure out how to work and function in this world without having to change anything about themselves and with very limited information they start to gather information assess the situation get organized build relationships and this will all eventually lead them to the midpoint which will define their path forward and give them a clear direction to move in so with all of that said i want to get into some common problems and pitfalls with the second quarter so the first common mistake that i see in the second quarter is the antagonist or the threat not being present

enough so because we're not going to see the protagonist taking big steps forward in the plot and they're typically you know fish out of water and they're not really sure what's going on and they're trying to sort of acclimate and adjust it can be tempting to push the antagonist out of this corridor so the antagonist isn't really doing anything or may not have any presence it's okay for the antagonist to be quite vague in this quarter if they they may not they may be very defined it may be very obvious and clear who the antagonist

is but they in any case whether or not we see them definitely very present or only implied or hinted at we should still feel the antagonistic force in this quarter so we still want the sense that there is a threat or there is something going wrong or the potential for something to go wrong um a good example of this is the woman in black it's it's not very defined what the antagonist is he sort of sees the woman i think he kind of thinks that it's a real person he doesn't specifically think that it's a

ghost um a child dies and that's blamed on him but he doesn't really understand why he doesn't really have any grasp but there are threats so you know a child dies and um the people in the town sort of try to push him out of town they sort of reject him they're very off um off-putting they're very like pushing him away they don't want him around so there are lots of demonstrations that there is a threat and that something is going on he isn't just going to a new village or a new house and just

sort of not feeling threatened or sort of putzing around you know we we need that sense that there is a threat and there is something wrong you know there's some there's something that's going to go wrong in the future and a lot of the second quarter is going to pay off later on so we see that with katniss and the hunger games as well so she sort of uh meets the other tributes and he and she um learns about the career tributes and we sort of get the sense that they're very dangerous and that's probably

the threat that she's going to be up against we also meet the threat of the sponsors and we're told you know you don't get sponsors you know you're going to die and you know you're going to die in the games you need the sponsors to get those extra items and those things that will help you so the the threat is there and the antagonistic force is there in the second quarter we're not going to see big face-to-face um combat in in in the majority of cases we're not going to see the protagonist and the antagonist

face off directly but the threats are going to be there and that's going to pay off later on if you don't put the threats in that's where you're going to have a second quarter that feels pretty slow um also just kind of boring or or just not intense enough kind of meandering or and it might leave the reader sort of thinking what's the point you know where is this going so you really need to have that antagonist and that threat present another very common problem is the protagonist being too capable or having too much information

too soon so this is a very common problem with um fantasies sci-fi horror things like that often the way that writers will conceptualize this story they sort of want to give all the information at once or they want to sort of set up or they might perceive the basic information of what's going on as set up or or something that needs to be established early on so the problem with that is that you're going to end up both sort of skipping over this structural point of this sort of um adapting to this upside down world

experience which is part of the structural composition or the structure of the story but you're also going to end up with a plot that moves way way way too fast so if you are the type of person who always ends up with drafts that are too short i would say the majority of the time the second quarter is actually missing in terms of of a structural point the whole structural purpose of the second quarter uh may be missing so an example of this uh done well would be harry potter and the sorcerer's stone so if

we were to say for example that we were writing uh harry potter and we were thinking we want to establish all of the basics of the story right away uh we would have a really really hard time writing out a full plot line for that story for example if um in the early in the second quarter uh harry were to go get to hogwarts and he learns right away well voldemort is trying to steal the sorcerer's stone and is hidden somewhere in hogwarts that's not a very complicated concept we're not we might think as a

writer well that's you know something that should just be established right away but most of the of the momentum and the thrust of that story comes from harry figuring out those details and piecing it together if we were to give that to him right away it'd be really really really hard to write a second quarter because he already knows what he's supposed to do so you can't really um you can't really have him have that sort of stumbling around not knowing what's going on experience it's not impossible you could theoretically uh create the correct vibe

by while still having him have that information but what we i can't talk today what you would create would be a a very awkward amount of plot points you need an extremely large amount of plot points um getting him to sort of that final showdown with voldemort uh because he already knew about it so instead of building all the plot around him figuring things out if he knows it then you need a lot of plot points to happen between gaining that information and the final showdown and in most cases it's not going to be practical

to come up with that number of plot points so in many many cases if your character is too knowledgeable too soon the second quarter is going to be nearly impossible to write so that is a very common pitfall of this section of the story another common problem is mistaking the inciting incident or the disruption of the status quo or the catalyst whatever term and in my videos i was referring to it as the disruption um thinking of that as the first plot point so we're sort of rewinding a little bit to the first quarter because

i want to sort of project out how this would affect your second quarter so if you are making the assumption that the occurrence of the disruption when it first happens that that is the entrance to the upside-down world rather than um the disruption happening then the debate then crossing the threshold and then it being in the upside-down world so you have the disruption you have the debate you have the first plot point you have the second quarter if you conceptualize the event of the disruption as entering the upside down world you are going to have

a massive problem with structure because you're going to have to make the first quarter extremely long in most cases you're going to have to bloat it not extremely long in terms of word account the word count may be the same but but when you're conceptualizing that as the disruption as um enters into the upside down world instead of the disruption happening perhaps 5 10 15 into the story is happening 20 25 into the story but really that is still part of your first quarter so it will make the perception that your first quarter is extremely

long i hope this makes sense so a good example of this is in the film big so in big uh josh becomes an adult about 10 minutes into the film and he has a pretty panicked reaction to that obviously he tries to figure out what to do how can i become a kid again you know he debates about how to react to the situation if we were to perceive that him becoming an adult is the entrance into the upside down world we would have then placed that 20 to 25 percent into the story we would

have had a significant disruption in the structure because you would have had to have filled that first quarter with something which would have introduced a whole bunch of other elements which you then would have to have managed moving forward and you would have spent a lot of the second quarter um with that panic reaction and that um adapting to uh being an adult or being in an adult body which obviously it is what happens in the second quarter he adapts to being an adult but the entrance of the upside-down world is entering the adult world

not physically becoming an adult so he enters the adult world he has to figure out you know his job like how to function in a job you know he gets a new apartment he gets a girlfriend all this kind of stuff so he's learning how to be an adult and if we were to make that mistake and think that that him becoming an adult was the entrance into the upside down world we would have really messed up the structure of both the first and second quarter so even though this applies to a little really both

equally uh the first and second i really wanted to mention it in this video because it is a pretty common problem with people who are just learning about structure or they're maybe struggling to understand the difference between entering the upside down world and the disruption and it is that the disruption may have maybe what created the upside down world but the sort of acceptance of that reality and the sort of um stepping into that world is what's different that's that's what's entering the upside down world so becoming an adult um physically is the disruption entering

the adult world is the entering the upside down world so hopefully that will help if this is something that you're struggling with another common problem with this section is the character's arc developing too quickly so like i mentioned earlier we're not going to see much character development in this section develop i mean you might develop the characters in the reader's perception of the character but you're not going to develop the character as in progress their arc they're not going to learn lessons necessarily in this section so um a good example of this like i mentioned

is the kid in the kid russell selfish in the first quarter and he's also selfish in the second quarter we don't see him becoming more selfless as a result of the introduction of this child and this upside down world of him of himself being eight years old we don't see a change in most cases the uh character the protagonist is gonna be pretty adamant about their worldview in the second quarter so we're not gonna see a big change again i touched on this a little bit with oculus so um tim continues to believe and to

argue with his sister that the mirror is not haunted we are not seeing him uh change his worldview here we're not seeing his perception shift until the midpoint he is very adamant that he is correct all the way up to the midpoint he is very adamant that he is correct that the mirror is not haunted that there is a natural plausible explanation for what has occurred so if you progress the character arc too quickly you're going to probably need to add an extra character beats or or shifts or other mental changes and in worldview perspective

changes uh that's going to add a lot of clutter it's also important to establish that they do initially try to function in this world in their old paradigm so it's also a structural loss if you were to have a major improvement in the character's perspective in this quarter so do not progress the character arc in this quarter that's not really what's going on here we will have as the viewer uh the perception that the character is wrong a good example of this will be in little miss sunshine so richard the dad and little miss sunshine

we see in the second quarter that he is obviously disrupting the family with his beliefs so he believes very strongly in winners and losers and what winners do and what losers do and he hurts his family from this perspective from taking this perspective and we see that very clearly we see him tell his daughter olive that you know if she orders ice cream she might get fat and that would make her a loser and that is very hurtful for her it's very upsetting and so as a viewer we see uh that's wrong and that he

needs to change but he doesn't perceive that so we see that but he he really blames other people and that's what you'll usually see you'll you'll see typically the character will say well the other person is in the wrong their perspective is wrong my perspective is right but as a viewer or a reader we will see um and we will observe that that character does need to change so we will see that they need to change but the character will not change in this quarter and we won't see them really having much of a realization

at all so the last common pitfall that i want to talk about with this quarter is piling on the negative without including any positive so even though there's a big fish out of water component the character is really struggling you know they might be coping with a really difficult strange unusual situation we will see at least moments of success or positivity or levity if you go all in on the negative it can be emotionally exhausting for the reader it can sort of squash the the concept that there's any hope and hope sort of keeps the

reader engaged it can also sort of flatten or dull your characters make them feel too one note too boring so we do want to see some moments of levity these don't have to be extremely positive moments um there can even be a sort of bittersweet or dark um context to it um for example in 127 hours uh aaron is sort of trying to chip the rock off of his arm and he drops the knife he's able to hook the knife with this sort of curved stick that he finds and he sort of has a moment

of triumph with that it's not a super positive moment you know he's still trapped his arm is still crushed under a rock but there's a moment of success in a moment of levity we see that also in little miss sunshine we see the family um they have to push their van and jump into it because it's broken and when they all jump in the van they all get in successfully they all sort of laugh and smile and you know they say oh that was great that was you know we did it you know it's a

positive moment so positive moments are very important you don't want a one note everything is negative everything is bad uh you want some successes uh we see katniss also get some success with her tv interview we see her shooting the arrow she shoots the apple and the pig and impresses the sponsors and we see that as a as a triumph or an achievement so it is not all bad or all negative so that is all i have for you today i really hope that you found this video helpful if you have any questions still about

the second quarter feel free to leave them in the comments again i will be revisiting this with novel structure in the future and that will help to sort of give a more specific perspective of how this might play out in different novels so i really hope that you found this video helpful if you'd like to support me on patreon i would very much appreciate it i will put a link in the description i will be back as soon as i can with another video and in the meantime happy writing guys