How to Write the Status Quo in Your Novel

hi guys it's ellen brock novel editor i hope you're all doing really well today i want to start a new series on story structure so in my old series on story structure the focus was more on the major plot points and i do want to touch on the major plot points in this series but i want to primarily talk about everything that sort of goes in between those plot points and how those things connect together and relate to each other so i've noticed a lot of writers really struggling with understanding how to get to the

plot points or what should happen between the plot points but also in this series i want to talk about just construction in general why certain choices might be made for a story and how that sort of impacts the the reader or the viewer if the case is film their experience of the story sort of what they get out of it and sort of why elements are balanced in a certain way or handled in a certain way so today what we're going to be talking about is the status quo specifically so the status quo is the

very early most basic setup for the characters the world and things like that we're really just looking to establish what's going on before the status quo inevitably gets disrupted i do want to start by saying that i'm going to be using films primarily as the example for this video but also throughout the series not because i don't love novels or enjoy talking about novels but because it's a lot harder to come up with examples from novels that everybody is really familiar with it's much easier to come up with films that most of us have seen

that we can talk about and sort of examine and dissect for the purpose of this series so i'm mostly going to be talking about films but these tips and things are for novels as well it's not because i'm talking about film structure as a separate thing from novel structure it's just because i'm trying to find an easy example that we can all understand so that's why i'll be using films primarily as the examples um for this series so to start i want to talk about a few definitions um mainly because there can be some confusion

about this the catalyst and the inciting incident are sometimes used interchangeably so in some structural systems those those two words refer to the same thing in other structural systems the inciting incident refers more to the call to action which isn't necessarily the same thing as the catalyst but again it depends a lot on who you ask or what structural systems you follow the main thing that i just want to make clear in this video is that i'm talking about the status quo as the period of time before the start of the disruption before the very

first disruption occurs and i'm referring to the disruption of the status quo as that very first thing that disrupts the status quo i'm not going to use the term catalyst or i'm going to try to not use the term catalyst and inciting incident because i don't want to create confusion because those things sometimes are used to refer to other moments in the first quarter of the novel so i i will talk about this a lot more in the next video um in this video i'm mostly talking about the status quo but just so that we

can define what we're talking about that's why i'm not using the term catalyst or inciting incident in this video i just want to try to minimize confusion because i think that plot structure can be really difficult to understand and some of that confusion i think can come from terms being used interchangeably or used to refer to different things by different people so today we're talking about the status quo and the disruption of the status quo and those are that's basically the terminology that i'm going to be using throughout this video so now that we have

that explained hopefully and hopefully i didn't just make it more confusing let's talk about the status quo so the status quo it can sound like what we're saying is set up the character and their most ordinary possible situation in the most ordinary world possible just a very basic uninteresting introduction but we actually don't see that play out in books or or films at all we don't we very very seldom see a character introduced in a normal mundane everyday kind of situation we normally see them introduced in a situation that is sort of within the realm

of what's normal for them but isn't really just a normal regular everyday kind of situation even for that character so it's normally a situation that's a little bit worse than usual or harder than usual more stressful than usual and that's mainly because it would be really boring to meet a character in just the most mundane basic everyday situation so for example in the hunger games we meet katniss within the realm of what's normal for her her regular um ordinary life but we meet her on a day when the names are going to be pulled for

the hunger games which is an unusually stressful and tense day so it's not just a regular day of her going out and hunting for her family we meet her on a much more unusually stressful day toy story is another good example of this we meet woody on the day that andy's having his birthday party so new toys are going to be introduced and that's a higher stress higher risk sort of day but it's still within the realm of what's normal it's just not mundane we don't meet woody just on a regular day playing games with

andy we meet him on a more interesting and dynamic day and of course that's part of establishing an opening hook is that you don't want to open with something that's just completely boring and uninteresting and ordinary usually then we see that the disruption of the status quo makes the day even worse that's a very very common setup so the day starts very stressful and tense um then that leads into the disruption of the status quo which makes things even worse than before so buzz is introduced and he's really cool and exciting and that makes woody's

day even worse and more stressful so we also in that we see woody's expectation for that tense day wasn't really negative he didn't really anticipate something this bad happening so even though it's a worse than normal day um that doesn't mean that the character has to expect things to turn out uh negatively and in fact the disruption of the status quo being something that's not expected is a very strong element of story construction so you will almost always see the status quo uh disruption being something that the character didn't expect to happen so that we

see there and we also see the day's a little bit more stressful than usual and then when that disruption happens it becomes much more stressful than it already was similar with katniss and the hunger games we see her day getting even more stressful a lot more stressful when prim's name is pulled for the hunger games so we see an intense escalation of events the disruption though unexpected it doesn't necessarily have to be bad a good example of this is in gremlins we meet billy the protagonist and he again is having a really bad day he's

at his job his normal everyday job at the bank but it's going a lot worse than usual he almost gets fired someone yells at him it's a really bad day but then when he gets home his dad gives him the little gremlin gizmo and that actually makes his day better so it's unexpected but it wasn't a negative worsening of his situation uh it actually improved his day so keep in mind that it it's unexpected but it doesn't have to be negative it's not inherently right out of the gate a problem it will eventually lead to

problems but it's not immediately a problem necessarily there will sometimes be situations where we are introduced to a character in a very boring mundane setting but typically in that case that's the point that's the reason that that um it's introduced in that way is to create a contrast to how disrupted and unusual their life becomes once the status quo is disrupted a good example of that is e.t we meet elliot in a really normal everyday situation where he's sort of being bullied by his brothers but it doesn't really go beyond what's normal or what's easily

understood by the viewer so it's not an unusual situation that requires a long setup it's very easy to understand and simple and in that case the mundaneness also helps to emphasize how unusual it is when he finds an alien in his shed the other thing to keep in mind is that in that situation the mundane setup is very very short it's it's less than one scene we see him sort of fighting with his brothers a little bit he goes out um to the shed hears a noise and that's what introduces you know et is comes

into the story shortly after that so if you're going to start with a very mundane setup that setup is then going to be very very short we also see a similar sort of situation in hitchhiker's guide it starts very mundane but again that's the point is to sort of contrast the mundane elements of arthur dent's life with how outrageous and bizarre things become as the story progresses so it is possible to use a mundane setup or a mundane status quo but there's a reason for why that's used one element that can be a little bit

confusing for writers when they're looking at the status quo of books or films is that you might notice a very common setup or very early beginning setup to stories is that the characters already going through a transition so they've already had a major life change and now they're adjusting to their new life so it doesn't really look like a status quo it looks like we never really saw them in their status quo at all haunted house stories very often fall into this category the conjuring insidious and evil horror things like that all start with moving

into a new house we don't see the characters in their old house we don't see their old way of life we only see them in in the process of moving or on the day they moved or shortly after moving teen movies or family movies often follow this format as well with the kids starting in a new school and we don't really see them in their old school often we don't see any glimpses at all of their old life and so we're not meeting them and what would generally be considered a status quo kind of situation

or day some examples of this sort of opening with a transition uh would be mean girls where we see her um adjusting to life we see katie adjusting to life in illinois i believe having previously been in africa we also see this kind of teen set up in hocus pocus with max adjusting to his life in salem having previously lived in la even though in this case the characters are already going through a transition and it seems like their status quo is already disrupted what we're really experiencing is their attempt to establish a new status

quo so they're trying to sort of find a way to make things work more or less things are not that set in stone when it comes to these construction elements so i don't want anyone to feel like what i'm saying is everything has to be this way or fall exactly into this category so for example with max and hocus pocus he's kind of resistant to living there he's you could make the argument maybe he's kind of trying to make the best of it but he's getting bullied he doesn't really have a super great attitude about

the new town so it's it doesn't have to be that the character is making a really admirable attempt to establish a status quo there may be some resistance and some negativity and things involved in that and that's completely fine however the important thing is less that they're trying to establish the status quo they may or may as we've discussed they may or may not be trying to do that but the more important element is their expectation of their new status quo so in hocus pocus max expects his status quo to be negative he doesn't have

good expectations for this town he does not like it he doesn't want to be there his expectations are negative so interestingly his disruption of the status quo is when he meets allison uh which becomes his love interest which is a positive thing it's a good thing that happens to him it gives him sort of a sense of you know maybe there's something to like about this town you know maybe everything isn't going to be completely horrible and that violates his expectation which was that everything would go negatively so in those transition type setups you're still

looking for what's unexpected or what violates expectations but we're not really starting with what would be considered a status quo in the traditional sense in your sort of classic haunted house story for example in insidious we see the characters attempting to sort of adjust to their new life again there may be mixed expectations of what that's going to be like it might be positive it might be negative in the case of insidious um the wife the mother i'm not sure what the character's name is the character played by rose byrne she's attempting to sort of

reignite her musical career she's sort of looking for more peace in her life and her the expectation was that this would be a positive experience but her son dalton has an accident hits his head falls into a coma which is very negative it goes against the expectation instead of finding peace in this house and this new life she's finding things are really stressful and way worse than before so look for that violation of expectations even though sometimes the status quo isn't really what the character is used to it's still important typically not always but typically

that you establish something about what their life was previously like really just to provide context for what's different about this transition they're going through or this new status quo usually that would be done through uh either introspection or dialogue so the so the character sort of thinking about the contrast of this life with their old life so they might think or say you know my old room was bigger than this room or my old school the kids were cooler than in this school and the only way that we sort of learn about that previous status

quo is through those sort of comparison thoughts um or or comparison dialogue sort of comparing and contrasting the current new situation with the old situation so you could probably tell from these examples that the length of the status quo section of of a novel or film it's variable it's sometimes very short sometimes seconds long in films and books honestly sometimes only a few sentences long other times it can take up a really significant amount of time it can take up many chapters and scenes and so there's a very wide range that you can sort of

construct your story within this can then of course create other concerns and confusion about how you determine how long that section should be and how you decide how you're going to handle it so that's really the core of what i want to be able to talk about in this series as a whole is how do you make those decisions and sort of how do you handle it so the variable length depends on a couple of factors so how long you linger in the status quo is going to depend on the uniqueness of the status quo

that you need to establish as well as how well you can create compelling scenes within the status quo those are really the two big factors that you want to look out for so a longer status quo makes sense for certain things certain scenarios that are really hard to understand so for example in the hunger games it makes sense to have a longer status quo a longer amount of time before there's that disruption because we need to learn a lot about katniss's situation her family her friends her relationships to other people but primarily the length of

the status quo is essential to setting up the the setting the dystopian world and giving us a good sense of how that works and what that's like so that we really understand when that disruption happens and prim's name is pooled for the hunger games we really understand what that means and the significance of that so it's really not a good candidate for an early disruption of the status quo because if we were to learn you know in the very first scene that uh her sister was pulled it's not impossible to make that work it wouldn't

have been outside the realm of possibility but it would have been really difficult to give the reader enough information without info dumping or relying on you know long bouts of dialogue so characters could discuss what was occurring to fill us all in on the things that we missed so it makes sense to just allow more space and time to establish the the world and the setup on the other side of that we have for example e.t like we talked about before there's only so much to say about a little boy living in suburbia we for

the most part get what that means and we don't really need to linger in order to understand that um elliot in et is also sort of like in every man i guess he's like an every boy or an every kid um and so lingering too long on the setup in that case can also differentiate him more from the average person and that isn't necessarily a good thing for what you want to accomplish in a more s in a simpler storyline a simple sort of you know monster shows up and how do you what are you

doing what do you respond in this unusual situation you know how do you handle that it's more something you want everybody to be able to relate to so in that case it doesn't necessarily make sense to add a lot of elements and conflicts and things like that to the status quo and that leads into the next point which i mentioned previous which is that the ability to create compelling conflicts is an important factor in how long you should linger in the status quo if a book really doesn't lend itself to compelling conflicts before the status

quo is disrupted it's not going to be a good candidate for a late disruption of the status quo so for example in a haunted house movie how long can the viewer really enjoy watching the characters move into the house before something spooky happens probably not very long and when you introduce the the other element you introduce the disruption that typically also introduces the genre elements for example horror elements or fantasy elements and so delaying that out can result in tedium or boredom it doesn't necessarily satisfy what the reader or the viewer was there to experience

so that's another reason why the conflicts might not be compelling even if you can create them because often you could come up with a way to add a conflict you could come up with some conflicts to pat out the beginning of say the conjuring or insidious or a film of that type however keep in mind there's only so long you can keep the reader interested in sort of basic mundane situations or ideas there's only so long the reader's going to be interested in the haunted house before the haunted house part starts happening yeah we could

add more conflicts we could we could brainstorm things that could happen in the conjuring maybe we could build more tension between the um the parents or between the kids but it really gets into why you know why would we do that what would be the benefit doesn't does it really add anything to the story and so that's what you really want to be careful with when you're determining how long you're going to linger in the setup is can you really create conflicts that are compelling and is that genuinely necessary is it really necessary to set

up a longer status quo or to linger longer in the status quo is there enough to set up that that's necessary so be careful with that when you're working on your book because a common issue is lingering too long in a status quo that really just isn't complicated isn't hard to understand like in the case with elliott and e.t it's just not it just doesn't need more it really just doesn't need much setup at all so be mindful of that it will help you a lot in determining um how long you want to spend on

the status quo it's also important to note that all of the setup doesn't have to happen before the disruption of the status quo in most cases your character's not going to completely leave the situation that they're in once the status quo is disrupted that can sometimes be the case it's usually not the case so if your character is not falling into a portal or getting shipped off to a boarding school somewhere they're probably still going to be interacting with the same people the same characters etc after their status quo is disrupted so a good example

of this is juno in juneau she finds out that she's pregnant very early practically at the very very beginning of the film and we don't really meet her characters uh her characters we don't really meet her family her friends the school things like that um until after her status quo is disrupted so keep in mind you can set up the novel after the status quo is disrupted you're not forced to just cram everything into the very very very beginning setup so i think that can be um believing that the entire setup has to occur before

the disruption of the status quo can sometimes be the reason that uh status quos can be bloated or or last for too long you also have to be mindful of that uh route being a potential solution if you're facing a problem of the setup scenes maybe feeling too much like set up like it's too obvious that you're just setting things up it's too obvious that you're just laying out the facts and the information you want the reader to know often in that case those stories are good candidates for an earlier disruption of the status quo

and then those setup elements can continue as the character is coping with the disruption of the status quo and that's a section of the novel that we're really going to talk about in the next video but i just want to touch on that briefly here when it comes down to what should it happen during the status quo or what you should include in the status quo the important factor to remember is that the status quo conflicts explain why the character gets involved in the core or the main storyline so for example in squid game which

is a very good example of this the setup conflicts are related to the character's willingness to gamble his financial difficulties why he's trying to get more money and that helps to explain and justify why he agrees to participate in the squid games so that's an element that's absolutely crucial to the status quo is establishing why a character would get involved in the core storyline that's why um i mentioned earlier with mundane storylines the point of a mundane status quo not a mundane storyline sorry why i mentioned previously a monday and status quo is that it

creates a contrast and justifies the interest and involvement in something that's highly unusual so a very mundane boring life could lead someone to be more attracted to participating in something highly unusual or exciting so even when the status quo is very very short and a simple mundane explanation of what's occurring it still justifies why the character ultimately gets involved in the core storyline another example of this is in disney's soul we see joe he's offered a job teaching but his dream is really to be a jazz musician and he tries to get this gig and

he's finally going to get this big break and he's going to be able to play with a jazz band and then his status quo is disrupted when he dies we know why he's so so desperate to get back to life and to uh you know reconnect with his body to be able to play this jazz gig because that was his dream and that's what we established during his conflicts in the setup a another example briefly because i think this is an interesting example is in um hocus pocus like i mentioned we see max meeting allison

as a positive experience for him so he's he doesn't like the town he's unhappy he's having a bad day he meets allison she's sort of a breath of fresh air his desire to sort of latch on to that good thing and that positive thing um in the town is what leads him to um agree to go with her to the sanderson sister house which is what sort of sparks the entire plot of the novel so it doesn't necessarily have to be obvious in the most overt sense why this conflict led to their involvement in the

main storyline but it's definitely something that's present and something that you can see when you look for it so the last point that i want to make about the status quo is to keep the character active make sure that they're not just sitting around doing nothing they should be working towards something or trying to accomplish something it's best and easiest for readers and viewers of films to empathize with characters when we see them actively trying and striving to achieve something or to improve their situation so for example in the shining we meet jack torrance when

he's he's trying to get a new job he's trying to get the job at the overlook hotel he's not just sitting around being an alcoholic or wishing that his family appreciated him more we see him striving to sort of redeem himself and to to improve his situation and again in seoul we see joe trying to get his gig his jazz gig he's taking action he's trying to change his situation it's very important to show the character being active and working towards something there is one exception to the character being active and that is that sometimes

the point of the status quo is that the character isn't being active they're not willing to engage in what they need to engage in in order to uh sort of better themselves or improve their situation so a good example of this is the babadook the in the um status quo we don't really see her taking a lot of actions her son is having behavioral problems we don't really see her doing a lot to solve that we don't really see her doing a lot in general but we do see and we should see in this case

how her failure to take action is hurting herself and the people around her so sometimes the point is that the character isn't taking action yet and that's something that they'll need to overcome and something they'll need to work on over the course of the novel and that's what we see with the babadook so that's that's an exception but it is not uh typical so if you do go that route there should be a reason and the reason should be um there should be a reason if the character is inactive and that reason should be that

that really demonstrates an important factor in what they need to overcome emotionally throughout the story so lastly now i want to go over why you might not open with the status quo so why a film or a novel might not start with the status quo note the status quo will still be there it is not replaced this isn't replacing the status quo but when you might start with a prologue essentially rather than just starting with the current storyline status quo so there are a few main reasons that this tends to happen um the first reason

is that necessary information wouldn't enter the story soon enough or there'd be no natural way to introduce information into the storyline so perhaps if you don't use the prologue you would have to have a weird info dump or a weird conversation between two characters sort of an as you know bob conversation where things are discussed or it might even be the case that the character doesn't know the information yet but the information still needs to be in the story earlier so that's one reason you might start with a prologue another reason might be to raise

anticipation for the disruption of the status quo so the prologue may hint or give sort of glimpses or glimmers of what's going to come later on when the status quo actually is disrupted and that might be done to compensate for a status quo that might be a little bit long or a little bit slow or boring or maybe doesn't quite have the elements that the reader reviewer would want and the last reason which is probably the most common reason maybe is that genre elements wouldn't enter the story soon enough if you didn't have a prologue

so this is really really really common in horror it's also really common in fantasy especially those that are set in sort of the ordinary regular world where the disruption of the status quo involves injecting fantasy or horror elements into the story but that doesn't happen right at the very beginning so you you have a setup um you have a status quo that maybe needs to last a little bit longer but throughout that status quo we're not really going to be seeing the fantasy elements or the horror elements so rather than just have those things enter

the story late a prologue allows the reader or the viewer to still get the tone and the vibe in the genre introduced at the beginning so um an example of this would be gremlins gremlins like we talked about it has billy's uh bad day his horrible day at work before he gets the um gizmo the gremlin but the film actually starts with his dad buying the gremlin that gets that fantasy element in it gets some of the information like we get the rules so it kind of gives us a glimpse and a glimmer of what

that disruption is going to be we can kind of infer that you know the problem that's going to cause because it's going to be related to these rules that we're getting uh for how this this gremlin works so it it gives us a sense of what we can expect and it gives us a bit of fantasy element so then when we go into the ordinary regular world that billy is struggling in he's having his really bad day at the bank we don't have to rely on that as the hook because it's really not a very

good hook especially for children and families you want something that's more exciting and interesting to really pull them into the story hocus pocus is another really good example of this the opening scene has the witches interacting with factory who's trying to save a sister he gets turned into a cat it's a very whimsical fantasy element and that really helps to pull the reader or the viewer into the the story and get through that more boring first day of school set up phase which might not be that interesting for younger kids and it also doesn't really

have that fantasy element so the fantasy element would enter quite late if um that prologue wasn't included so those are the reasons why you might want to include a prologue i do want to talk about two other prologue type structures one would be a flashback so even though we're talking about a prologue i would consider consider this to be a flashback because it primarily occurs before the core storyline a good example of this would be the babadook in the babadook the um first scene is the car crash where her husband dies and we really establish

uh her flaw her sort of emotional core and that's very common with this flashback structure is that it would sort of establish the emotional basis of the film or the story or or the novel so we meet her during this uh car crash this big cataclysmic event and that's really what forms the basis of her flaw and her character arc through the novel is her needing to deal with that grief and what occurred so that is very common with the flashback structure is that it's a flashback to the origin of the flaw or the thing

that caused the um the emotional context or the emotional problem of the story you also sometimes have stories that start with a flash forward deadpool is a good example of this it opens with a big fight sequence and again this is really done to buffer out the fact that that more exciting superhero element wouldn't really enter the story early on if not for that so because it's an origin story for deadpool there's a lot of things that need to be set up and established and it wouldn't necessarily be super exciting for the viewer who really

just came for the superhero and the more exciting action-y part so that lets us know what we're going to expect and it helps to pull us through the potentially more boring status quo so that is all i have for you today i really hope that you found this video helpful i'm really excited to keep moving forward with this series that said the next video is going to be one of the writer types i have two types left to cover methodological plotter and intuitive pantser uh please let me know in the comments if you have a

preference of which of those videos i prioritize for the very next video that i upload thank you so so much to my patreon supporters it really means so so much to me that you are helping support this channel if you're interested in supporting on patreon i will be doing a q a there once a month this month january is the first uh q a so if that interests you the link will be in the description so i will see you all again soon let me know what questions you have i'm happy to make a follow-up

video if there are things i didn't cover about the status quo or if you're still confused about anything please just let me know i'm always happy to make follow-up videos so in the meantime happy writing guys