Original Normal vs. New Normal

Whether the arc is focused on external happenings or internal ones, whether it’s your own point of view or someone else’s, the story structure always moves you somewhere.

It moves from an original normal (the way things used to be before the events of the story) to the new normal (the way things are after the events of the story).

You may be looking at this image and thinking to yourself, Wait. Does that mean that the backstory is just the original normal and the resolution is the new normal?

Yes. That is exactly how I think of them.

A longer story structure is much the same. The only difference is that you hit a bunch of smaller new normals along the way, every time the story plateaus.

If you think back over stories you’ve watched or read, you’ve seen this change before.

Think of a novel series, like a trilogy: at the beginning of the first novel, you see a certain set-up (the original normal). By the time you reach the last chapter of the last novel, the dust has settled a bit. Everything may have changed a bit, but it’s stabilized. At the end of each novel, you usually also reach another stabilization—or a mini new-normal. It’s not as different as the final resolution, but that’s okay. It more-or-less becomes the original normal of the next book.

In both, the story needs to bring you from someplace old to someplace new. If everything is the same at the end of the story as it is at the beginning of the story, then the story tends to fall flat and remain ultimately forgettable.

Think about your favorite TV show. The filler episodes in the middle of a season tend to start and end with the same normal—they’re considered “episodic,” because it’s just an episode in the characters’ world. It lacks a significant shift. The most impactful and memorable episodes are the ones where the normal established at the beginning of that show is different than what you see at the end of the same show. That’s because there has been a significant shift inside the character’s world, a shift that brought the story forward. The significant shift is the secret ingredient in a character-driven story.

As the writer, it’s your job to create a shift significant enough so that the reader also feels like the original normal has given way to a new one.

If the normal at the end does feel the same as the one at the beginning, revisit your story and figure out why the changes aren’t hitting home. In my experience, true change—from an original normal to a new normal—can only occur if the external happenings sink in deep enough to impact an individual’s inner world, whether this is a story you’re writing or a story you’re living.

Everything that occurs in a story has a purpose. This is easy to see with the catalyst and the significant shift, but it’s also true of what happens in the murky middle—the external events and the accompanying internal epiphanies help the character travel to somewhere different than where they started. A well-told story takes the reader along too.

In other words, every character is headed in a particular direction. And I believe every person Is too. That’s why I’ve named this Season: “People Are Stories-in-Progress.”

We are “in progress,” because we are still growing.

External happenings trigger an individual’s internal development, and each shift has the potential to bring an individual—real or fictional—to another version of themselves. An individual can constantly learn from their experience and therefore transform, because life will demand a different version of you at age 13 than it does at age 33 or at age 93.

There’s always another “new normal” waiting for you or your characters.

Good storytelling just captures it.

But, you may ask, what precisely is the new normal? How do you find it?

That’s easy.

It’s whatever works, for the story or for you. There can be as many new normals as there are stories and people.

But in all my years of reading and writing, I’ve noticed this: the transformation you see between the original normal and the new normal tells you something about the storyteller.

The more work of a particular writer you consume, whether it’s the books they publish or the stories they tell about themselves, the more you can see the patterns. Those patterns usually reveal the storyteller’s own foundational lens. You can usually get an idea of what growth they believe is possible—both for characters and for people.

For example, I’ve just told you mine:

Individuals, whether a person or a character, are constantly growing into their new normal, and no one is actually done growing. We continue to grow as long as our story unfolds, which means as long as we are alive.

Now, we’ll travel through a new story, one that happened to me.

Then we’ll take a look at how I processed that story—and the way that influenced solving problems in my fiction.