What is the First Quarter Debate? | Story Structure Pt. 2

hey guys it's ellen brock novel editor today is going to be the second video in my series on advanced story structure so in this series rather than focusing on the major plot points i'm focusing or putting more emphasis on the sections in between the major plot points because i think that's the section or those are the sections that people tend to really struggle with even after they understand the major plot points so in the previous video we talked about the status quo and how the status quo will eventually be disrupted and that disruption is sometimes

called the catalyst or the inciting incident but i just prefer to refer to refer to it as the disruption today we're going to talk about the section that happens after the disruption of the status quo this section in screenwriting is often called the debate and i'm going to stick with that as the term that i use in this video mainly because i think there's it really a term that i prefer and debate sort of best encapsulates what this can look like in different genres so even though we're talking about novels and films i am going

to use the more screenwriter focused terminology of the debate i am going to be using films as the examples in this video as well not because what i'm saying doesn't apply to novels but because i want to give examples that either you might already know really well or you can quickly watch them and all of the the films that i'm going to be referencing are streaming at various places so you'll be able to most likely watch at least a few of them that way you'll be able to learn more quickly and easily and these structural

structural elements are also a lot easier to see in film than in novels so that's why i'm using films as an example but i am planning on doing a series where i deconstruct novels so if you have a novel that you want me to structurally deconstruct just let me know in the comments because i'll be preparing those videos in the near future so in case you're concerned about spoilers i will be providing information and details about the plots of several films however i'm not going to go past the first plot point so it's really not

more than you'd probably get from watching a trailer or something like that but if you are concerned the films that i'm going to be talking about and potentially spoiling just the beginning of our juno toy story deadpool secret window oculus and the hunger games the film so i want to start by talking about the length of the debate section if you watched the previous video you might remember that we talked about the status quo being of a variable length so it can be very short or very long and the debate section is exactly the same

however it's dependent on the length of the status quo so if you have a short status quo you're most likely going to have a long debate and if you have a long status quo you're most likely going to have a short debate these uh two sections could also be closer to 50 50 and that's completely fine as well anywhere any sort of split or divide is completely fine but we're shooting for about 20 to 25 of the total length of the story split between these sections so we might think about the disruption of the status

quo as a sort of floating plot point that can hit anywhere in the first quarter but it splits it into two distinct parts and those parts are the status quo and the debate where that hits is completely up to you and dependent on your story in the previous video we talked about reasons why you might need a longer or shorter status quo so if you're not sure where you want that disruption to occur you might find the previous video more helpful in determining that than this video so what actually happens in this section in the

debate this section can look pretty different between different books and films because what the character is doing is reacting to the disruption of the status quo and because the status quo disruption can look very different between different books and films what the character has to do wants to do needs to do in this section can vary quite a bit but what this section always contains is a reaction to that disruption in many cases the protagonist is trying to maintain or hold on to the status quo so they're not ready to to have things change or

accept that things have changed they want to keep things as they were sometimes this can take the form of denial so the character might sort of be crossing their arms and saying you know no my house isn't haunted and no my spouse isn't going to leave me or no i'm not in financial trouble a really good example of this is toy story and toy story woody is andy the human boy's favorite toy and for his birthday the human boy andy gets buzz which is this new really cool exciting toy and we see that buzz is

replacing woody but woody is in denial about that he tells his friends you know just wait everything's gonna go back to normal you know it was just an accident that andy put buzz in my spot on the bed woody is not able to accept or he's refusing to accept the reality of the situation that he's being replaced in many cases the character will be attempting to maintain a status quo that is impossible and usually that's because they have two different paths that they could sort of take and one would be externally preferable and one would

be internally preferable so you can think of this as two options one that's positive externally but negative internally and one that's negative externally and positive internally a good example of this is juno so in juneau we don't really see much of a setup but we can assume or infer that her status quo is just being a normal teen so the disruption of her status quo is finding out that she's pregnant which of course would force her to leave normal teen life or it would force her to be in a very different sort of situation though

the debate is pretty subtle in this film it does a really good job of demonstrating that push and pull between the two options so the easy choice in terms of maintaining an external status quo would be for juno to go to the women's clinic and end the pregnancy which is what she sort of attempts to do but we know that she's also struggling with that not being internally satisfying because we can see that in several subtler moments hesitations and interactions and things like that and more specifically when she talks to uh bleecker who's the father

she tells him that she's thinking about nipping it in the bud and asks are you okay with that or are you cool with that and you can tell in that moment that she's really hoping that he'll argue with her that he'll say no he's not okay with it and through that we can see that she's really struggling with feeling okay with it that this isn't an option that is satisfying to her on an internal level it's not uh allowing her to sort of maintain her her perhaps her status quo view of herself so in that

she is needing to choose between an externally preferable option and an internally preferable option but there's really no option where she can maintain both where she can maintain her external status quo of just being a normal teen and her internal status quo of how she views herself or her moral compass or however you want to conceptualize it so the key thing to remember is that in many many many cases the protagonist is waffling between two bad choices so another really good example of this is in deadpool and deadpool uh his wade wilson's status quo is

that he's pretty much just living a happy life with his girlfriend vanessa and then his status quo is disrupted when he's diagnosed with cancer so here we see again he's choosing between two bad options so he can either stay with vanessa through his cancer treatment which he views as sort of putting her through a difficult time in ruining her life and um you know forcing her to see him deteriorate and all of that being very negative and then on the other hand of course his desire to be with her and to stay with her but

he can't do both he can't stay with her and not have her be forced to cope with his cancer and what that will do to them so it's two bad options and that's important because you don't want the decision to be easy if the decision was easy or simple there wouldn't be a debate so we really need to make sure that both of those options are negative so we could think about or conceptualize this section as the character perhaps asking how can i return to the status quo as quickly and as pain-free as possible and

of course in that case the answer is going to be they can't or they might be asking uh which of these two options is the least bad so which of these is the least painful and then eventually they're going to be forced to make a choice between those two things so what ends the debate the debate section ends when a moment or an event forces or inspires the character to make their choice to pick which of those two bad options they're going to go with so in deadpool that moment happens when um wade wilson is

approached by a recruiter and the recruiter asks him to try this experimental treatment it will cure his cancer but it will also turn him into a superhero which he knows will force him away from being with vanessa his girlfriend so that path is going to force him away from her so in this type of situation what you'll usually see especially with the hero's journey is you'll see a refusal of the call you'll see the character initially say no and this helps to emphasize that this is a difficult choice if the character were to just say

yeah sure i'll i'll go with that i'll take that option we wouldn't really as the reader feel that that difficulty and that challenge and how momentous of a decision it is for the character so there's usually that hesitation in there when it's a very overt option when when um the debate uh sort of takes sort of ends through the form of a proposition so a character just saying hey do you want to do this thing normally the protagonist will say no they'll normally make an attempt to go back to the status quo at that point

and they'll realize the status quo actually doesn't exist anymore so they'll sort of have to face the reality that they really can't go back so um in deadpool we get a voiceover which actually really helps us to hear because he's literally telling us this um in the voice over he goes back to his apartment and he's hanging out with vanessa watching her sleep he's just sort of sitting there contemplating but through the voiceover we understand that he's debating uh between those two bad options and he's thinking you know i really can't put her through this

and even though you know i've already said no to this recruiter i just can't do it i can't actually follow through with making that choice so he packs his bag and he leaves the apartment and that makes his decision he's chosen his path his path is away from vanessa another common iteration of this would be the protagonist is threatened and initially they just don't take the threat that seriously or it's not significant enough for them yet and then another event pushes them into into feeling that you know okay this really is a big deal this

really is a big threat now so a good example of that is in the film secret window so in secret window which is an adaptation of a stephen king story um the main character is a writer named mort he's struggling with divorce and writer's block and he is approached by a man called john shooter who tells him you stole my story you stole you plagiarized this manuscript and so he's struggling and debating with whether or not he can sort of acknowledge the fact that that's what he did uh to acknowledge that he might have plagiarized

it would hurt his sort of internal status quo his sort of internal view of himself but to deny it he is sort of forced to contend with this unsavory character of john shooter so what happens in terms of this ending the debate structure that we're talking about is john shooter confronts him and he says you know i'm going to give you three days you figure out how to prove that this manuscript wasn't stolen um or else and we see that mort the protagonist clearly doesn't take this threat very seriously he he feels threatened but he

doesn't take it that seriously he goes home and he kind of thinks about you know maybe kind of doing something but then he decides to take a nap but then we get the event that pushes him and he has to make a choice and that's when he finds that his dog has been killed that jon shooter has killed his dog he left a note uh reiterating that mort has three days to prove that he didn't steal this story so in that moment we feel along with more that push that you know now you've done it

now i have to get involved there's no way now of saying uh of sort of staying on the fence or saying i'm not really gonna have to make this choice you know he really feels like at that in that moment he he needs to to make a choice now things have gotten serious this isn't just you know little threats this is you know actual violence so he then goes to the police and that's what pushes him towards or indicates that he's chosen a path he's chosen this path of fighting externally rather than choosing the internal

path of saying you know maybe i did plagiarize this story um but that would force him into an uncomfortable internal turmoil so he's sort of choosing the external turmoil instead in many cases the path being chosen is going to be pretty subtle so for example in toy story we have um woody just sort of having to face reality he really can't deny reality anymore he sees um you know the poster that used to be about of him is now of buzz the bedspread that used to be of him is now of buzz and the icing

on the cake is when andy the human boy chooses to take buzz to bed with him at night instead of woody and so woody you know sleeps in the toy chest and he wakes up the next morning in the toy chest so he can't deny any more that he's been replaced he's literally physically been replaced so that's another form that you'll see with uh the end of the debate is sometimes it's just it becomes impossible to deny reality he just he can't deny it anymore the debate will also sometimes end by eliminating one of the

options because when push comes to shove and the character looks really in the eye of one of the options they realize you know i actually can't follow through with that option or i can't to do that and juno is a really good example of that she goes to the women's clinic outside the women's clinic there's a girl who tells her that you know her baby has fingernails and we see when she goes in that she's noticing all the fingernails of all the people in the waiting room she's sort of getting this anxiety attack and she's

realizing you know i can't follow through with this you know when she looks in the eye of what that option is she realizes she doesn't actually even have the capacity to follow through with that choice and so she's forced to make the other choice which is stay pregnant and this film is actually a really good example of this and um it's quite overt because she goes she runs um out of the clinic to her friend and she tells her friend i'm staying pregnant which is a very conclusive statement and her friend reminds her of what's

at stake when she makes this choice so sort of what the risks are of this choice you know they're not going to let you go on spring break everybody's going to get really mad at you and you know you're going to get pregnant like physically grow in pregnancy and juno replies with saying well maybe they'll canonize me for being so selfless and that really shows that she's picking what she thinks is the internally correct choice rather than picking what could be the externally easy choice or what would easily let her go back to the status

quo so i really like that as an example because i think it's pretty blatant what her debate was about and how she decided to choose the more emotionally fulfilling path over the easier external path so now that we've talked about the debate and sort of the different forms that it takes let's talk about the common problems and pitfalls with this section so one of the most common problems is simply not defining what the debate is even though the debate can take really subtle forms and you might have to kind of try to find it in

films or books especially when you're not really used to looking for the structural elements you might have to really try to assess you know what what's the debate even really about but as the writer if you're plotting especially if you're plotting or if you're in the editing phase and you're sort of refining your story you really need to define what's the debate actually about because it's very difficult to create the sort of tension that's necessary to prevent this section from feeling slow or meandering if you don't define the debate because what you don't want is

the is this section of your story to feel like you're just stalling you're just making it take longer on purpose and you've probably read books or seen films where you've sort of felt that vibe either the the character just had no good reason not to choose a path and it just sort of felt like the story stagnated and it couldn't really uh you know get going or get past this section and that's often because the debate just isn't that well defined so writing it down can be helpful especially if you're a plotter uh you have

to sort of think about how to put your character between a rock and a hard place and to really put risks and stakes on both sides so that there isn't an obvious choice so for example in deadpool if wade wilson had been given an 80 chance of surviving his cancer we wouldn't really have understood what the debate was about we would have said okay well statistically you know maybe just stay with vanessa because probably you're going to live and you guys will be able to be happy together it requires that the cancer be terminal for

him to have that debate because we have to know there's almost no chance that he's going to survive and he's almost definitely going to have to see the effects of the cancer on vanessa and we would not have felt that if if the debate wasn't as defined if even if those risks weren't defined so we really need to know what's bad about both paths so that we understand why the character doesn't just jump on one right away it's also important to note that this decision only needs to be difficult because of who your character actually

is so another character would have absolutely no problem staying with their partner through the cancer treatment and you know dying sort of in the arms of their partner lots of characters would not have a problem with that but wade wilson does have a problem with that so it's important to keep in mind it doesn't have to be something that's universally understood or accepted it just has to be true for your character so there has to be you know a view of both options being bad for this character specifically another really common problem with the debate

section is thinking that the debate has to be about the most obvious question that the novel poses or that the setup poses so a really good example to talk about this is the film oculus in the film oculus it's about a brother and sister who experienced a tragedy during their childhood which the sister attributes to a haunted mirror and the brother attributes to their father so a non-supernatural source if we were plotting this you know we were writers we were talking about you know how would we plot this out we might uh look at this

this dichotomy that's set up of the sister believing in the paranormal the brother who is the protagonist not believing in the paranormal and thinking you know the the impacts of this child of the childhood event uh were caused by you know natural normal causes of you know their father um we might look at that and say well then the debate is going to be is it supernatural or is it not because that's the most obvious question posed by this story but that's actually not at all what the debate in this uh film is about uh

the debate's actually about whether or not the brother will help the sister even though he doesn't believe that the mirror is paranormal so the sister has gotten a mirror and she's she wants to destroy it she wants his help destroying it she sort of just wants him around during this experience and he wants to sort of maintain his view which is that you know it wasn't paranormal the events weren't paranormal but his debate's not about that it's not about is it paranormal or is it not it's do i help my sister with this or do

i not so his decision to stay with her as she tries to destroy the mirror is the conclusion of his debate he's made his choice you know i'm going to engage with this uh this event i'm going to help her destroy this mirror or at least be present while she destroys this mirror because i care about her he's not deciding anything about the paranormal so when you're plotting your novel it's important to keep uh to keep that in mind that just because there is an obvious question that doesn't mean that that has to be what

the debate is about another common problem is not entangling the status quo problem with the debate so if you recall in the status quo video we talked about a longer status quo uh usually it contains some kind of conflict or problem that the character is trying to solve a status quo problem that's not always the case like we just talked about with some examples juno doesn't really have or we don't know of any status quo problem that's overtly defined wade wilson doesn't have an overly defined status quo problem and so once a disruption happens they

don't need to worry about some other element or some other component because it's just not there however frequently there will be a status quo problem like we talked about with secret window with mort he was dealing with divorce and writer's block so he has these two big status quo problems that he's trying to deal with and those problems don't go away when the status quo is disrupted so when john shooter accuses him of plagiarism he still has writer's block and he still has his divorce to contend with those issues don't go away so a common

problem is not entangling those two things because by entangling those two things having them sort of impact each other and interact with each other it helps you to build up more content for this debate section so for example in secret window initially mort uh doesn't look at the manuscript so john shooter leaves the manuscript he says you plagiarize this you know here it is here's the main script you played your eyes you know not in so many words but that's basically what happens uh and mort throws it in the trash but mort goes and tries

to work on his novel he gets writer's block he gets frustrated he gets up to get a drink and he sees his cleaning lady has put the manuscript on the table so then he looks at it because he is procrastinating because of his status quo problem which is writer's block later on when um john shooter gives him his ultimatum and he says you know you have three days to prove that you wrote this story first a big part of why he doesn't initially take action like we talked about his dog's death pushes him to take

action but why he doesn't take action at that first threat a big part of that is because he would have to talk to his wife his ex-wife in order to get the manuscript from her to have her mail it to him so he can say look see you know i did publish this here it is but he doesn't want to talk to his ex-wife because of his status quo problem so his status quo problem is interacting with his debate and that helps to build up more content in this section so that is very often necessary

in order for the section to be long enough and also uh it helps to sort of incorporate those elements or incorporate the status quo conflict and sort of maintain its relevance a little bit so that's something that you probably want to consider especially if you have a longer status quo again like we talked about in the status quo um video it's completely fine if there's not a status quo problem as long as the status quo isn't too long in which case it's going to feel really really slow to the reader or viewer the last common

problem that i want to talk about in this video is misidentifying the first plot point so often the debate gets muddled or confused forgotten mixed up etc because at the plotting phase or perhaps at the writing or editing phase if you incorporate structure at in those phases of your process the writer will believe that they they know a certain event has to be the first plot point i think that this typically happens because even myself and other uh people who give writing advice in general will often give examples of what the first plot point might

look like and that can sort of those sort of examples can make people feel that anything that fits into that type of scene has to be the first plot point which is not the case so you know we might give examples like you know getting kidnapped or getting you know um going to a new school you know as things where it marks the entry into the second quarter or the second act because you know it's a point of no return however those events could occur earlier those events don't mean that that's the first plot point

because it's more than just the content or the concept of the scene so a really good example of this which will hopefully illustrate what i'm trying to explain better than i'm explaining it right now is the hunger games and i'm going to talk about the film not the book so in the film of the hunger games we might think about the story say we were writing the story we might think okay katniss volunteering to be the tribute to replace her sister because her sister's name is called to participate in the hunger games and she volunteers

we might say well her volunteering is the first plot point because the point of no return you know it's this big decision she can't take back and it sets her on the path to the rest for the rest of the story but there's a big problem with that concept which is that that actually only occurs 11 into the film so in order for that to be the first plot point we would have needed to bulk up the first part of the quarter to make that happen late enough that it would hit as the first plot

point and that might have been a big mistake if we were plotting this thinking that has to be the first plot point um because it would have really messed up sort of the pacing because we kind of want to get things moving along you know we don't want to linger in her district for too long and delay getting to the meat of the story because it's a pretty complicated story with a lot of characters and events and things like that so we kind of want to get it off the ground well you might in that

case be thinking then okay so katniss agrees to go to the hunger games so she doesn't have a debate because you know that was sort of her call to action and she accepted it and she you know she didn't debate she didn't question however we do have a debate for katniss and it does occur after she agrees to be the tribute to replace her sister and her debate is actually about whether or not she's able to attempt to win the games sort of specifically it's implied that her big question is you know can i kill

people can i kill people to survive and to win we kind of get the impression that she is going to choose to not that she's going to choose to not participate in the games or to sort of just accept her death and we get this debate very clearly it's just very easy to miss if you're looking at structure in terms of examples of plot points or certain plot certain events mean that something is a certain plot point rather than the vibe or the tone or what's going on internally sort of defining what those sections are

so after katniss agrees to be the tribute she talks to her family and she tells her mom you know you need to take care of prim her little sister you need to take care of her now they sort of imply that the mother has been depressed and hasn't done a very good job taking care of her and we can sort of infer that katniss might be saying you know i'm not coming back it's up to you now we also have gail who tells her you know find a bow you know it's just like hunting and

she says you know i hunt animals you know the implication being i don't hunt people and then later when she is on the train with peta peta you know is competing alongside her they both have a mentor and that mentor is haymitch and peta and haymitch you know haymitch is not really very uh willing to help them at first but peter sort of like pursuing that you know he's like come on you know you got to help us you know we need help and katniss sort of says you know there's no point you know it

doesn't matter we don't need you know basically you know in her mind she's saying we're gonna die anyway you know and what difference does it make we're gonna die so you know whatever like we don't we don't need to to try so hard to try to make this work out however we see katniss watching coverage of a previous game and she sees the moment where one of the previous tributes became the victor by killing the last person in the hunger games so everyone died they became the champion and in that moment we see katniss sort

of have this realization or this sort of inspiration and then we don't really get any specific information about what it is so we really do have to infer what it is and and um again it's that event where she's sort of faced with the reality you know if you choose to die you know you're going to be the one in this footage who died and if you choose to be the victor you're going to have to be the one who does the killing so we know that she's made a choice because she overhears um peta

and haymitch having a conversation you know uh they're talking about strategy and things like that and she comes into the room having just overheard them say you know something like that will get you killed and she comes into the room and says what will get you killed and that's the first time that she's engaging with that concept of you know how can we win you know how how can i not die so we know then that she has made a choice that she is choosing that she is going to attempt to win which means she

is going to have to try to kill people or succeed in killing people um so she has chosen that path so i really really like this example because it shows that the structure of a novel is not always the most obvious or the most straightforward or what might occur to you at first when you're first looking at your ideas and you're first looking at plotting it might not be that super obvious choice you know that moment that feels like the first plot point might not be the first plot point and if you try to force

it to be or conceptualize it to be you might get confused either about where you place the debate whether there is a debate so really try to open up a little bit um open up i guess you're thinking it can be so difficult to do that to separate those examples that you might have heard of first plot points from sort of like the practicality of how they actually play out or the concept of how they play out it can be so hard to separate those ideas but if you can really focus on those in between

sections and what those sections are doing it can help you to better pin down where exactly those plot points fall and which plot point you know you really want to actually be the first plot point because it's not always going to be the most obvious option so that is all that i have for you today i really really hope that this helped you to understand this section of the novel i know that it's kind of a tricky complicated section if you have questions let me know i'm happy to make follow-up videos or answer any questions

in the comments if if they're easy enough that i can do that so definitely let me know also again please do let me know what novels you'd like to see structurally broken down in future videos because that is also something that i want to do um once we get through this series to sort of help pull it all together and we can really dissect and look at one story beginning to end or several stories beginning to end you know how how do these things really play out um over an entire novel so let me know

about that if you want to help to support the channel i do have a patreon which you can support i'll put a link in the description the next video is going to be about the intuitive pantser i know a lot of you have been waiting a really long time for that video it will finally be up probably week after next if all goes well so we will you know all keep our fingers crossed that i can manage to get it done in that time frame thank you all so much for your support whether on patreon

through your comments watching the videos sharing the videos it really means a lot to me and i will see you all again soon and in the meantime happy riding