The Normal World of the First Act

The terms normal world and adventure world are derived from concepts in the hero's journey made famous by Joseph Campbell. In my archetype series, I used distinctive terms for the first and second acts in each archetypal arc. The function of the normal world in a story is to indicate to readers the status quo from which the protagonist is about to depart. It represents not so much a physical setting, but more so a state of being. As such, the normal world may indeed represent the most normal of all normalities.