Choosing Throughlines

A secular world peace activist (IC) and a religious zealot with an apocalyptic agenda (MC) end up hiding in the same secret room from aliens that have invaded the world.

By virtue of being an activist, the IC goes in the Activity Through line quad
By virtue of having an agenda (plan) : the MC goes in the Psychology Through line quad
By virtue of the IC and MC being stuck together in one room to hash out opposing points of view: RS in Situation TL
Which automatically leaves the OS in the Fixed Attitude TL

Thoughts ??? Is this the right way to think about selecting Throughlines ?

That’s a pretty good start. One minor correction, instead of saying “IC goes in the Activity Throughline” you could say “the IC Throughline Domain is Activity”.

There are two ways you could run into trouble here:

  1. If you had a bunch of other ideas about this story that weren’t mentioned in that summary sentence, it may be that your throughlines should be in different domains. Like maybe the IC is an activist, but if you had all these ideas of his conflict stemming from his fear & doubt, then he might be in Fixed Attitude.
  2. If you’re building the story from scratch, just be aware of what these throughline assignments mean. For example, the IC throughline’s conflict (and influence) is going to come from activities in the physical realm. If you just say he’s an activist, but don’t encode how all the conflict and influence stems from activities, it’s not enough.

Also, hashing out opposing points of view is not really the RS. The RS is more about the developing relationship between them. Maybe despite their opposing points of view, they end up like brothers to each other, or end up falling in love. Or maybe they had a relationship before this whole thing, friends or enemies or grandparent/grandchild, and the story puts that to the test. This might help: focusing-in-on-the-relationship-throughline

Thank you! This helps a lot. The only thing I know for sure is the mc has a concern of developing a plan and gets lost in the process of thought. I guess since I am certain of that then ic has to be in activity. But for sure I need to figure out how this relationship pans out. Hope to check back when I pull together some ideas. Your input is insightful thanks!!