Hi,
I’m a novelist and I always used to jump to the PSR to get a handle on the signposts.
However, more recently I have been forcing myself to use the ‘objective’ variations that sit below the signpost to get an initial feel for what a signpost is about.
I do that because I worried that by going straight to the PSR variations, I was skipping a step, and failing to get a clear ‘objective’ encoding for the signpost.
This is the method I am playing with at the moment: I use each objective variation to develop a beat for the signpost, and then put these beats into some kind of PRCO order, that makes sense to me, and gives the story a progression.
So for example, Signpost 1 for my MC is Contemplation, and I have created 4 objective beats, using investigation, appraisal, doubt, and reappraisal, in that order (my choice).
I can summarise these beats to get a simple encoding for the signpost, which by focusing on the elements below, I trust to be a decent encoding of Contemplation.
However, once I have the four ‘objective’ beats, I can also map them to the PSR variations, and think about how my main character would distort these ‘objective’ beats into the PSR beats.
Thus the PSR for my MC signpost 1 is: closure, hope, dream, and denial (in that order).
However, if I try to get inside the head of my MC, I can easily see how the MC would distort investigation into closure, appraisal into hope, doubt into not dreaming, and reappraisal into denial, based on the story material I developed in the first step.
So I can still see how to use the PSR sequence to develop the signpost, but I am no longer using it as a first step. If I dived straight into beats for closure, hope, dream, and denial, there is a risk my signpost would not be a good encoding for Contemplation. So I try for a more objective encoding first…
I’m pretty sure Jim did an article looking at the variations of a signpost both objectively and subjectively. I think it was for Doing, and it was about about someone crossing a river… anyway, I remember thinking it was fascinating (I don’t have the link). In an ideal world, one would be able to ‘see’ both views when developing a story… but yes, perhaps we novelists have to work a little harder to see things objectively like the screenwriters!