On the PSR, is dealing with someone else’s attitude toward you a variation illustration of attitude or of approach?
Is the attitude causing conflict? Or is the characters approach to dealing with it causing conflict?
Both.
Like a character who is accused of an affair with his best friend’s wife, the best friend’s response is creating conflict and the tactic to just ignore the accusation (because “nobody would believe me anyway”) is creating conflict.
What is the PSR order. Is there a way to explore one and then the other?
It falls under the RS, Signpost 2 (Developing an Idea), Attitude / Approach / Self Interest / Morality
I’d use it as is, then. Start the scene with the problematic attitude and then slide over to the approach of dealing with the attitude by the end of it so you get both in one scene.
If you don’t want to do that, just show the problematic attitude in the first scene, and how everyone else reacts to it in a way that makes it problematic. But don’t introduce the approach of ignoring the accusation until the next scene.
It’s a novel. Approach and Attitude are different scenes.
Who are the RS players in this? The character accused of cheating and the best friend? If so, you need to look at the attitude of the relationship itself for best results, not just the attitude of the angry friend. So instead of the best friend accusing the other character of having an affair and having an attitude about it, it should be something like:
Attitude Gist of Being Candid or Forthright
Character 1 “We need to talk about something. Every time my wife has to stay late at work, you can’t go to the bar and hang out because of some dumb excuse. To be honest, I think you’re sleeping with my wife.”
Character 2 “I can’t believe you’d just come right out and say something like that. I don’t care for you much right now”
C1 “Just tell me the truth, dude. We’ve been friends a long time. I can handle it. Did you or did you not sleep with my wife?”
From here C2 can say “yeah, I did” and the candor can drive the friends apart, or C2 can say “no, I didn’t” and the lack of candor can drive the friends apart.
I still struggle a bit with RS, so that’s probably not the best example. And I’m aware the the dialogue is poor, but it’s just an example. Haha.