I was more worried about big plot events or stuff like “how do I make this character do X without making them unlikable or bending them out of character to serve a plot?”
I wanted the story to end a certain way, so I had to do a major overhaul of a certain character, making him younger and teen-mind scattered, so another character could continue being the main influence IC. I find it helps to type where the characters are supposed to be, a sentence a chapter, with the end I want. Then think it over.
A. In this case, I believe your storyform is off.
B. That strategy of determining your OS concern is unfortunately not very sound. This is because “not letting failure hold you back” might represent any number of concerns.
C. You can always change illustrations. The story belongs to you. You are in control of it. Shape it however you like. Moreover, you’re entitled to make mistakes. What’s that saying-- there’s no making an omelette without cracking a few eggs? That applies to the writing process as well.
D. Yes, you probably are procrastinating, but you’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Writing a novel is hard; pinning down a storyform is hard. Creating anything is hard. The only way to avoid that challenge is not to create anything at all. I hope you don’t take that path, but if you choose to keep trying, you will have to tackle one side of that equation or the other and wrestle it to the ground until you’ve got it pinned. Sorry to say there’s no way around it.
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My advice: learn to take a leap of faith. Either take one with regards to trusting your own instincts, or take one with regard to trusting the guidance of people on this forum. But you’ll have to learn to trust someone’s judgement or the damn novel’s never going to get written.
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The OS concern of your story should be either Learning or Conceiving, depending on whether you put the OS in Physics or Psychology. I would suggest Learning, as it seems like a better fit. (OS: Physics)
Your MC problem is Evaluation. His throughline is in Universe. Your IC is in Mind. Your MC is a linear do-er who changes by the end of the story. The story is driven by Action and ends with a judgement of Good.
You are now down to two storyforms, depending on whether the OS ends in success or failure.
Why do I think this? You described the story lesson as ‘don’t let fear of failure hold you back if you want to be happy.’ So the OS goal is either learn how to manage fear of failure or conceive of a way to manage fear of failure.
I do like that kind of thing, like writing an objective “MC feels X because of Y.”
More like more like running on the stones of Brighton Beach during the storm and so and so standing on the skittle/ship/whatever and another ch watching/waiting/whatever.
Just wanted to add to what @Audz is saying, and remind you that you do not need to know the full storyform before you start writing.
Even if you’re only sure of Judgment, Resolve, and who the MC & IC are, that’s still WAY more than most writers know before they start.
So either take a leap of faith and go with a storyform you’re not sure of (you can always change it later to match what you end up writing). Or, proceed with only what you know about. Either way, you’ll get something written.
Even when you do have a full storyform that you’re 100% sure of, it doesn’t magically make the writing easy. It’s still hard … and you still have to decide what happens in the story, what the characters are like, etc., yourself. You still have to trust your gut every time.
I’m going to point you to this post by @decastell. He’s a successful novelist with lots of experience yet it’s not uncommon for him to flounder around for a while (probably true for most novelists). But notice that even while he’s floundering, he’s writing.
I can’t necessarily trust my emotional evaluation since I know that just because I like something, doesn’t mean it’s good writing. I mean, look at all the author-insert Mary Sues out there. 
I suppose it’s my fault for loving to watch funny critics mock awful movies and cartoons or that time in college where I drew an abstract fox that my illustration professor thought was a bird and I learned that I had to evaluate my work by putting myself in the audience’s shoes, which hardly seems objective.
That’s basically MC’s problematic approach to the rock and a hard place.
Does being in a similar position to MC mean that I have to think in terms of everything relative to MC throughline because I can’t be objective? Or do I take the message I know that I want to say (about fears) and set the OS to that while MC and IC pushing each other is my internal tug of war between the urge to give up fighting vs. persistence?
But how do you choose when either one is fallible? My POV is subjective and must be full of blind-spots, but I’m sick of feeling unable to… feel as confident and self-reliant at creative stuff like before art school critiques (illustration, specifically) taught me to keep analyzing my work in terms of “what will the audience see?” and by extension “How will they or potential employers judge my work?” rather than say “This is X and it’s great the way it is.”
Others may be more objective but not have all the information (which is why I write overly long posts, in case details might change the context) I’ve tried both, though halfheartedly because I’m incapable of 100% trust in anything. Does my present emotional struggle with this indicate that my storyform should be about that?
But my gut clamored for Innermost Desires, Future, Becoming, and Obtaining, which must’ve been wrong since others have had different ideas about it and then my gut wonders if that nagging thought about whether I’ll turn out to have been right all along or not means anything.
No no! Sorry I wasn’t clear. I meant trust your gut on what to put in the story, not on how to analyze the story. Like if you have some cool idea for a scene or a character, and it feels like it will fit, then go with it (even if you don’t know how it works in the structure).
For what it’s worth I think you must possess an incredible amount of courage and dedication to be writing a story that so closely mirrors your own personal struggles.
I think I tend to write stories where the characters’ conflicts are around problems that I want to have, not ones that I do have. (I mean, no I don’t literally want to have to resist an alien taking over my body or a nightclub filled with zombies or struggle to figure out who threw my wife off a cliff. But it would be cool to try, for a while…)
Can I offer some further advice?
Stop trying to write a good novel. Just focus on writing a novel at all.
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I did many years ago. Over 500 pages lacking focus, leaving me unconvinced of my own tacked-on message. I have a better idea of what to do now and am just as obsessed with this one, but I’m still wary. If I can succeed this time, maybe that fear of failure will be lifted.
It just evolved that way from a handful of weird ideas since I think far too much about thinking and need an outlet for stuff that can’t be expressed in the form of adorable animal cartoons . There’s nothing wrong with writing cool escapist thrillers since I imagine that it’d afford the writer a healthy degree of objectivity needed to edit ideas down. I kind of wish mine wasn’t an obsession even though that’s what’s carrying me through this… if I don’t work on it, I get anxious about failing. If I decide to work on it, I get anxious about failing (unless I feel like I’ve made progress, but that doesn’t happen all the time). So annoying… 
So meta… 
I’ve got Dramatica open and I can see Activities maybe working (but isn’t the source of the problem the intolerance of fear that drives them to problematic activities though?), but I’m not sure how Preconditions work. I can agree that MC isn’t in a good Situation, but isn’t the cause of him, say, weaseling out of helping IC about mental stuff? If MC (or everyone) wasn’t afraid or acting on fear, they’d be ok.
Maybe keeping MC/OS Problem as Evaluation, but changing
OS: Situation; Present (for lack of living in the present); Attempt
MC: Psychology; Conceiving (he can’t think of an idea of what he’d be good for); Deficiency (unhappy, wants more out of life)
IC: Activity (IC drags the characters into activities like maybe a performance); Learning (he’s teaching MC stuff); Preconditions (“I’ll help, but I need you to help me first”); Proaction (when others hesitate, he pushes them to take action immediately)
RS: Mind; Contemplation; Doubt (they don’t agree on stuff and conflict over doubting each other’s certainty that they’ll succeed/fail at things)
As to your question about determining the source of the problem (read: assigning throughlines to the appropriate domains), I invite you to look over Mike’s excellent post here:
As novelists, we’re often inclined to try and assign our domains not by what is actually causing the problem, but by what preceding attitude/situation/activity lead to the problem. For example, a main character is driven to act terribly towards his sister by an irrational hatred towards her, fueling a rift within the family. How would you assign his throughline. If you guessed fixed attitude/mind, you’re going one step too far! what is actually causing problems within the story has to do with his behavior. If he stopped acting that way (regardless of whether his feelings changed), the problem would go away, at least as far as the storyform is concerned.
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Oh. In that case, someone should just post that in big neon letters since, I don’t know about everyone else but, I wouldn’t be able to see how else “cause” of a problem in various Dramatica explanations is supposed to be interpreted aside from “root cause,” which I don’t think you could even find because you could work backwards in time from an item like “the brother hates his sister because their parents yelled at her less as kids, which they did because their parents… etc”, which has long bothered me. I’d been wondering if there was an “atomic level” of something being a problem, but if the root cause doesn’t matter, then that solves that.
“Cause” and “leads to” sound like the same thing to me, although in your example, the difference is that they are separated by 1 link in the cause-and-effect chain: 1: Brother’s hatred for sister > 2. Brother acting out against sister > 3. The family wants harmony, but argues (the kids among themselves and maybe the parents with the kids and each other over what to do about it) instead. So, the problem isn’t the root cause, but the previous link? Actually, maybe it isn’t a chain in time so much as the family wanting harmony can’t simultaneously co-exist with the brother and sister fighting?
Could you then say that “irrational hatred” is the “why” there’s a conflict, which is not of concern to the story form, while “what” the conflict is (desire for harmony VS fighting) is what the form is about? That sounds like Mike’s formula from the post you linked: Character + desire + (thing that cannot co-exist with desire)
I love math-like formulas for Dramatica. They make things so much clearer.
And after finishing it, as long as you like reading it, that makes it good. Don’t forget that Casablanca was just considered a B [quickie not very good] movie, when it was written and made. It is the film that everyone appearing in it is remembered for, and arguably the #2 movie of all time, behind Citizen Kane.
Yeah, there’s a lot of Dramatica that’s like that: distinctions that seem like splitting hairs but actually matter quite a bit to how the story structure operates.
For example, is a story driven by actions or decisions? In life, actions and decisions exist in a never-ending chain. For every action you could claim started a story (a meteor hitting a town square), there’s a preceding decision that might have led to the circumstances in which the action occurred (the main character chose to go for a walk that day through the town square). But when you pin down a storyform, you are forced to draw a line somewhere. Learning where to draw it takes practice.
And for the record, my example was a bit sloppy because I didn’t pin down exactly what the three elements of that equation were with regards to my MC who hates his sister. So let’s do that below.
Character + desire + (thing that cannot coexist with desire)
MC who hates his sister + (desire to snap at/tease sister) + (overall desire for family unity).
So what’s the problem here? We’re tempted to say that it’s the fact that the MC hates his sister. But that in and of itself doesn’t create a problem. It is only when the desire to do harm that results from that hatred comes into conflict with something else that is desired that we actually have a “problem” or inequity from the Dramatica POV that needs to be resolved.
Now as for assigning a domain to the MC, we have to examine the part of the equation that he plays in creating that inequity. In this case, it is his ACTIONS that create the conflict here.
Wouldn’t this depend on the throughline though? If it’s MC, then for all we know, MC doesn’t care about family unity (or the author could decide that he does, but is MC wrapped up in a conflicting goal). If it’s OS, then I imagine:
OS: Family + desire for family unity + family disunity (I was tempted to say “MC’s actions,” but disunity sounds like the direct obstacle). Honestly, I’m not sure if “unity” or “disunity” is an external (“not yelling at each other”) or internal thing (“Feeling safe and calm at home”), so I don’t know what story point you’d assign that to. Maybe it depends on the Story Goal?
MC:… I’m not sure. Are you saying that MC throughline is about MC’s role in causing that OS trouble, if MC is the cause of the trouble-- I forget if there’s an Appreciation for that. Story Nature?
I wonder if the formula could be simplified to “Conflict = Character + Desire + Obstacle.” and the storypoint would define the area of conflict: Family + Desire for Contentment + Discontentment = Conflict of Innermost Desires
So, I want to know, how do you take the message you want to say and come up with the storyform about it?
I read Jim’s recent article on choosing a Story Goal based on what you, the author, want to say rather than what happens in the story, but, to use an example from the article, wanting to write a story about characters trying to escape the yakuza isn’t the same as wanting to write a story arguing the way to escape a bad situation (which could, now that I think of it, be illustrated as characters who don’t want to be in the yakuza trying to find a way out).
So, if you have the message in mind (Yakuza example: “If you want freedom from a bad situation, then…” or in mine, it’s something like “If you want to avoid regret…” or “attain happiness” or “freedom from fear” or “not be afraid”) as a formula like:
"If you want (OS Story Goal, or “avoid the Consequence”), but (whatever represents the obstacle… OS or MC Problem?), then (MC Growth) the (MC or OS Solution? Story Requirement?) and you will feel (MC Judgement)" To do that, you must (Requirement) and to (Requirement), you must (Prerequisite)
In my story’s case, maybe it’d be:
If you want to minimize your suffering and avoid regret, Stop avoiding things you want to do and you will feel Good. To stop avoiding, you must learn to tolerate fear. To learn that, you must do things you’re scared of.
I know I’ve read stuff like that before, but they seem to be missing pieces (or maybe it’s just me) and the most clear was Melanie’s article on choosing what you want to say with Issues, not the overall story’s message.
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I’m not a novelist. But as a Screenwriter, I would approach the problem like this:
Your Character has Anxiety…so, they are a Be-er. The kind of Be-er depends on what you want the Anxiety to do to the MC.
If the change character starts out a Be-er, they must become a do-er to show the character arc to the audience even though their personal problems will be solved by the throughline solution element in an internal domain.
So, the guy that is afraid of heights in Pretty Woman climbs a ladder to show he puts the relationship first now.
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Interesting. When you put it like that, it does sound like Change, Stop, Story Goal: Subconscious (so OS in Mind), OS/MC Problem: Avoid, Requirements: Preconscious. This gives Prerequisites of Progress and Preconditions of Doing, and a Consequence of Future, all which seem to fit. (I think this arrangement would make the Outcome Success, based on your ideas for the ending, too.)
This would be structurally similar to Barefoot In the Park and the Great Gatsby at the Domain & Concern level, but more similar to Collateral, The Graduate, or The Lion King at the Element level.