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.
One thing that’s neat about that storyform is it seems to get a lot of the implied points for your IC right, even though it was based on your overall message.
IC Issue of Self Interest vs. Morality fits the wants to help vs. selfish vs. selfless stuff pretty well. The apparent “too many motivations” might match the Focus of Reconsider, actually.
The way the IC impacts the MC around his passions and fears does fit an IC Problem of Feeling. It also seems to work for his character – “impulsive” might be he’s always doing what feels right, judging what to do based on emotion.
Maybe you’ve already been looking at that storyform?
My original instincts were Innermost Desires, Future, Becoming, Obtaining, but I wasn’t sure if that was because it’s a popular quad so maybe I’ve been saturated by stories like that (I don’t like seeing that quad put down just because it’s common. The notion that Common = Inferior/Lazy/Boring is toxic and might prevent writers from choosing accurately.), or my judgement is clouded by subjective experience, or maybe I was confusing story points as the topic of fears instead of descriptors of the type of conflict, or if a knot of personal issues were muddling what I wanted to say and pulling me on tangents-- ex. straying from “the way to reduce emotional suffering is…” into topics I see as related and feel emotionally drawn to like a lesson about changing one’s perspective to see the good in one’s failures, or learning to value people’s differences (society needs both janitors and rocket scientists to thrive) as an antidote to measuring oneself unfavorably against others.
I also flip flopped on whether it should be a Failure/Good story since if they fear failure, but facing fears of failure means failing, then shouldn’t they Fail something? But if the Goal is something like “peace of mind,” then it’s a Success. Sometimes I confuse story structure with story points. All this is why I think a formula would be helpful.
I’m not sure Becoming works with MC, unless “trying to avoid changing his fearful nature prevents him from trying the new things that he wants to” is a legit encoding of that. I had MC set at Impulsive Responses since it straight up contains Worry, which keeps him from doing what he should to live how he wants, then considered switching that to OS if I want to make a point about how you have to slog through uncomfortable emotions and resist the instinct to flee pain to reach goals, but I can also see Innermost Desires since the conflict is between Desire for a goal/happiness vs Desire to avoid failure/pain.
Any ideas for a formula?
Not a formula, but the best thing you can do is to create a single-sentence summary of each throughline. This single sentence will of course leave a lot of details out, but it should be accurate in the sense that everything about the throughline kind of fits inside it.
This will help you differentiate between the MC and OS throughlines. Your MC needs to be dealing with something different than everyone else, something personal to him.
I had actually kind of wanted to put your OS in Becoming, but your message seemed to fit a lot better with OS in Subconscious – and that might explain why you’ve had trouble, since an OS in Mind is kind of a different, somewhat rare beast. Still, throughline sentences will help clarify.
I don’t think I can do that. OS of “Characters learn to let go of fears” or “Avoiding emotional pain/fears (or trying to protect oneself too much?) leaves characters feeling worse/more stifled than if they’d just faced them or acted in spite of them” seems incomplete and vague.
I think the OS characters are in denial that they are doing what they’re doing out of insecurity.
One resists getting help for his senile loved one for fear of being forgotten if she sees other people, thus losing a last immediate family member, but keeping her isolated makes her hate him and act destructively, and he grows to resent her too since he’d rather go back to acting (although type-casting is a problem due to disability, frightening appearance, and popularity playing a horror character in some cheesy movies. Maybe IC wants to revive his career and ride his coattails and win him over by writing him a rom-com script since no one else would.) She’s got delusions that she still owns a ranch and he’s out to sabotage her, then MC shows up, is mistaken for a relative, and she gives her affection to him, inciting jealousy and an awkward Situation since MC is the only one who can calm her. The first character insists that he’s just keeping her safe, but his motive is fear of losing his last connection to his family and setting into the despair that he he’ll eventually lose everyone he loves. The correct response would be to realize this and get her the help she needs. Maybe she’ll forget him, but it’ll be far less stress on the both of them than fighting and resenting each other. The first character can find peace if he learns to appreciate her the way she is Presently, like MC does since they just met, instead of lamenting loss of who she was. That’s just one strand in what I assume is an ensemble goal.
IC denies that he cares what his parents think of him, since they rejected him for dropping out of college, even though he’d love to get fame to make them come crawling back to apologize for being wrong) or whatever. He acts confident or cocky, but he’s still bitter about it. His attempts to use MC as a springboard for attention backfire when people only pay attention to MC’s extraordinariness. Affection turns to envy. That might be RS, or maybe MC’s reliance on IC (Situation) is RS stuff.
MC wants to help others, build a new life in the present as a responsible, productive member of society (to feel worthy of love and happiness), and try new exciting things like fly in an “aeroplane”, but he’s held back by fears of failure based on past experience (Proven), Worry about potential disaster (“What if we crash?” “What if I choke during our song and it makes everyone laugh at us and I let IC down? I’d better hide rather than take that chance.”), and just that awful visceral experience of anxiety. MC seeks external methods of anxiety management (avoidance, trying to win over someone to, in a way, possess as a shortcut to gain the courage and better life he doesn’t believe he can earn on his own as he is-- something he lets go of at the end. IC is helping him with this goal, but I don’t think it’s THE Story Goal-- everyone has a stake I guess, or is affected by the efforts, but they’ve got their own issues, which is why I flip-flop between wondering if it’s an ensemble goal or if I should narrow focus to everyone’s concerned about MC finding a place in life or stuff he does interfering with their plans or whatever) when he should be facing his fears.
The dog-like monster, representing MC’s unruly mind and resistance to change and joins the story after MC attempts a physical shortcut to fix his brain, fails obedience training, takes MC’s savior complex (not “I’m Jesus” but “I see danger everywhere and must try my best to help or else I’m terrible!”) to the extreme and starts sucking up people and animals to protect them from life’s pain, which is unpleasant for them. MC will have small successes and failures as a tug of war between Worry and building Confidence thanks to IC’s pushing, but after taking a risk of some kind leads to a large failure, echoing the traumatic one from his past that drove him to drop out of society, he wants to give up and join the monster so he’ll never have to worry about failure and responsibility again. IC will somehow inspire him to not give up and make the now-kaiju-sized monster release everyone by communicating with it or taking control over it, and that involves facing fears somehow. Maybe he learned something from failure that allows him to succeed this time.
I guess that all points to an overall theme about how trying to insulate oneself/others from life’s inevitable suffering (or risks?) just leads to more, which is hard to put a Story Goal to.
A giant pile of OS like that, which likely needs trimming, is why I need a formula like what you came up with for defining all three parts of a conflict. Knowing what I want to say and how will help me both generate ideas when stuck as well as trim the fat and keep on track.
I could say that “MC needs to realize that OCD/anxiety is a cycle that can only be broken through exposure” then he could use this realization to see how everyone is perpetuating their on misery in OS, but that seems like it could be an alternate illustration for the OS thing.
Too … much … info … 
Seriously though, I think the ability to summarize your narrative is actually the same ability that will allow you to determine the storyform, and shape the structure.
Don’t worry, the summaries are supposed to seem incomplete and vague! You just do the best you can.
“Learning to let go of fears” actually sounds pretty good. (Ignore that the word learning is also a Dramatica term for now; it might point to that Concern or it might not.)
So if you subtract anything to do with letting go of fears from the MC, and just list (even point form) everything that’s left that makes him special and is related personal issues he has, you might get somewhere.
So far I noticed the “external attempt to fix his brain”, being responsible for the dog-like monster, and something about being a vampire-like creature living off a tree. These all seem to be things the MC is dealing with that no one else is.
That stuff might affect other characters, like trying to deal with the monster. I could argue that anything MC deals with might apply to anyone else at a certain level. I mean, none of the others were hermits but that’s, what, a Situation and other characters maybe have issues with stuff in The Past. Regret over “wasted” time is MC stuff too.
I was told that encoding must be specific and concrete, or do you mean something else by summary?
Is a proper conflict something like “MC always wanted to fly on an airplane but isn’t on an airplane, therefore conflict is Situation because he’s not on an airplane and desires it, and that his fears caused him to make a scene at the airport and miss a flight doesn’t matter”? IIRC, don’t you have to state why something is a problem for it to be a real conflict though? Like Character + Desire + Obstacle to Desire = demonstrable unpleasant effect on Character = Conflict?
I suppose that would look like: MC spent a century alone in the forest and wishes he hadn’t, but can’t change The Past. This causes him to use sleep as escapism and miss out on even more experiences. Doing that, just about everything I chose sounded like Situation or Mind, and I can’t have MC in Situation and OS in Mind in the same form.
Wouldn’t it make more sense if MC Concern was the Story Goal instead of OS Concern since MC is the reader’s position in the story-- the perspective being reconsidered? MC is considering whether to give up on life or try to build one back up.
Wouldn’t it make more sense if MC Concern was the Story Goal instead of OS Concern since MC is the reader’s position in the story-- the perspective being reconsidered? MC is considering whether to give up on life or try to build one back up.
Remember, all four throughlines can have a goal of their own, and it is up to the author which goal he chooses to emphasize. But it’s also worth noting that if your MC is also the protagonist, then the OS Goals and MC goals might be overlapped:
Me: Munches popcorn
Right, I mean something else – these summaries aren’t encodings. They’re identifying what each throughline is. Look at the beginning of any DUG video analysis, identifying throughlines is the first thing they do. You need to do it with your story, too, in order to analyse it.
Right, but that’s why I was careful to say “being responsible for the monster”. Others might be affected by it but no one else feels responsible for it (at least as I understood your description).
If my characters want to avoid regret and I want to make a statement on how not letting fears hold you back leads to less regret, does that mean Regret is the Consequence or does that make Avoiding Regret the Goal?
I’m guessing Innermost Desires as Consequence, which makes Future the Goal, but I’m not sure if “You can have a better Future and avoid regret if you face your fears” is exactly what I want to say when the characters seem like they’re trying to obtain, but close enough? ~shrug~