Hello, I’ve been working on clarifying the structure of a character-driven story I’ve been writing so I have a story form, and to generate OS ideas I let Dramatica assign random Gists (the Playground Exercises from Narrative First). For OS Concern of Innermost Desires I got “Fearing Intimacy” and I really liked the idea of independent and stubborn characters wanting to feel a connection to others/the world, but being too afraid and giving in to the Temptation to avoid reaching out (my focus has been more on my MC who must learn to face unreasonable fears of causing bad things to happen, so that kind of OS would work well), however, I’m not sure how to determine the Story Goal from that, especially since I imagine it as being a collective goal.
Would the goal be wanting intimacy even if some don’t yet realize or admit it? Or is it avoiding/resisting intimacy, perhaps in a roundabout Response-like way in which they concentrate on bolstering self-reliance? I’ve imagined this story being Failure-Good in which the characters were maybe after a goal that wasn’t good for them until they realize their real problems… but I don’t know if that’s right since I want the ending to be ultimately mostly positive for the general characters. Maybe they want to attempt to avoid all suffering, which proves impossible, so they Fail, but learn to accept it?