Toward designing/plotting chapter one of “Orgies for Free”

(The below won’t make (much) sense if you haven’t read the previous posts.)

Re: story design

From Story:

“A story can be told in two acts: two major reversals and its over. But again it must be relatively brief: the sitcom [is one example].”

“An act is a series of [scenes] that peaks in a climactic scene which causes a major reversal of values.”

“Story values are the universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive [e.g. love/hate, loyalty/betrayal].”

Re: a defining characteristic of a comedy chapter/episode is that the climactic shift is negative-to-positive

In the early 1990s a then-student at the University of Chicago performed an extensive structural analysis of sitcom episodes and found that each climax enabled/completed a shift from negative to positive. From a 1994 article about his work:

“As I was thinking about story formats for Hammond’s course — and watching a little TV — I kept thinking about the predictability and structure of sitcoms. They follow very specific rules: They’re always 30 minutes long, they always include commercials at precise plot points, and they always conclude with a nice, neat resolution. I decided to make a sitcom plot engine that would generate, analyze and predict the outcomes of sitcom plots. I watched and took notes on hundreds of sitcoms and read the plot summaries of even more. I ended up with a representational language for characterizing sitcom plots and used it as the backbone for my computer program, which I named Structuralist Gilligan.”

. . . “Basically, there are four elements to any given plot and only about 15 types of plots in all,” Goldstein said. “In every sitcom the status quo is upset, the characters try to re-establish it, and in the end they always do. Perhaps it’s this swing back from a tangled situation to harmony that keeps people around the world watching sitcoms day after day.”

Re: the climactic shift in a chapter of flowmantic comedy

The “positive charge” that’s reversed and then restored can only be the well-being of the main flowmance (e.g., main “throuple”).

Re: the first chapter of OfF (hereafter OfF 1.0)

1.0 will differ from 2.0+ because the main flowmance must first be established, along with its/their (1.0) comic plight. (The plight will be the source of the (1.0) upsets to the harmony of the flowmance.)

The climax of OfF 1.0, then, must establish that the flowmantic partners are committed to making their relationship(s) work, despite what they have learned about their comic plight.

From Story:

Once the [story’s] Climax is in hand . . . we must work back from the ending to make certain that by Idea and Counter-Idea every image, beat, action or line of dialogue sets up this grand payoff.

So 1.0’s penultimate reversal — positive-to-negative — must derive from the partners’ comic plight becoming known to them.

1.0’s first act, then, must culminate with the establishment of the initial positive charge: the partners’ initial sense that they are great together.

From Story:

“Ideally, every scene becomes a Turning Point in which the values at stake swing from the positive to the negative or the negative to the positive.”

“The second most difficult scene to write is the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident [e.g., the opening scene of 1.0’s first act]. So here are some questions to ask . . . What is the worst possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How could that turn out to be the best possible thing that could happen to him?”

More ASAP.