People We Meet on Vacation Chapter 3
Scene Analysis
It’s the first night of orientation at the University of Chicago twelve summers ago when Poppy, our protagonist, spots Alex, the antagonist of the scene.
The Inciting Incident of this scene is the point where the antagonist or force of antagonism forces the protagonist to confront a crisis moment—in this case, this is the moment after Poppy approaches Alex:
He stares at me blankly.
Before we proceed further, let’s make it clear:
Scene antagonist ≠ Story antagonist
Aka a scene antagonist isn’t the villain of the story. It’s simply the force—person, environment, or circumstance—that blocks the protagonist’s goal in that moment.
In this case, Alex is the person forcing Poppy to confront the crisis—the fact that these two are probably not made to be friends and she should probably look elsewhere.
Poppy’s goal or object of desire is to make friends at orientation—which is why she approaches Alex. Alex’s reaction to her throws the first obstacle in her path, hinting that maybe this interaction won’t go the way she wants it to.
He stammers something about spilling on his shirt and a last-minute outfit change.
It’s clear at this point that Alex was not expecting to be approached, and that his goal or object of desire might be different than Poppy’s. I’d wager that his goal is in fact to attend orientation and learn more about the school.
Which means that we don’t just have two characters with completely different personalities—we have two characters with different goals or objects of desire as well, and that makes for an interesting scene.
This misaligned desire is the root of our scene tension—a necessary element for a romance novel.
Poppy does start to make some progress towards her goal when she finds out they’re both from Linfield, but again what good is a scene without a few progressive complications (obstacles).
I’m sure that the longer we talk, the more violently boring he’ll become, but we’re here, and we’re alone, so why not be sure?
This is the point where Poppy runs into another obstacle. Here she is trying to achieve her scene goal of making friends but Alex is boring (at least for now). The longer they talk, the more boring she’s sure the conversation is going to get, which decreases any motivation to continue the conversation and continue toward her scene goal.
We also start getting into theme here.
It’s clear that at this point, Poppy thinks she wants:
Excitement
Wit
Big personality
Adventure
But Alex represents:
Stability
Quiet
Thoughtfulness
Depth
“Yeah, you know,” I say, like, I’m here to meet a wealthy oil baron in need for a much younger second wife.”
That blank stare again.
The fact that Alex isn’t following Poppy’s humor hammers home the crisis point—while Poppy approached Alex to make friends, these two are nothing alike, which means Poppy has a decision to make. Settle for what she believes is nice and boring or keep searching for fun and adventurous like she wants.
The climax of the scene comes when Poppy makes her decision.
“By the time we part ways, I’m fairly confident we’ll never speak again.”
Let’s be real, by this point we’d be fairly confident they’d never speak again too—if this wasn’t a rom-com and we didn’t already know how this was going to end.
The scene resolution ends with the two parting, sure that they’re never going to see each other again.
“Good luck with freshman year, Poppy.”
Do you agree with my take on Chapter 3? I’d love to hear your interpretation—share your thoughts in the comments!