In classical mechanics, the two-body problem has a clean, exact solution. Add a third body and the system turns chaotic, which any writer of love triangles could have told Newton for free. Week three of Writing in Different Genres was about romance, and I left with a suspicion I want to test here. Romantic comedy, dramatic romance and tragic romance are not three different machines. They are one machine with a handful of dials, and the ending is the dial that matters most.
The session paired two texts that could hardly be further apart: John Huston’s The African Queen (1951) and Benedict Lombe’s play Shifters (2024).
A fairy tale with a formula
The engine of romance as a genre is the oldest formula in storytelling: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. The formula is so simple that it can be endlessly reassembled, from girl meets boy to boy meets boy and, in some cases man meets mermaid.
It seems to me that the genre looks easy and is fiendishly hard to execute. It has also given women stronger roles than most of mainstream cinema. In any case, the discussion during the session split romance into three sub-genres: comic, dramatic and tragic. But as I say, it seems to me that it is a continuum that can be dialed: Once pain outweighs the comic contract, you have crossed into drama.
One observation from the session sharpened this for me. In comedy, characters make choices in a hurry; in tragedy, they have time to think. The instructure uses a quote from Wendell Thomas
“We are at our most vulnerable when in love, and therefore at our most comic”,
which explains why the same vulnerability can be played for laughs or for grief. Read together, the examples suggest a simple model in which the dials, not the machine, change:
| Dial | Romantic comedy | Dramatic romance | Tragic romance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main obstacle | The lovers themselves | Society, circumstance, time | Fate, nature, an irreversible flaw |
| Moment of despair | Leads to self-correction | Leads to sacrifice or compromise | Becomes permanent |
| Ending | Reunion and a kiss | Reunion at a cost, or a bittersweet parting | Loss or death |
| What love does | Conquers all | Changes the people involved | Gives meaning to the loss |
Plotting the orbit
The structural spine came from Syd Field’s paradigm: set-up, confrontation and resolution, hinged on an inciting incident, a midpoint and turning points that make the central problem harder to solve. The romantic comedy variation is more specific. The inciting incident is the first meeting, ideally embarrassing. A second meeting lets the characters register the attraction. A shared external goal often binds them together, and the midpoint has them approach their situation in a new way. The final turning point puts the relationship under maximum strain, and the climax answers the only question the audience really cares about: will they or won’t they?
Two further ideas developed in my brain during the session. The first is that romance demands two protagonists of equal narrative weight, each carrying problems of equal weight, or the story tips into one character’s journey with a love interest attached. The second is the distinction between want and need. Want is the conscious desire that drives the plot; need is the inner lack the character only recognises later. Romance is unusually good at staging the gap between them, because the person who frustrates the want is very often the answer to the need.
For the session we talked about two works
- The African Queen: tragedy averted. It is a romantic comedy that spends most of its running time threatening to become an adventure film but it follows the rom-com playbook closely. The theme arrives early, when Rose pours Charlie’s gin into the river and tells him that nature is what we are put in this world to rise above. The shared external goal, sinking a German gunboat, is what keeps two incompatible people in the same boat, literally.
- Shifters: comedy dissolved. Lombe’s play runs the experiment in the opposite direction. Des and Dre meet as sixteen-year-olds in a debate class in a small town near Crewe, and reunite at 32 at his nana’s wake, with three hours before her flight. The present plays out over a single evening in near unity of action. The past spans years and arrives in flashbacks that behave like memory rather than chronology, each scene closing with a “Snap”. Its five acts are named for the stages of the relationship: Allies, Friends, Fractures, Lovers, Fugitives.
| The African Queen | Shifters | |
|---|---|---|
| First meeting | A ruined tea party | A debate class |
| Main obstacle | External: river, war, execution | Internal: trauma, and the lives since built |
| The wedding | Real, at the gallows, rewarded | Mock, interrupted by a phone call |
| Ending | Comic rescue | Open loop, bittersweet release |
| Direction of travel | Tragedy averted into comedy | Comedy dissolved into drama |
Choosing the ending
Put side by side, the two texts make the case for the single-machine model better than a longer discussion. Both use the same parts: opposites, a stated theme, a shared goal, a moment of despair and a wedding under impossible conditions. What separates them is the nature of the obstacle and the decision about how it resolves.
For a writer, that is a liberating thought and a demanding one. It means the genre is not chosen at the outset so much as earned at the end, and every earlier beat has to be built so that it can bear the weight of that final choice.
The two-body problem, it turns out, has more than one exact solution. Which one you get depends on the initial conditions, and on what the writer is prepared to let the characters survive.