Bob and Jack's Writing Blog

Dramaticus Moebius

Drama.

• We built this website because we want to take the writer into the heart of drama.

Drama is writing about struggle.

• Two characters who both want the same thing will fight to get or to keep it.
• Three characters struggling over an object will develop allegiances, partnerships, even coalitions.

Drama is writing about place.

• When two characters occupy a place, and a third character intrudes into that place, you have drama because the rules of conflict tell us that something has to explode. The intruder must be repelled, expelled, assimilated or he takes over the place, owns the other characters. He is a monster.

Drama is writing built on Action.

• Without action, there is no drama. Without conflict there is no drama. Drama at its most basic deals with conflict and resolution. Action is the work of character to achieve what she wants. Action in drama always stems from desire. She wants, but he says she can’t have, she, therefore, acts to get what she wants.
• Want. Need. Can’t have. Action at the heart of drama.

Structure: Writing– the Moebius strip.

• We built the website to open writers up to the power of the Moebius strip.

Structure: Story structure, scene sequence, close structure, invisible structure.

• Story, story structure, scene sequence, scene structure, language structure, syntax, plot tracks, object links—all a continuum called writing, but the writer has to find a way to order the scenes in the story to get the best story.
• Story structure is the way the writer lays out the storyline from beginning to end. This step might be a conceptual step, a chronological step, a plotting.
• Scene sequence: the sequential structure is how the writer lays one scene next to another scene. Scene A precedes Scene B but the two scenes might not be connected by inner devices (plot tracks on object, characters, action) but the writer finds that the story is served best when they are laid out next to one another. This is, at its core, a filmic technique called the jump cut. A leap from scene to scene without obvious connection.

Let’s look at this: In a story there are six scenes.

• Scene 1 and Scene 6 are related through an object link.
• Scene 2 and Scene 4 are related through a different object link.
• Scene 3 and Scene 5 are connected through an action link.

This the writer knows, but he lays out the story like this:

• Sc1 Sc2 Sc3 Sc4 Sc5 Sc6

As the reader reads, she finds the links. She connects 1 to 6, 2 to 4, 3 to 5. This is structure out of time, out of sequence. She connects the plot tracks to make story. The reader becomes an active participant in the story when she puts the parts together that the writer has torn apart. But this we know: the writer, in her Big Structure, knows that the parts are connected and that is the only way she can string them apart, tear them asunder—Writer as God, creating a universe of disconnected elements all of which combine to make something greater than any one part.