ADF Basics: How to Write A Story About A Paper Cup
The idea behind this exercise is that an ideas doesn’t make a good story, craft makes a good story, and a writer should be able to move a reader with a story about anything—even a paper cup!
Tag: creative writing
The Paper Cup: How to Write A Story (Part 1)
This is our raw story about a paper cup. We will follow the Paper Cup and look at its development given narrative device, dramatic line, and audience.
The Paper Cup: Narrator As Character (Part 2)
We’ll take our raw story about a paper cup from the previous What Is Story? exercise and give it some narrative awareness.
Whether sitting in a fiction workshop or acting as a beta reader, it can be difficult for writers at any level to articulate actionable feedback for their writing peers. Remember these three tips for always giving relevant and objective peer feedback, which will also help you write better stories.
ADF: Dramatic Mask
In fiction writing, the dramatic mask controls the assumptions of the story, to include the “terms of community” that select an audience and the image or cultural “language,” exploited by an author to define an audience; and the narrative contract.
ADF: Dramatic Character
Dramatic character controls the dramatic line and character elements. The dramatic line represents the cycles of set-up, action, and suspense that create movement, imagery, and meaning in story, ultimately ensuring that
What is African dramatic form (ADF)?
In fiction writing and analysis, the three primary controls (or trees) of ADF are dramatic form, dramatic character, and dramatic mask.
The Negative Aesthetic
The negative aesthetic is the practice of creating imagery from a Black center and the process of identifying and rethinking anti-Black imagery so that it becomes from a Black center.
The Problem of Anti-Blackness in Our Literal and Literary Imagination
Manichean leitmotif uses blackness, black bodies, or African humanity to symbolize the degeneration of an identity. Non-whites or white undesirables were typically “negroized” to reflect a degenerate state.
African Dramatic Form (ADF): An Introduction
Using ADF for story development can help writers avoid “borrowing” anti-Blackness from non-African languages, allowing them to make their stories more empathetic, more meaningful, and more “Black.”