The Paper Cup: Mind The Construction Lines (Part 3)
Exercise: The Paper Cup – Dramatic Line (Part 3)
Remember making pencil drawings as a kid? To finish, you would outline the best parts in ink and erase the pencil, but sometimes, the pencil marks or impressions would still be visible: People could see how you got to the final drawing. The idea behind “minding the construction lines” is to erase the writing that distracts the reader from getting one point to the other.
The dramatic line is the system of ‘set-up, action, and suspense’ between points, to include the start of a story through its end. In African dramatic form, dramatic character contains the dramatic line.
Going back to my analogy about drawing as a kid, the dramatic line is the solid ink outline I made after all my pencil mistakes. The construction lines are the words and writing that show us working to understand what we are trying to say.
Under the What is story? topic, we chose “three points of action” to write through in our exercise because story is the appreciation of movement between points. Given “the beginning” and “the end” are the two points that contain the movement of story, these “three points of action” represent the total system of ‘set-up, action, and suspense’ that will move the story. This is typically understood as “beginning, middle, and end.”
Let’s look at our micro story about a paper cup to see how the raw story was manipulated to create appreciable movement and meaning.
“He watched the paper cup fall. His niece had knocked it over. Her sleeve, really, so not much. It rolled over the tabletop and onto the grass. Still, it landed upright and was defiant, even, underfoot of all those children. Nothing could shake that cup! Nothing but the wind, apparently because soon enough the shortest breeze came through and turned the damn thing on its side, so the groundskeeper came along and quite easily speared it up. There’s no love for a paper cup. The moment it’s down, is trash.”
EXERCISE: How did we get here, and why?
Find the primary line of action through your story and the interesting things around this action that help to explain it. “Interesting things” may have happened directly or indirectly, meaning they might be suggested but not fully explored.
The first line tells us we are watching a cup fall. We might anticipate some symbolic meaning. The line of action follows the cup’s fall, and at the end calls back to the symbolic meaning we assumed.
For work in progress:
1) Identify the line of action through your story, start to finish.
2) Find the line of action through 500 words. Now, ‘dig in’ to identify points of drama, to include where the suspense is happening, why, and how it is resolved/suspended. Understand what is motivating the action, or inaction, of figures and why you have chosen certain imagery (description) to build this ’scene.’ The motivation does not have to be obvious, but once you understand how a figure, or actor, in scene is resolved to behave, or how the figure is transformed by the scene, it will be important to understand how the details you choose as imagery support and advance this description (as narrative imprint).