We built this website because we want to open a doorway for writers to go deep into the art and craft of writing. Writing today, in America, is about images. It is about images and action. We live in a post-literate world but it’s a world that lives for and consumes images, moving images—film.

Art in the 21st Century is driven by the moving image. To achieve success, a writer today will create a work that transforms easily into image, a work that adapts to film, moves with ease into video. The key for the writer in this century is to know that behind every image there is a solid piece of writing. Behind every movie, there is a solid screenplay. The precursor to the image is the written word. Reading is, perhaps, on the wane, but writing is stronger than ever.

To use our website, the writer does not have to write a movie or a film but she must be aware that the moving picture is the cultural pinnacle of art, a pinnacle that all other writing will reference.

This means that the writer who comes here might want techniques, ideas, and insights that will lead her toward an image-based style of writing, a writing built on images and action, action and reaction.

By image we mean word pictures. In the art of writing there are at least three means to story: to tell outright with no subtext; to show through description or emotion; and the last—to evoke.

Evocative writing is work that comes into being when the writer refuses to state outright what she means—evocative writing is built on subtext. Subtext is the hidden story that the words index but never state out-right until the moment of climax when there is no need for the hidden things anymore.

Writers are always looking for gateways to another vision of writing. The gateway we’re aiming for is a writing that proceeds in steps from Idea, to Story, to Structure, to Language.

What does this mean?

We want writers to turn the writing they know upside down. We now know this: when a writer puts pen to page, story is often left behind in favor of language. Then, when a rewrite becomes necessary because the story is insufficient, the writer once again pokes at language, a sentence at a time, over and over, polishing the prose while calling it rewriting, or, as most put it , “Revision”. But story is not revision. Because writing is like a moebius strip—no beginning, no end, the inside is the outside—writers are told that they can get to story through language and revision. This is putting the cart before the horse.

On our website, we put the cart where it belongs—behind the horse. We say you have to work the story before you work the language. Once story becomes clear, the writing becomes limpid, almost transparent, like Flaubert’s god in the universe—everywhere evident, nowhere visible. So on to Dramaticus Moebius