Story Structure: Creating a Step Outline

As the term implies, a step-outline is the story told in steps.

Using one- or two-sentence statements, the writer simply and clearly describes what happens in each scene, how it builds and turns. For example: "He enters expecting to find her at home, but instead discovers her note saying she's left for good."

On the back of each card the writer indicates what step in the design of the story he sees this one scene fulfilling -- at least for the moment. Which scenes set up the Inciting Incident? Which is the Inciting Incident? First Act Climax? Perhaps a Mid-Act Climax? Second Act? Third? Fourth? Or more? He does for Central Plot and subplots alike.

He confines himself to a few stacks of cards for months on end for this critical reason: He wants to destroy his work. Taste and experience tell (the writer) that ninety percent of everything he writes, regardless of his genius, is mediocre at best. IHe may sketch a scene a dozen different ways before finally throwing the idea of a scene out of the outline. He may destroy sequences, whole acts. A writer secure in his talent knows there's no limit to what he can create, and so he trashes everything less than his best on a quest for a gem quality story.

This process, however, doesn't mean the writer isn't filling pages. Day after day a huge stack grows on the side of the desk: but these are biographies, the fictional world and its history, thematic notations, images, even snippets of vocabulary and idiom. Research and imaginings of all kinds fill a file cabinet while the story is disciplined to the step-outline.

Finally, after weeks or months, the writer discovers his Story Climax. With that in hand, he reworks, as needed, backward from it. At last he has a story.

Robert McKee, Story: Structure, Substance, Style and Principles of Screenwriting, 1997

A conjecture about multiplicity: it's probably possible for successful writers to have multiple step-outlines active at any one time.

A conjecture about collaboration: writers' best chance at collaborating on story is in the stage of step-outline.

Film: Political Satire in "Being There"

Being There is the deepest political satire I think I have ever seen in film.
Besides humor and deep political content, the film has hair-raising sound engineering:
That last track is by Eumir Deodado -- an ingenius rendition of "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

A Game of Poems: Sikong Tu, Act 1

In the late Tang, there was once a young man from a small town called Yuxiang 虞乡 who specialized in doing nothing. Though he came from a family of minor officials, he did not even try taking the examinations until was thirty-three years old, in 869.

In my youth I used to waste my life,
The time pushed me hard, but I was always at leisure.

Nobody knows what Sikong Tu was doing in the years before 869, but he probably spent a good deal of his time in the Zhongtiao mountains, a place of Buddhist institutes where students and scholars gathered for study and teaching. Tu took the public examinations the same year his patron, Wang Ning 王凝, became the Chief Examiner. When he ranked fourth out of thousands of candidates, disgruntled young men said Tu only succeeded because Wang Ning helped -- but Wang Ning actually opposed corruption in the government, and his crackdown on favoritism cost him his own job the following year. Wang Ning's enemy, Wei Paoheng, married the daughter of Emperor Yizong 唐懿宗 -- that was how Paoheng gained the influence to retaliate against Wang Ning. Purged from the capital, Wang Ning was assigned to a series of minor posts in different outlying locations until his death in 877. Tu stayed with Wang Ning till the latter's death in the South, gaining experience as an exile that would mark his poetry:

The sun brings with it the roaring of the tide to the evening.
The smoke is soaked with the color of trees in the autumn.

From ancient times, the worthies and the talented have been tragic and sorrowful.
Everlastingly the powerful families controlled the important positions.
Henceforth I will get myself drunk whenever I hear a song,
And live as an idler without helping the world.

But such lines belie Tu's devotion to Wang Ning, who was fighting the rebels Huang Chao 黄巢 and Wang Xianzhi when he died. After Wang's death, Tu answer a summons to the capital for a new assignment, but as punishment for tardiness he was demoted and sent to Luoyang, the less important Eastern Capital. This city was a gathering place for all the men of talent currently out of power -- Lu Xi, one such official, came to admire Tu's character. When Lu Xi was summoned back to the capital a year later to head the Department of War, he shared his good fortune with Tu. By 879, Lu Xi was a Chief Minister and Tu was given a post in the Ministry of Rites. While in the capital, he lived in Chongyi Ward, two blocks from the palace; he was soon promoted, and even earned the purple-fish-bag (feiyudai) for meritorious service. But in the winter of early 881, the Tang capital of Chang'an was under attack; Wang Xianzhi was dead, but the rebel Huang Chao pressed on. On January 4, rebel forces took the Tongguan pass, the capital cities last defense. Eunuchs made accusations; officials committed suicide. Emperor Xizong fled in secret to a provisional capital set up at Chengdu, leaving most of the government and royal family behind. Rebels entered on January 8. Panic ensued.

Sikong Tu hid in a friends house in the gentry neighborhood of Chongyi Ward. He was just about to leave for Changpinglin, a government store-house of salt and iron, rebel soldiers burst in; one soldier blocked the door with a great spear. He stared at Sikong Tu. Then, he approached and took Sikong's hands. "I am Duan Zhang 段章, your former servant." Duan Zhang explained that he had been captured and forced to join the rebels, but now knew that Heaven had arranged events so that he, Duan, could save Tu's life in repayment for Tu's kindness. He suggested that Tu seek parlay with Duan's commander, General Zhang, who respected scholars. No! Tu would rather die than surrender and be disgraced. Moved by his decision, Duan lead Tu to the road, and escape.

Tu slipped out of the city through the Kaiyuan Gate under the cover of darkness, heading east. When he reached Xianyang Bridge, a boatman named Han Jun took him south, to Huxian. From Huxian, we lose track...

Paraphrasing Wong Yoon Wah, Ssu-K'ung T'u: A Poet-Critic of the T'ang, pp. 7-18

"Note on a Calligraphic Screen"

In "Note on a Calligraphic Screen" 书屏记 (900 AD), Sikong Tu 司空图 relates that when his father settled down in Yuxiang, Tu's calligraphy master, Pei Xiu 裴休,  received a present from Li Rong, who was "also famous for his calligraphy in scribbled 草 and clerical 隶 styles." Li Rong's present was a screen 屏, consisting of forty-two panels of calligraphy by Xu Hao 徐浩 (703-782), a great Tang calligrapher. According to Sikong Tu's account, his father so appreciated the masterpiece of Xu Hao that he studied it every morning and so enjoyed it that he even neglected to eat or sleep. Tu might have been exaggerating, but his account indicates his father's enthusiasm for the art.

Sikong Tu's account of Li Rong and Xu Hao's screen is the only information we have of them in Chinese art history. According to Tu, Xu Hao wrote in all styles, including the "eight styles" (bati) and most of the poems he wrote were quotations of five-syllable poems from Wenxuan, an anthology compiled under the patronage of Xiao Tong (501-531). The screen included two lines of a poem 杂诗 written by Wang Can of the Jin 晋 dynasty (265-420):

Winds from the north move the autumn grasses,
Horses at the border have their minds on return.

朔风动秋草,边马有归心

Screen paintings from a Tang tomb, discovered in 1987 and exhibited here at the Xi'an Expo, May 2011 .

Sikong Tu remarked that these two lines, together with some others, which were written in clerical or scribbled styles, were the outstanding portions of the masterpiece 或草或隶，尤为精絶. He also added that on the lower margin of the screen someone noted a very poetic comment on Xu Hao's calligraphy:

Mad beasts gouge stone,
Thirsty horse races to the well.
They can see all the blue sky.

怒猊抉石，渴驥奔泉

The first two lines of this comment have become the most often quoted description of Xu Hao's calligraphy. Unfortunately, the screen was burnt to ashes in 869 by a fire.

-Wong Yoon Wah, Ssuk'ung T'u: Poet-Critic of the T'ang (poetry translations meddled with)

Poem: Cat in an Empty Apartment

As we got in the van, someone asked about favorite poets, and the girl who had talked about translating Jackie Kay into Polish said she for one liked to read Wislawa Szymborska. I remember feeling a pinch of anxiety that I had not read Szymborska, but looking back, wasn't it wonderful to have met a reader of hers?

Cat in an Empty Apartment

Die - You can't do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there's more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they're new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn't start
at its usual time.
Something doesn't happen
as it should. Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.
--tr. Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Poem Sequence: Apparitions

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. — Ezra Pound

***

In a Station of the Metro
by Dan Beachy-Quick
Peace fell on the dim lands a sort of abstraction
The metronome counted one petal after another
So the petals fell as or in some music
This song needs no breath just an apparition
With a mouth open and eyes and eyes
The wet smear of eyes beneath pink
Petals in excess of the window frame’s bright
Yellow square and yes spring gathers right now
The moisture from my breath up into clouds
Whose downpour makes of the plum tree in blossom
A diminishing crowd for which the natural symbol
Refuses to exist a plain blue gem on a pin
Faces glowing within the stone like flowers
Within the stone like flaws the mind turns inward
Turns inward its tangle of wet black boughs
A knot pulled tight so tight it ceases to be

A knot yes I’ll say it a knot that becomes angelic
Another example everywhere seen of the angelic
Gears toothless and without cogs a sort of mist
That turns the other gear by drifting through it
As just now through my eye drifts that storm
Battered tree whose broken-petal pocked bark
Asks of me a question my mouth can’t speak
Like a river that dives underground just there
There where the animals thirst the most
A desert fox say or say a toad or let’s speak more simply
About a plum which bursts through its own explosion
Into being and hangs there so ponderously
As if as if not concerned with innocence or
Gravity or other acute angles as they evaporate
Into this poem O no am I speaking again again about
dim lands these dim dim lands of of peace

*** 

In Paradise Lost, Book VIII, Adam asks:

“Love not the heavenly Spirits, and how their love
Express they, by looks only, or do they mix
Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?”

And the angel Raphael replies:

the Angel with a smile that glowed
Celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue,
Answered. “Let it suffice thee that thou know’st
Us happy, and without love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:
Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, union of pure with pure
Desiring; nor restrained conveyance need
As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.”

***

1144
Ourselves we do inter with sweet derision.
The channel of the dust who once achieves
Invalidates the balm of that religion
That doubts as fervently as it believes.
--Emily Dickinson

Chinese: Character, Rhetoric and a Hippo

她兩指夾著一支香煙，悠然吐著煙霧。煙霧裡只見她那張臉像俊俏的河馬。俊，因為嘴巴比例上較河馬的小，可是嘴形和鼻子眼睛都像河馬，尤其眼睛，而這雙眼睛又像林黛玉那樣「似嗔非嗔」。

Her two fingers clasped a cigarette blowing a long strand of smoke. In the smoke one could just make out that slight, lovely hippo face of hers. Lovely, because her mouth was small compared to a hippo's, though the shape of her mouth, of her nose, of her eyes, all resembled that of a hippo, especially the eyes -- and this pair of eyes was also just as was said of Lin Daiyu, "glaring and not glaring." -- Yang Jiang, Baptism

The source for this is:

林黛玉听了，不覺帶腮連耳通紅，登時直豎起兩道似蹙 非蹙的眉，瞪了兩只似睜非睜的眼，微腮帶怒，薄面含嗔，指 寶玉道：“你這該死的胡說！ 好好的把這淫詞艷曲弄了來，還 學了這些混話來欺負我．我告訴舅舅舅母去。” --Dream of the Red Chamber, chapter 23

Lin Tai-yü became, at these words, unconsciously crimson all over her cheeks, even up to her very ears; and raising, at the same moment, her two eyebrows, which seemed to knit and yet not to knit, and opening wide those eyes, which seemed to stare and yet not to stare, while her peach-like cheeks bore an angry look and on her thin-skinned face lurked displeasure, she pointed at Pao-yü and exclaimed: "You do deserve death, for the rubbish you talk! without any provocation you bring up these licentious expressions and wanton ballads to give vent to all this insolent rot, in order to insult me; but I'll go and tell uncle and aunt." -- H.B. Jolly translation