Output language = the language of the question; terminology is always anchored to the original terms; see sw-workflow/terms.md, and do not invent translations.

sw-dialogue

sw-story-structure

• McKee's definition: Action within a relatively continuous space-time that expresses the value of a situation through conflict and turns that value at least at one perceptible level. There is no scene without a turn: record whether the opening value is positive or negative, then record it again at the end; if the two are identical, ask, “Why does this scene need to exist?” It is almost always exposition → cut it and weave the information elsewhere. A lovers' breakup that moves through a bedroom, kitchen, garage, and highway remains one scene; test this by asking whether it can be written as one unified whole.
• Mei Feng's value test: When setting a scene, the only thing that must be established is what value is placed at stake in this scene and whether it reverses or acquires a new layer by the end. Subplot values may be incorporated, but both the main and subplot value pairs must be displayed accurately. Change can occur only through conflict, and conflict can occur only through character choices. In the restaurant scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the same value pair—civilization versus barbarism—flows repeatedly: legal codes, Western rules, literacy, the black suit, a trip, the raised gun, picking up the steak, and throwing the bottle.
• Field: A scene is “the place where the story is told.” It has two elements: location and time; changing either creates a new scene, at a cost of roughly ten thousand dollars per minute. First establish the purpose—the single piece of information that advances the story—then choose the location and time, and finally find the components of the scene (the waiter, the neighboring table, or the old friend in the restaurant).
• Hicks: Every scene must do two things at once: give the reader new information that advances the plot, and reveal more about the protagonist. Delete any scene in which nothing happens, such as shaving in a hotel room.
• Henson: A scene equals a complete dramatic action occurring in one place, with consistent time and characters. The grounds for changing scenes are a shift in location or time (the most common), the addition or removal of characters, or a change in dramatic purpose.
• Lu Jun: A scene is more than two lines stating time and location: “Why does the story happen now and here rather than then and there?” Lao She: “To portray a cook merely by placing him in the kitchen to cook rice and prepare food is not enough to create drama; place him in the desert laying railway tracks, or amid fierce fighting when everyone desperately needs water and food, and his role becomes far greater.”

1. Establish the conflict: Identify who drives it, what they want (using an adverb of purpose), and what the opposing force wants. The opposition must be direct rather than tangential.
2. Mark the opening value as positive or negative.
3. Break the scene into beats: A beat is a unit of action/reaction; use emotionally colored present-continuous phrases to mark actions and reactions at the subtext level (“currently lying at her feet” / “ignoring his earnest plea”). A beat is new only when the behavior visibly changes.
4. Mark the ending value and compare it with the opening. If they are identical, the scene is a non-event.
5. Review the beats to find the arc and turning point: each beat builds on the previous one until the value charge changes at the turning point. A turning point can be created only by action or revelation, with four effects: surprise → heightened curiosity → insight → a new direction.

• Scene intention and super-intention: What each character wants in the moment (the scene ends when that scene intention is fulfilled) plus the subconscious super-intention, which may run contrary to the character's characterization. Background desires form a web of constraints that determine what a character can and cannot say.
• Five steps of behavior: Desire → awareness of opposition → choice of action → action → expression. “A scene does not exist in the act of speaking but in the action the characters take through their speech.”
• The earliest sign of a poorly written scene is too many repeated beats—the same strategy expressed in different words.
• Four defects of a poor scene: desire without opposition and therefore without conflict; repetition and circularity without progress; a turning point that arrives too early, too late, or with insufficient balance; and a point written too explicitly to be believable. To repair it, compare the beats with the scene objective, adapt the behavior to the desire, or adapt the desire to the behavior.
• The six forms of conflict—balanced, comic, asymmetric, indirect, reflexive, and minimal—have different writing approaches; see

  sw-dialogue

  .
• Hoxter: A scene beat is the moment of dramatic progress or shift in the center of gravity (in Thelma & Louise, guessing a person's occupation → “I just got out of state prison”). Every important character has an objective, and the performer selects a tactic (flirting, threatening, deceiving, or reasoning). Watch for polarity reversals. August's Six Questions and Four Exercises: What must happen in this scene? What would happen if it were deleted? Who needs to be present? Where can it happen? What is the most surprising thing? Should it be long or short? → Think of three possible openings → Rehearse it mentally → Draft it → Complete the scene.

• Enter late, leave early: Goldman: “Do not enter the scene until the last possible moment.” In Chinatown, move from the bathroom and peroxide to a cut to the aftermath in bed (Field). Hicks: Leave the scene before the conflict is fully resolved—the sense that something remains unresolved creates tension (The Cabin: “I came all this way just to get a little raccoon!”). Enter a scene immediately, disengage near its end, and jump energetically into the next scene. Walter's “start late and end early” applies both to scenes and to individual lines of dialogue—for example, in a restaurant, cut directly to the main course.
• Pacing (McKee): Forty to sixty scenes average two and a half minutes; a one-minute scene is paired with a four-minute scene. A shot lasting two or three minutes exhausts the expressive potential of a location. 12 Angry Men relies on more than eighty French scenes, with a new scene whenever a principal actor enters or exits. As the act climax approaches, shorten scenes to increase speed and thereby earn the right to pause. A major reversal scene should itself be long, slow, and tense.
• Speed means the level of activity within a scene (bedside whispers versus chaos).
• Transition principle: The third element between two scenes is something shared or opposed—a character trait (a naughty child → a childlike adult), an action (foreplay → afterglow), an object (a greenhouse → a jungle), a line, the quality of light (shadows at dawn → sunset afterglow), a sound (waves → snoring), or a thought (a blank canvas → a dying man).
• Sequences: Field: “A single idea that links a series of scenes together”; a sequence is the backbone of the screenplay (a wedding, a chase, a homecoming, a bank robbery). First establish the sequence's idea (the cup), and then fill in its content (the coffee). McKee: Two to five scenes escalate in impact toward a peak; give every sequence a title. Hoxter: A sequence is a group of scenes that accomplishes one or more story goals and is unified by time and location; determine which segment's beat should be emphasized (the longest stretch in Winter's Bone is the argument). There are two pacing methods: control the duration of scenes, when to enter and leave, and divide the sequence according to beats.
• Mei Feng: Arrange a short scene featuring Peabody between two major dramatic scenes. It may contain no conflict, slow the pace, separate the major scenes, and resolve a temporal gap, allowing the whole film to alternate between tension and relaxation.
• Henson: An action sequence should read like a list rather than a description. It includes a “presumed situation”—time, season, and weather; environmental conditions that affect action; and physical details that provide clues. “Early morning, blue sky, strong sunlight, heat rising, Stars and Stripes fluttering above the stands” means July 4; changing it to “gray skies and fresh snow” means Veterans Day. “Simply changing one image can change the entire story.”

• Principle 30: Drama is behavior and action; Principle 31: Any action is better than no action, and action fully integrated with the story is the best action. Tennessee Williams: “Make them stand on their heads, make them take off their pants, make them do something—anything will do, but they must never do nothing.”
• The greatest power of film is its ability to magnify very small things: in The Blonde Woman's Love, a wedding ring slips and rolls across the floor; the camera crawls beneath the table past a row of legs, finds the ring, and rises to discover a group of women standing nearby. In Kramer vs. Kramer, a piece of French toast initially seems lost in the Borneo jungle, but by the end, the protagonist waves pots and pans like a chef. In The Rose Tattoo, someone twists a long stocking. In A Heart-to-Heart Consultation, someone makes a handmade insulation pad. In The Inglourious Basterds, someone fills a pen with ink. “Small, ordinary, everyday actions magnify the inner meaning of film.”
• Static situations: Restaurants, bars, cafés, cars, dinner tables, and offices are generally to be avoided unless the whole scene absolutely depends on them. Phones (Atlantic City: a phone booth used to look for a parcel; Captain Hook: a phone thrown out of a window); cars (Close Encounters of the Third Kind: a sign indicating that the “car” will drive past); restaurants (That Thing You Do!: refusing to make two main courses becomes a metaphor for the conflict between commerce and art); offices (a lieutenant confronts his superior → list a dozen alternative locations → a swimming pool: the superior follows his doctor's orders and swims back and forth, the lieutenant calls from the poolside, and chlorine splashes onto six-hundred-dollar crocodile-skin shoes). List a dozen alternative locations for every scene, then choose the one that expands the dramatic conflict. “Give the actors something to do, and use details to fuse the story with the characters.”
• Hicks: An action sequence should contain causal action with a beginning, development, and ending, giving the reader a sense of rhythm, rather than describing every visual in order (the snowmobile chase is a counterexample). Sex, fights, and chases are the hardest things to write and the easiest things to make clichéd; the writer must still provide a scene outline that maintains the thread (Stairway to the Lighthouse). Scenes involving phones, meals, and driving should receive little setup.
• Henson's story-doing: Replace a state of being with an action. “I am sad” becomes “I weep”; the son may comfort or tease her. “Mary, you are so rebellious” becomes Mary hiring an assassin to kill Elizabeth I. When the screenplay stalls, the characters are trapped in an internal state rather than acting; use the “I want…” exercise to break out of the impasse. Write reactions whose intensity runs opposite to what is expected: Jones facing a samurai who draws a gun; Dunbar learning of an amputation and attempting suicide; Tiger and Leopard leaping from a cliff.
• Counterpoint (Field): Play tenderness while expressing anger; talk about flowers while falling in love; discuss love in front of sharks; make the decision to rob a bank in a pinball parlor while police enter and walk around. Comedy creates a situation in which the characters respond to it with utter seriousness.
• McKee: The best dialogue advice is not to write the dialogue. For every scene, first ask, “How can this be shown purely visually?”

• Interest means novelty, ingenuity, and wit, realized through suspense and charm; charm also carries the anticipation of further charm. Li Yu: “The two characters ingenuity and wit are indispensable to a lyricist.”
• Establishing and destroying suspense: Establish one suspense while resolving it and establishing another (The Foolish Son-in-Law Sells Cloth strings seven suspenseful moments together). If a major mystery begins the story, as in a detective story, the ending must be astonishing and must substantiate the opening. Begin by misleading the audience, raise one mystery after another, and finally unravel the major reveal (The Wife Who Cannot Be Chased Away).
• Revealing the solution and withholding secrets: Chinese opera usually gives the audience the key to the plot (Fifteen Strings of Cash reveals that Lou Ahu is the villain at the outset; Nine Copper Coins gives the audience three key lines early). Ya Que: A playwright absolutely should never keep a secret from the audience—you cannot keep secrets. Curiosity is “a delicacy for one night”; the lasting pleasure of drama lies in foreknowledge—the audience watches mortals play blindly, like gods. In The Yang Family Generals: Birthday Hall, two approaches are possible: conceal the news from both the characters and the audience, producing the shock of surprise, or let the audience know alongside Mu Guiying and Chai Shunzi before the celebratory banquet and show them forcing a smile, which creates the more powerful charm of “interest” and moves the audience far more deeply.
• Suspense of character and fate: The best suspense concerns a character's personality and destiny. Reveal from the beginning that a father has poisoned someone, yet suspense remains: two bowls of fried rice and one pair of chopsticks remain untouched. Minor drama does not pursue grand surface turbulence; it refines the joints and seams of a smaller world.
• Delay exists to release tension: A high jumper crouches before jumping; a fist pulls back before punching. In One Night at the Little Hotel, the statue appears only after the horror reaches its peak, visible but silent; the calls of the names are then delayed one by one. In Mr. Leonidas Meets a “Reactionary”, the middle section builds momentum and enlarges the gap between panic and false alarm: “Only when people are brought to the utmost tension and seriousness, and then discover that the situation is not remotely so serious, do they receive aesthetic satisfaction.”
• Four sources of charm: An interesting situation (Molière's formula: conflict stated directly → the insulted party devises a plan → the mocked party appears and performs → the critique is delivered without restraint → the designer exposes the truth); an interesting character (Little Nine's Old Delight: a henpecked husband whose “fear is love,” confused about small matters but clear about large ones, with the “dramatic eye” igniting the characterization); interesting language (“I told her to stop, and she said, ‘You can go right on’”; two philosophers in The Forced Marriage); and interesting details (Gilding: layers of ostentatious detail before the meeting, after the meeting, when another person arrives, and behind the scenes).
• McKee: Interest equals curiosity, which is intellectual, plus concern, which is emotional and centers on what is good. Mystery, suspense, and dramatic irony are three possible relationships with the audience—the axe-bearing figure in the corridor has three possible treatments. Do not use cheap surprise or false mystery.

• A detail is the smallest unit of characterization, event, and environment. “Details determine success or failure”: three steps at a subway exit; Tōgō Heihachirō looking at clothes drying on a gun barrel. “A story may be fictional, but its details cannot be fabricated”: a sparrow crossing two rows of tiles; a guinea fowl traveling across eras.
• Mr. A versus Mr. B: Mr. A says that a gold bracelet merely “puffs himself up like a fatty”; his general remark cannot provoke a genuine smile. Mr. B says that after dinner he sits outside the main gate, searches for matchsticks to pick his teeth, and finds “the gaps packed with ham meat”; a ten-yuan note hangs from his belt; he buys half a salted pig's head and runs from the east to the west side of the village. Mr. A expresses commonality through concepts; Mr. B portrays individuality through details.
• Examples: Ah Q signs his name “in the shape of a melon seed”; Hong Chengchou dusts off a strand of spider silk and straightens his clothes, revealing his will to survive; in A Legal Marriage, a girl plays hopscotch in the sunset, characterizing her state of mind, revealing the theme, and advancing the relationship; in The Overcoat, someone swats a moth at night; Yan Jingsheng has two wick ends; in The Changing Melody, a daughter returns from military training with eight details.
• Five functions of detail in Beating the Copper Gong: establishing the environment (entering with the gong and striking it three times, followed by four lines); advancing the conflict (catching the duck); characterizing the character (Cai Nine holds the gong, deceives the gong mallet, performs a trick, and reveals the second mallet); forming the climax (killing the duck and testing the grain); and highlighting the theme (giving away the mallet and leaving a message).
• Five requirements: Authenticity; “close to the flesh,” meaning that it fits this particular work, character, and scene; differentiation of weight, prioritizing details bearing the marks of the period and social history—the human-blood steamed bun, the six-hundred-and-twenty-yuan debt, the silent cannon used during “Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius,” and killing an ox to celebrate after finding the key; no showing off (“a wasted expression” needs to be used only once; seven or eight uses become revolting. Passing a rusty sword around is needless business. Beating the crown prince's trousers is a good detail, but do not stop to explain its provenance. Snow Mother's five-minute dance is excessive. The sign of necessary repetition is whether it advances the plot, develops the conflict, or shapes the character: a bag of rice appearing three times is necessary); and visualizability (merely saying “kill the duck and test the grain” is inferior to taking out a knife, cutting it open, and examining its contents).
• There is only one source: observe life as a waiter observes chopsticks (“You eat by bringing both chopsticks toward your chest before raising them, so I can tell that you are poor”).
• Walter's “Conk” rule: Do not write “a small town in the Midwest”; write “Springfield, Ohio.” Do not write “an expensive suit”; write “a double-breasted chocolate-brown Armani suit.” Do not write “engaged in various activities”; write “gluing popsicle sticks together and drawing with a finger.” McKee: Use concrete nouns and active verbs, and avoid is and are throughout.

• A prop is a small object through which feelings are exchanged: a paper fan, handkerchief, key, or button during an arranged marriage. “One well-chosen prop often outweighs many flat, dry passages of exposition.” The goal is not quantity but refinement: Xu Xian's umbrella, Othello's handkerchief.
• Six functions: ① Structural core (Chasing the Egg: two eggs; One Cent; Training the Scarecrow: the scarecrow; The Locked Chest: the wife throws the key onto the floor instead of handing it to him; A Doll's House: the promissory note); ② Conflict accelerator (donkey-skin glue advances the conflict with every transfer; the handkerchief becomes a relay baton); ③ Characterization (Zhou Puyuan uses a pocket watch to set the clock; Pi the Rascal: one turtle serves two purposes; Beating the Copper Gong: two gong mallets; The Orphan of Zhao: three sticks and the idea that “it is hard to play the human twice”); ④ Symbol of the soul and fate (the magic chair—who sits in it and what is said upon sitting; Luo Han coins; prize savings certificates); ⑤ Thematic window (a cradle, a reassuring pill, a nanmu coffin, a door covered with slogans, a disruptive alarm clock); ⑥ Carrier of song and dance (stone mills, pots).
• Six techniques: Amplification (a foot warmer becomes as large as an iron wok); reduction (a shop sign becomes the size of a playing card); repetition (letters of recommendation pasted into paper rings, a dozen stools decorated with chicken heads and feet); transformation (jumping into a vat and walking while holding onto it); virtualization (Snow Mother, the Bodhisattva); and substitution or living props (an actor playing the ghost of a constable sings the character's inner monologue). “Drama is ultimately drama”—once “a full moon illuminates Suzhou and other places” is made scientifically accurate, where is the poetry?
• Yin Dike: The protagonist's weapon is a symbol of identity—a lightsaber, a sword, or even a car, ship, or computer—and it should play a role at the climax. Campbell: A symbolic motif, such as a handkerchief or small statue, should recur without being overused. McKee: An image system is a category of image that remains coherent from beginning to end while recurring with variation; it must remain latent (The Exorcist: water; Chinatown: blindness, water, and corruption). Once consciously recognized, it becomes a neutral object of curiosity. Snyder: “Recurrence” returns to an image, as with the flyer in Back to the Future, while a “repeated action” should be reversed in its latter half.
• Prop throughline chain (Kong Shangren's Peach Blossom Fan): One fan changes identity seven times: a scented fan pendant → an inscribed palace fan serving as a love document → evidence of a rejected marriage → a “defensive sword” spattered with blood → blood drops forming peach blossoms and giving the work its title → a family letter sent away → a relic after delivery → publicly torn in two. Rule: Every identity change must be caused by another person's action—inscription, painting the peach blossoms, sending the fan, and tearing it are all performed by different people—and must coincide with a value turn. Self-check: If an appearance in which no second person acts on the prop can be removed without affecting the plot, remove it. Failure condition: This method does not apply when the prop is not a physical object that others can take, destroy, alter, or pass on.
• Public substitution (the Yuan-dynasty zaju stage direction huan ke; Guan Hanqing's The Salvation of a Prostitute, Act IV, “the principal female role substitutes the document”): The substitution is written in only two words within the stage direction, with no explanatory line—the audience sees it, but the deceived character does not. The solution is revealed only in the interlude after three songs. Self-check: How many passages separate the substitution from its revelation? If they are too close, the audience has no time to worry for the protagonist. Failure condition: If the audience does not clearly see the act of substitution at that exact moment, all the subsequent tension collapses; use the alternative approach of keeping the secret from the audience instead.

• O'Neill's deliberate arrangement: In Beyond the Horizon, the alternation between outdoor scenes—the horizon representing desire and dreams—and indoor scenes, where the horizon disappears, creates rhythm. In Desire Under the Elms, two elm trees are “like two tired women who rest their drooping breasts, hands, and hair against the roof.” In The Emperor Jones, the forest and drums shift from a rhythm matching the heartbeat to frenzy, with hallucinations transformed into a series of scenes. In Long Day's Journey into Tomorrow, the fog outside the window changes from bright sunlight to a dense wall.
• Chekhov's sense of wholeness: The water clock, the sound of woodcutting, a snapping piano string, an owl, a fire, and a sigh interrupted by a whistle characterize a mental state and a way of life; see

  chekhov-dramaturgy

  .
• Contrast in Chinese opera: A birthday hall becomes a funeral hall; a chastity-and-filial-piety tower; Spring Festival couplets in the Lu household versus Xianglin Sao in the snow; a pursuit at a moonlit dock.
• Taboos: Do not automatically give every rural story a small courtyard or every urban story a living room. Three standards: It must benefit the theme (only two people can stand in a niche beside a tunnel), the characters (a mud pit halfway up a mountain reveals three layers of historical, political, and economic background, allowing Uncle Zhao to release his anger → fight for dignity → pull out his heart), or the conflict (the elevator itself participates in the conflict; scaffolding becomes the force that resolves the conflict; the Moon City and Yue family locations in Zhang the Antiquarian Borrows a Wife echo each other; in Two Sisters Marry, three spaces cross-cut one another, with upstairs dust falling into a downstairs glass).
• Traveling the same road twice (Scene 2's road song and Scene 7's retrospective passage in the Henan opera The Sunlit Valley): Traverse the same space in the opposite direction and reclaim, item by item, the physical objects introduced during the first traversal—the canal, terraced fields, martyrs' graves, and fruit trees—while reusing the same tune and the same opening-line structure (“Cross a ridge, then climb a mountain” / “Cross a ridge, then descend a ravine”). The same object on the same road now carries a different meaning. Failure condition: If the physical objects were not introduced one by one during the first traversal, there is nothing for the second traversal to reclaim, leaving only lyricism. Self-check: Does every object referred to in the second traversal appear in the first?
• Hardware and software: Hardware means physical factors; software means literary elements that enrich the inner meaning of the scene, such as a recurring song, a folk tale, or the history of the location—The Seventh Tree Is the Magnolia Tree uses its theme song three times, the origin of Love Square, and the character of the person who planted the tree.
• Hicks's genre patterns: In interpersonal drama, too many “spaces” can destroy the tension of being forced face to face; in comedy, the whole world can resemble the peel of a giant banana; in horror and thriller, it becomes a distorted maze or corridor; in detective fiction, it becomes a fetid urban jungle. McKee: A small, knowable world, as in A Clockwork Orange, with three locations and eight characters.
• Egri on entrances and exits: A character should appear only when the plot needs him and his appearance must advance the conflict; pouring water can be used to send someone away in a way that is “so bad it is unforgivable.” Lu Jun: Major characters should enter when the storm is about to break.

1. Why now and why here? Would another location make the conflict harder and the characters more exposed? Have you listed a dozen alternative locations?
2. What value is at stake? Positive or negative at the beginning, and positive or negative at the end? If it has not changed, this is an exposition scene—cut it.
3. What does each person want, what tactic do they use, and what do they subconsciously want? Is the opposition directly opposed or merely tangential?
4. Label every beat with a gerund: Are any beats repeated? Does each beat bring you closer to the turning point? Is the turning point created by action or revelation? Does it arrive neither too early nor too late, and does it actually appear?
5. Do you enter late enough and leave early enough? Do you leave before the conflict is fully resolved?
6. Are there passages in which “nothing happens,” such as shaving, small talk, or ordering food? Are the characters trapped in a state rather than acting?
7. Can the scene be written without dialogue? Which small action can be magnified, such as a ring, toast, or stocking?
8. Are the phone, car, restaurant, or office indispensable? If used, do they become centers of action?
9. Is suspense “a delicacy for one night” or foreknowledge of fate? Have you given the audience its key? Is the delay sufficient, with three layers of buildup?
10. Are the details authentic, close to the character, marked by their period, and visual? Are you showing them off by explaining the same detail seven or eight times or stopping to explain its provenance?
11. Is the prop a structural core, conflict accelerator, characterization device, symbol, thematic window, or song-and-dance carrier? Have you used amplification, reduction, repetition, transformation, virtualization, or substitution?
12. Does the scene have software—a song, a story, or a history? Do the entrances and exits serve the plot?
13. Does the sequence have a single idea? What is the third element—the transition—between adjacent scenes? Are scenes becoming shorter as the act climax approaches?

1. In the sequence outline, confirm the scene's purpose—the single piece of information that advances the story plus the aspect of the protagonist it reveals—and its position within the act, including its pacing: long or short, fast or slow.
2. Write down the value pair at stake and the opening value charge; write down each character's scene intention, tactic, super-intention, and background desire.
3. Choose the location: List a dozen places and select one using the three standards—theme, character, and conflict. Decide on the software: a song, story, or history.
4. Establish the props and details: What function will the core prop perform? Which two or three details are close to the character and visual? Which one should recur, and will its repetition advance the story?
5. Establish the suspense strategy: Will the audience know more or less than the characters? Which key will you give the audience? How many layers of delay will there be?
6. Write a beat sheet—gerund-based actions and reactions plus value changes—find the turning point, and confirm that no beat is repeated. First ask, “How can this be shown purely visually?”
7. Decide on the entry and exit points: Enter late and leave early; leave the final blow on the last word or action.
8. Draft: Action paragraphs in the present tense, concrete nouns and active verbs, no camera terminology, and no “we see”; see

   sw-dialogue

   for dialogue.
9. Self-check: Run through the diagnostic checklist. Walter's “$?”—is this line worth the money the audience spends? “Three Strikes”—Does it have a purpose? Does it have value? Is this the best way to achieve it?