352: Chapter 352 Things That Cannot Be Taught

Lin Que stood in the center of the stage and placed the marker back on the table.

He glanced at the students in the front rows of the inner field who were still bowing their heads and writing furiously.

"The 'photographing inspiration' I just mentioned is only the first step."

"After taking the photo, you have to know how to turn that photo into a complete narrative."

He walked to the whiteboard, picked up the marker whose cap hadn't been closed yet, and drew a horizontal line in the blank space.

"After you go back, you can use three words to record a moment every day, and then use a precise verb to string them together."

"Keep it up for thirty days, and you'll find that the beginning of your essays will never get stuck again."

This was spoken in extremely common terms, without a hint of academic jargon.

But the underlying logic was as sharp as a knife, slicing through the chronic problem of 'not being able to write an opening' that plagued countless students.

In the second row of the teaching and research area, Zhou Min, the Head of the Chinese Language Group who had taught four graduating classes of seniors, raised her eyebrows slightly and leaned over to lower her voice:

"Verb Anchor... this angle is certainly novel, but writing a diary and a College Entrance Examination essay are two different things. Can it really work?"

Teacher Wu beside her didn't respond.

He just silently screwed the lid of his freshly opened thermos back on, his eyes fixed on the whiteboard on stage.

Zhang Chaowei wrote the words 'Verb Anchor' in his notebook, hesitated, and then circled them several times.

On stage, Lin Que didn't stay on the point of 'openings' for too long.

He flipped the whiteboard over and used the marker to draw three equidistant vertical lines on the blank surface, dividing the entire board into three areas.

"Now that we've solved the opening, let's talk about the second thing: structure."

He wrote three numbers at the top of the three areas:

One, Two, Three.

"Students, regardless of how many essays you've written before, has anyone seriously thought about a question: what should an article actually look like?"

The hundreds of students in the inner field looked at each other; no one raised their hand.

"Usually, teachers teach the 'General-Specific-General' structure—opening to state the theme, middle to expand, and end to sublimate, right?"

A chorus of murmurs of agreement rose from the audience.

Lin Que drew a flat horizontal line in the middle of the whiteboard.

"These templates can get you a passing grade, but they have a fatal flaw—they're flat."

"It's like walking on a straight road without any curves. The graders will forget it as soon as they finish reading. How can they give you a high score?"

Lin Que erased the horizontal line and replaced it with a wildly fluctuating wavy line.

"A good article is essentially a movie with only three acts."

He tapped the first area with the tip of his pen.

"Act One: Make the reader sit down."

The tip of the pen moved to the middle.

"Act Two: Make the reader unable to sit still."

The tip of the pen landed on the last box.

"Act Three: Make the reader stand up."

The rhythm of these three sentences was like three drumbeats, each one heavier than the last.

The eyes of all the students followed the movement of his pen tip.

Lin Que put down the pen and scanned the front rows of the inner field.

On several students' folding desk boards, the cold gray-covered folding beijing sat alongside their notebooks, the pages covered in colorful sticky notes.

He picked up the sample book Fei Yuncheng had prepared earlier from a nearby table and held it up.

"Since many of you have this book in your hands, that makes things easier. Let's use it for a breakdown."

Several students in the front row who happened to have the book immediately flipped open the covers excitedly, while those who didn't craned their necks to look at their neighbors'.

Wu Di directly held his book over his head and shook it twice, muttering in a low voice, "If I'd known, I would've brought a couple more," before being slapped down by Fang Zhiyuan.

Lin Que opened the book and called out the corresponding page numbers.

The students below followed along.

"The setting of the First Space appears in the first three chapters."

"Five million people enjoy a full twenty-four hours, while fifty million people are compressed into eight hours of survival."

"This is Act One."

"Its task is singular—to lay out the rules, make the reader realize 'something is wrong with this world,' and then make them willing to keep reading."

He marked an upward arrow in the first box of the whiteboard.

"From Chapter Six to Chapter Twelve, Old Knife smuggles a letter from the Third Space to the First Space. This part is the core of Act Two."

Lin Que drew a densely fluctuating curve in the middle box, marking every peak and valley with a circle.

"Act Two is the heart of the entire piece."

"All conflicts, reversals, and emotional explosions are packed in here. But there is one ironclad rule."

He tapped the whiteboard.

"The core conflict cannot be revealed all at once."

Hundreds of pens below were suspended above the paper at almost the same instant; even the rustling sound of notes disappeared.

"I call this the 'Onion-Peeling Conflict Method'."

Lin Que used the pen to draw four progressive markers at the valleys.

"Old Knife is caught in the Second Space—that's the first layer of skin. After peeling it back, the reader's emotion is despair."

He wrote a word next to the first marker: Sinking.

"Immediately after, he meets someone willing to help him. The second layer is peeled, and the emotion flips to hope."

Next to the second marker: Floating.

"Then that helper betrays him. The third layer: deeper despair."

Next to the third marker: Sinking.

"Finally, Old Knife finds the crack in the garbage chute on his own. The fourth layer is peeled: relief."

Next to the fourth marker: Floating.

"Sinking, floating, sinking, floating."

"With every layer peeled, the emotional amplitude becomes a step larger than the last."

"The reader falls and rises along with Old Knife. By the time the fourth layer is peeled, they have no way to stop."

Lin Que closed the book and turned the whiteboard toward the large screen.

The cameras throughout the venue simultaneously zoomed in on the curves and annotations on the whiteboard.

In the front row, several students who had already finished folding beijing looked down and flipped to those pages, their fingers tracing the paragraphs, cross-referencing word-for-word with the curves on the whiteboard.

The positions of the turning points matched perfectly, without a single word out of place.

A boy from Jiangcheng No. 4 Middle School flipped to the passage where Old Knife crawls into the garbage chute, his fingertip stopping on the page.

He had clearly read it once before, but now, feeling that four-layer onion-peeling progression against the curve, he still got a layer of goosebumps on his back.

Fang Zhiyuan propped up his chin, staring at the book in his hand for a dozen seconds, then suddenly turned to look at Wu Di.

Wu Di was bowing his head, his hands flipping the pages with a rustling sound, muttering something.

Fang Zhiyuan pricked up his ears to finally hear what he was saying:

"This is too brutal... I was nailed to my seat by these chapters when I first read it. So this was the structure..."

The teaching and research area.

At some point, the pen in Zhou Min's hand had stopped.

She stared at the four-peaked emotional curve on the large screen, her brow going from tightly knit to relaxed, then to slightly furrowed. It wasn't doubt, but assimilation.

Teacher Wu beside her placed his thermos on the armrest and leaned his upper body forward by about fifteen degrees. He didn't speak, but that posture spoke for itself.

Zhang Chaowei's notebook was already more than half-filled. His handwriting was no longer as neat as it was at the start; it became increasingly scribbled toward the end, clearly trying to keep pace with the young man's output on stage.

He wrote a note next to 'Onion-Peeling Conflict Method': Can be transferred to the progressive logic of evidence in argumentative essays.

Lin Que stood by the whiteboard, looking at the faces below—some in deep thought, some shaken, some writing furiously—and stopped.

This sudden stop wasn't a hitch; it was rhythm control.

He remembered back in his previous life, when he had secretly audited classes at the literature society in university, he had heard an old scholar talk about such a theory:

After a period of dense output, one must leave a gap for the audience to digest.

Otherwise, information overload would occur, and no matter how good the subsequent content was, it wouldn't fit.

A moment later, he returned to the center of the stage and gently placed the marker on the tabletop.

The pen barrel hitting the table made a short sound that was exceptionally clear in the quiet venue.

Lin Que's gaze swept from the inner field to the second-floor stands, and then to the blurred faces at the furthest reaches of the third floor.

"Everything I just talked about belongs to the level of technique."

His tone suddenly changed.

It wasn't the crispness he used when breaking down cases, nor the sense of command from the interactive experiment. His voice dropped half a notch, as if switching from a lecturer's channel back to the channel of a peer.

Tens of thousands of people in the venue noticed this shift at the same time.

"Technique can be taught. How to capture inspiration, how to build a structure, how to control rhythm—these things you can pick up in thirty days and master in three hundred."

He paused for a beat.

"But in writing, there is one thing that cannot be taught."