Kapitel 4: The First Step of Writing a Webnovel: Choosing Your Genre
Author: 314 (Yang Chen)
Naturally, the first step of writing is deciding on what you want to write. That is to say, what genre to choose.
Any literary work is a bridge that authors use to communicate with their readers. In that case, choosing a genre means that we should also take into consideration both creation and the market. From specific issues to actually taking action, there are three main questions that can be asked:
1. What genre should I choose?
2. Is this genre appropriate for me?
3. Will my story be enjoyed by the readers?
These three questions are in obvious chronological order. Yet, when actually fleshing out your story outline, these three important factors typically complement and affect each other. You can definitely think about all three simultaneously, and use the answer to the latter two questions to change the genre you chose for the first question if necessary.
1. What genre should I choose?
Choosing a genre typically isn't quite as simple as picking one from all the genres available out there. Most of the time, it's actually a brand-new process of creation.
If you as an author have no idea what genre to pick, and only know that you wish to write a webnovel, in that case, you can try thinking about it from the following angles:
l Starting from a specific type
This means that you should first confirm what type of story you wish to write. Which overarching genre does it fall under? What subcategories? What's the background of your story, what year does it take place in? Only after that will you think about other relevant story settings.
For example, you have decided that you wish to write a Xianxia novel, with the story taking place in a modern-day city, which puts it in the modern-day cultivation novel subcategory. Then, you should start thinking about where the main character learned his skills from in this modern-day city setting, what his abilities will be, and how cultivating power levels work in your story…
This is a rather passive and mechanical method of choosing your story's type. The advantage is that after you choose your genre, you can use the overall outline that your genre generally has for novels to fill in the blanks. This is a rather simple method for newcomers that can help to greatly reduce any errors in writing.
l Using a specific novel as an example
This method is to use an already existing novel as the blueprint for your novel by borrowing certain elements.
There's an incredible amount of elements that can be borrowed as reference from any novel. From the story's setting, to how the novel describes its characters, the author's style, and so on can all be used as references. Of course, you can only use such elements as references, not copy and plagiarize.
What needs to be said is that this type of referencing has a foundational difference from the imitation method mentioned in the starter level authors' guide.
At the starter level, what's more important is to improve your writing ability. It's not really that important whether your book is good or not, or even if it's one that can't be officially published, like fan fiction. But if you're at the level where you wish to write for a living and already possess starter level author abilities, you must be careful just how much you borrow from others. Not only do you need to be careful not to be accused of plagiarism, you also need to make sure that you have a story that's unique enough to stand out on its own.
We must absolutely remember one point: the point of borrowing for reference isn't to help you skip over the creation process entirely, but instead to help you get inspired to create something even better!
As for the novel that you're referencing from, there are two types that you can choose from.
The first type is to choose a novel that's currently highly popular. This type of referencing can often be referred to as "bandwagoning."
There are many authors that look down upon bandwagoning and believe it to be abandoning their own creativity, or that it doesn't show any skill at all.
But actually, bandwagoning can oftentimes be quite an effective shortcut. Not only that, bandwagoning will also often create new developments in the original genre and help to improve the overall genre even further.
This is also the reason why the best and most popular novel in a particular genre is almost never the novel that started the genre in the first place.
To be honest, being successful at bandwagoning isn't as easy as you might think. A bandwagoning author needs to have sharp insight and judgment. You must stand out from other bandwagoners in the crowd and also have the ability to create new from old and adapt your novel so that it'll become a truly original work in the genre.
Still, no matter what, this is an excellent method for newcomer authors to choose a genre to write in. Even if you choose a genre that has an overabundance of novels in it, that's still better than choosing a genre completely blindly.
Not to mention any genre that has such a large number of bandwagoners and overabundance of books means that the market has proved that this is an excellent and classical topic.
The second type of novel you could choose as an example to reference from is one that you as an author really enjoy, even if it isn't a popular novel. This can't be called bandwagoning and can only be called referencing.
For authors that really don't know what genre to choose, this is a method that you could try as well. Try remembering what novels you've read in that past that you've really loved.
Even if the novel and/or the genre that you really enjoy isn't a currently popular one, and maybe it wasn't even popular back when it came out, just the fact that you enjoyed the novel means that it still has a market for readers. Not only that, it is highly likely to be a genre that's highly appropriate for you to write about.
Of course, when borrowing from such novels, we need to pay close attention to how much you borrow from them. At most, borrow ideas from the genre. You should create completely original settings, your own style, and so on.
This is somewhat difficult for newcomer authors, so I don't quite recommend it for authors that don't intend to become professional.
l Starting with a cheat
This method is to first give your main character some specific cheat and then figure out the rest from there. Consider what type of situations this cheat can be fully taken advantage of, what background should be given for such a cheat ability, and what type of main character is the most suitable for possessing such a cheat…
For example, let's pretend that the cheat ability you wish to give your main character is "Far Sight." Your main character has excellent vision, perhaps ten times, or even one hundred times better than an ordinary person.
In that case, we can naturally extrapolate from this that this advantage is greatly lessened in any era where binoculars have already been invented. So of course, your story will be much more suited to have an ancient setting. You can write a historical fiction novel with this, making your character into a noble commander, or perhaps an army general…
For authors that aren't skilled at writing historical or military fiction, you could also use this cheat ability for a wuxia or xuanhuan novel. After all, these novels also typically take place in ancient times with very limited levels of technology.
The main character could use his ridiculous eyesight to spy on grandmaster martial artists practicing their techniques or teaching their disciples to steal their techniques and secretly learn in such a method. With such a story setting, you can easily come up with additional settings – your main character needs to have a low social status and is probably poor to explain why he needs to do this, along with the fact that he needs to be skilled at learning martial arts…
Of course, it might not always be so easy to make extrapolations like these. Sometimes, we'll often discover that after extrapolating to a certain extent, there will be conflicts within your own storyline, perhaps two settings that can't be resolved with each other, or that you ended up with a story that isn't the one you wanted to write.
To continue using the example of the main character with the "Far Sight" skill, now that you've extrapolated that the main character is suited to be in a historical, wuxia, xuanhuan, or other ancient setting, maybe you actually only wanted to write a modern-day novel. In that case, you came up with a failed cheat for your planned novel, and you should probably be decisive in giving up on that cheat idea.
It may be somewhat more difficult to begin brainstorming with a cheat power as your foundation, but it's not that difficult, either. Newcomer authors can trying to do it this way.
l Starting with the main character
Starting with the character settings, or more accurately, the main character's settings, is quite similar to starting with the cheat power.
Actually, the cheat is just an element of the main character's settings. But apart from that, the main character's settings also has his social status, background, personality, and so on.
Normally speaking, when starting from the main character's settings, especially the personality, you need something special, maybe even something appropriately ridiculous.
For example, maybe you can make your main character be someone who is terrified of dying. Then, you can try imagining what your main character would do with his exaggerated trait of fearing death in certain scenarios, and how other characters might react.
Perhaps you can write that in a modern day setting, he only goes outdoors while wearing a bulletproof vest and iron helmet despite the fact that it's a peaceful era. Not only that, he has modified his house into a fortress with an underground bunker, he hired the strongest bodyguards around, but he's also paranoid of them; he's incredibly obsessed about eating healthy and always exercising…
Obviously, this main character's habits will require a large amount of money. In that case, your main character will either need to be from a rich family, or he needs to be skilled at making money. This can help to flesh out your main character even further. For example, he doesn't have any hobbies for fun at all, and instead only works hard at making money…
And if you have a setting in another world, then naturally your main character will work hard at cultivating his skills. Of course, he would have an overwhelming preference for all defensive skills and techniques. Not only that, your main character should have a good temper, and not be the type of person who likes to challenge or fight others…
Still, not having any conflict means that your story will be rather boring. So, in order to have a more interesting story, you'll have to write some reasons why your main character is forced into fighting with others. For example, your main character accidentally consumes a magical medicine that turns his blood into a magic potion that can improve anyone's power level…
This type of extrapolation is quite a bit more difficult than others. I don't recommend it for newcomer authors.
l Starting from some other media's idea
This is even more challenging than starting with the main character. The writer needs to have a significant level of creative ability.
In this type of situation, you as an author can try using other media, movies, television shows, news in society, what you see around you, or just about anything else for your inspiration so that you have something to write for your original novel.
Obviously, this method isn't suitable for newcomer authors.
l Starting with the market's needs
This is yet another high-level method that's not particularly suitable for newcomers.
Only veteran authors that have an excellent understanding of the market should try basing their next novel on what the market needs and what the readers want.
In conclusion, for a newcomer author like you to choose a genre, you can first consider about what type of novel you wish to write, or choose to bandwagon a popular novel. Or, starting with the cheat's settings is a good place to start from as well.
2. Is the genre appropriate?
To be more specific, this means you need to judge whether or not the genre you have chosen is one that you are familiar with and skilled at.
Of course, different authors will have varying levels of skill with different genres.
To a certain degree, the difficulty of writing a particular genre also has a direct correlation with the type of novel it is. I shall cover the varying difficulties of each novel type in a later article.
Newcomer authors can try measuring themselves from the following angles when it comes to your novel's topic:
l Knowledge
This refers to professional knowledge, layman knowledge, special experiences, and so forth.
Some novels' topics will involve relatively professional topics which requires the author to know more specialized knowledge about the topic at hand than the average person. For example, basketball, medieval politics, artifacts, gambling, racing, and so on. If your topic has to do with some specialized field that you're also well-versed in or have done your research on, this will be of great help to your novel.
The reverse is also true. If you wish to write such a topic but don't know anything about it, you should probably reconsider.
l Personality
This refers to you, the author's personality. Of course, there's no need to go too deep into analyzing your personality. You just need to have a general idea of your own personality—for example, if you're more of an introvert or an extrovert.
Normally speaking, it's not very advisable for newcomer authors to write a main character with too much of a personality difference from themselves.
Otherwise, not only will you feel awkward while writing, it's also much easier to accidentally make mistakes and write using your own personality rather than the main character's, and make decisions that don't seem consistent with the main character's personality.
Obviously, this will affect your readers' ability to enjoy and believe your novel.
When choosing a topic, we can tell that the main character's personality should be directly related to the topic as well. From this angle, it can also be said that the author's personality will also affect the topic that you should choose.
l Age and gender
This is quite easy to understand, as this refers to the author's own age and gender.
Just like the previous subsection, the same logic goes for the main character's gender. It's usually not advisable to write a main character who has a different gender from you for the same reason. This also goes for having a main character who has a large age gap from you. It will be much easier for a newcomer author to write about a main character who is the same gender and a similar age to themselves.
l Imagination
Imagination doesn't have any specific criteria to it, and this strictly depends on the author's own personal interpretation. If you feel that you lack imaginative ability, then I would advise you to choose a genre that's more realistic, such as modern or historical fiction.
And if you instead have a wild imagination, then of course you're probably more suited to writing xuanhuan, xianxia, and other more fantastical story types.
l Personal interests
This refers to the author's personal preferences when reading. If you read one genre more than any other, then naturally a newcomer author like you will find it much easier to write this particular genre.
l Topic extrapolation
I already mentioned this in yesterday's article. After we think of a particular topic, we'll naturally extrapolate various settings from the topic, including the cheat, the main character, the story background, and so on. Perhaps these settings will all mesh excellently with each other, but they also might conflict and contradict with each other.
Whether a topic is appropriate to write about or not will largely depend on how much these settings clash with each other and whether or not you have a way to resolve these conflicts. If you're unable to resolve them, or you will have to sacrifice great enjoyability in order to resolve a conflict, then it's not a good topic.
3. Will your novel be popular?
This is a topic that every single author out there should consider before even writing their novel.
Whether a novel will become popular or not typically depends on the market and the readers' overall preferences. Still, newcomer authors should consider one more factor—whether or not their novel will be welcomed by their editor.
I mentioned before in a previous article that whether your editor likes your novel or not can be considered even more important to a newcomer author than whether the market likes your novel.
When choosing a type of new novel to write, most people will say: "There is no best genre out there. There's only the best genre for you." Without a doubt, this is correct. This phrase applies to choosing what specific topics to write about as well.
Still, depending on different websites and different editors, choosing a more appropriate topic that goes well with your own writing is a good way to increase the odds of receiving a contract.
Normally speaking, the larger and more powerful the website is, along with the more experienced the editor, the less importance they'll place on the genre and topic of your story. As long as your story is indeed an excellent one, they'll be more than willing to sign a contract with you.
As for smaller websites and newer editors, they typically choose books based on the website's needs. The website's needs typically fall into two categories: novels that will be able to do well on the website, and novels in a genre that the website lacks.
The first category is quite easy to understand, and relatively easy to judge as well. The author only needs to take a look at the top-ranked novels on the site along with the novels on the front page that are recommended and see what genres and types of novels they are. That's all that is needed for you to understand.
Of course, in order to understand this even better, you should probably check out the front page once a week for at least two to three weeks in order to reduce the effects of a rather abnormal week in making you misinterpret things.
The second category, to be more specific, is that the website already has a well-developed business model and happens to need novels of a certain genre. Don't misunderstand and think that just because the website lacks novels in a genre, you can raise the price you demand for your contract or that a genre that a website lacks means it's a good genre.
For the rarer genres, it's more difficult to make an accurate assessment. Still, there's typically two characteristics for these.
The first one, normally speaking, is a genre that has a significant number of readers, even if it's not one of the most popular genres. At the very least, this genre isn't one that's bottom of the barrel.
The second characteristic is that perhaps a website has several recommendation slots on the front page, but you only see very few books on the front page, or that the numbers for this genre don't add up to the popularity that it deserves.
These two types of books are "books that editors love." Actually, to a large degree, these books also represent what readers love. For newcomer authors, this is enough, and there's no need to analyze any deeper into the market's wants for each category.
Still, there's also an important factor that newcomer authors need to think about—do you as an author like such a genre?
This is a critically important yet often forgotten element.
Many newcomer authors immediately try to start off by writing a book in a mainstream, popular genre, without any regards to what they truly enjoy themselves. This will only result in a failed, unpopular novel, or, at most, a novel that didn't reach the standards that you hoped for. This will also likely cause you to become extremely tired of writing, and give up on everything you've done.
In the reverse scenario, if you, as a newcomer author, write a novel in a genre that you truly love, then it'll greatly improve your ability to take criticism and pressure. Also, this will greatly improve your novel in the end as well.
This is why newcomer authors should consider first and foremost whether you yourself love the genre and topic that you've chosen for your novel, before you consider whether your editor likes it or not.
Kapitel 5: How to design your settings and write your overall outline
Author: 314 (Yang Chen)
After you confirm what genre and topic you wish to write about, it's now time for you as an author to design your settings and write the overall planned outline for your plot. As for why I'm putting these two elements together, that's because these two elements are deeply interconnected and inseparable.
When you're writing the overall outline, this is basically coming up with the story's plot. As you write the outline, what you're actually doing is fleshing out the details for your setting.
When you're writing a story, of course, you need to first consider where your story will happen, when it happens, who it happens to, and what type of person it happens to. As the story progresses, you also need to consider who the main character will meet in the story, what time and place he or she meets them at, along with who's stronger and who's weaker than the main character…
This is why by the time that you're finished with your overall outline, the world's background, various factions, levels, special abilities, treasures, all the important characters… and such settings will be naturally completed during the course of outlining.
The reverse is true as well. If you first work on designing the detailed settings instead, then you'll basically end up with an outline for the story's plot and how the main character grows over the story as well.
Of course, there's still some differences depending on which angle you start from. However, newcomer authors like you don't need to worry about this. You can simply create based on your personality and whatever you prefer. It doesn't matter whether you start from the settings or the outline. You can even do both at the same time.
For newcomer authors like you, there's only five points that are critically important for you to understand.
1. Having an overall outline isn't absolutely necessary, but having one is always better than not having one
Theoretically speaking, even if you didn't prepare an overall outline, it might not affect the progress of you writing your novel at all. There are some authors out there that simply write whatever comes into their mind and go with the flow.
Of course, this is all just a best-case scenario in theory. For the great majority of authors out there, once your story's plot exceeds your planned outline...
Your outline will help your story stay on track in the early stages, but once you reach the mid and late stages, all sorts of problems often appear, such as too many plotlines all at once, self-contradictory plotlines, or writer's block…
At such a time, authors will typically regret not creating a more detailed outline, but it's already too late now. Actually, overall outlines have more uses than you think.
Since webnovels are typically longer than normal novels, they take much longer to write as well. Typically, it takes an average author several months or even longer to finish writing everything in their overall outline. By the time that they're finish writing everything in their overall outline, most authors will have new ideas and insights into what they want to write. Once they combine their new ideas with their original outline, in a way, this gives them two sources of inspiration. It's basically the equivalent of two people working together, and on top of that, these two people know exactly what each other are thinking.
It's easy to see how this can be helpful in improving the quality of your novel.
Apart from this, while creating an overall outline, the author can also discover many topics or problems with the settings and correct them in time.
To give an extreme example, if you're having a great difficulty with writing your overall outline and don't know what to do with your own plot, this proves that there's a large problem with your plot. You should either make major changes, or delete this part of your plot entirely.
So, newcomer authors definitely shouldn't overlook the uses of having an overall outline. No matter if you have a good or bad outline, a simple or a detailed one, as long as you have one, that's good.
What needs to be noted is that only outlines that have been written out truly count as outlines.
Even if you as an author have a very detailed outline, and even if you've solidly memorized every single plot point in your outline, any outline that hasn't been written into your novel doesn't count as a true outline. That's because when you actually start writing, you'll discover that what you finally end up writing will always have differences from what you envisioned.
2. You need to finish your outline, but it doesn't need to be complete
Thinking about your outline is equivalent to thinking about your novel's plot. You need to consider both the beginning and the end. You also need to think about everything that the main character experiences from the beginning to the end of the story.
If your outline isn't finished, but only half-finished, you won't even be able to predict the storylines that come later, which will cause you to have difficulties writing your plot once you finish the beginning stages. This is basically the same as not having an outline at all.
Still, there's no need for us to make the outline as detailed as possible from the very beginning, with so many specific scenarios for all your plots. The reason for this is quite simple—none of us know just how long our novels will turn out to be in the end.
A story that's written with the intent of becoming a commercial product needs to be sufficiently long enough right from the planning stage. The longer your potential story, the better. But actually, how many words it finally ends up with depends on how well your story performs.
If your story is incredibly popular and performs well in the market, then we can consider writing it for as long as possible. However, if your story obviously isn't popular with readers, then you can consider ending your story in a timely fashion at an appropriate point in the plot so that you can think of a new story instead. That would be a wiser decision if you wish to become a professional author.
Of course, when you're only in the outlining stage, it's impossible for you as a newcomer author to know how readers will react to your novel. Precisely because of this, you need to have a flexible writing plan. What this means is that you should have an outline that's detailed in the beginning and general near the end. For the beginning of your story, you should have as detailed an outline as possible, while for the middle and especially the later parts of your story, you only need some general ideas. All you need is to consider the overall development of the plot so that you know what direction to take your storyline in.
For example, maybe you planned that the beginning of your novel will be approximately 80,000 words, and you've prepared a 4,000-word outline for just the beginning. In that case, your outline for the next 80,000 words, the middle of your story, might only need 3000 words, and the meat of your story, another 240,000 words, might have an outline that's less than 1000 words.
Of course, as you continue writing your story, you should constantly update your outline as well. You should complete your outline for the next 80,000 words before you finish writing the first 80,000 words.
3. Your settings need to be constantly updated
Just like writing an outline, you should first come up with the basic settings before you even begin writing, which includes your world background, main character's personality, power levels, and so on.
More specific settings, such as a powerful artifact that appears in the story, can be added as you write your story.
Unlike an outline, you don't need to fully plan out all of your settings at the very beginning. It's perfectly acceptable to think of new settings while you're writing.
However, newcomer authors need to note that while it's okay to come up with new settings as you write, you should write these settings down and add them to your outline or settings document as you write.
This is to help yourself check your own settings later in the future. Otherwise, a novel that reached over one million words and has lasted for one year or longer might cause you as an author to completely forget about something you wrote before in the past. It's even quite common to make a mistake when writing about the items that the main character possesses. Yet, there will always be a sharp-eyed reader or two that catches the author out in a misstep.
If you have a very detailed document on your settings, not only will you be able to greatly reduce your own plot continuity errors, you'll also be able to look through your settings whenever you have writer's block and find some inspiration in a side character that you have already forgotten about or some item that was mentioned before but never used again.
4. It's better for your settings to be cliché
Here, this means the systems and names that you use for your settings. For example, the names and levels you use for a martial arts society.
Many newcomer authors will mistakenly think that using already existing well-known settings will make their novel seem too cliché, causing them to want to be as "unique" as possible. These authors will use their imaginations to come up with all sorts of fictional vocabulary words, which in their minds will make their novels "stand out." These newcomer authors don't realize that this is the worst possible way to write a novel. In the great majority of situations, this will have the opposite effect from intended.
A new original novel that you write should be a new interpretation or story about some specific genre or story type. How to make your novel stand out depends on the conflicts you create in your story and how the main character resolves them. As for coming up with new vocabulary words and names for your novel, even if you make them sound really cool, or make some modified slang words, it's almost never a good thing for you.
The reason for this can also be understood in my article about how to write the beginning of your story. By doing so, the author is placing more burden upon the readers to understand a larger amount of information.
There will always be other already existing words that you could have used, which are easily understood by all your readers. Instead, your readers now need to spend their time and effort on reading your explanations. Obviously, readers aren't here to read your technical manuals or info dumps. The more explanations that you have in your novel, the lower your novel's appeal and flow will become. But, if you don't add any explanations for your self-created words at all, the readers won't even understand what's going on.
This is why newcomer authors should avoid this useless type of "creativity" as much as possible. You should simply rely on settings that all readers are familiar with instead.
5. The storyline should be pushed forward by using conflicts
Many newcomer authors will often develop writer's block when planning their outline or working on their novel.
Sometimes, this is because the author has made their storyline too messy. But most of the time, it's because the author feels like there's nothing to write about, or doesn't know what they should make the main character do. The author has no idea how to continue their own story.
In order to deal with writer's block, or in other words, how to push your storyline alone, the answer is actually incredibly simple.
You can answer this question using only one word – Conflicts!
Actually, the critical element of all webnovels can be summed up into one word – conflicts. For example, leveling is the desire or need of the main character to become stronger, which is a conflict between the main character and his or her own current weakness.
And since there is a conflict, you must resolve the conflict. And so, your main character wants to cultivate to become stronger, which means he needs to travel around the world in order to find cultivation methods…
All sorts of conflicts will both push forward your storyline as well as create numerous climaxes for your readers. It can be said that how you design your conflicts is the very foundation of writing any novel, not just a webnovel.
As for a more detailed analysis on how to design your story's conflicts, please read my intermediate-level article on the topic. For newcomer authors like you, you simply need to understand this concept, and know that you should keep coming up with new conflicts whenever you're having trouble keeping up with your own storyline. Try finding potential conflicts from plots, characters, and items you've already used, or forcefully introduce a new element into your story that creates a new conflict.
This can be said to be one of the most basic techniques of planning your storyline.
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