Capítulo 15: A technique for coming up with a topic – Sentence expansion (2)
Author:314
Last time with my sentence expansion article, perhaps some people will still feel confused after reading it. Here, let me give an example and do it from start to finish, so that everyone can understand.
Let's start with "The main character is incredibly strong." The first step is to think about what he's strong at.
For this example, let's go with one of the most common story types, "The main character is incredibly strong at fighting." Your main character's strength doesn't need to be something particularly groundbreaking or innovative.
For the second step, why is your main character strong at fighting?
Here, it's better to have something that's fresh for your setting. Of course, so-called fresh is only relative, since its true nature won't be able to escape from the clichés. All we can do is to put an outfit that hasn't been used before on our cliché.
Let's just use a typical cliché, such as "The main character has an incredibly strong teacher."
Now then, let's give this cliché a new-looking outfit, so that readers don't think you're just using something incredibly cliché. Now then, what outfit should we give it?
How about making the main character's teacher someone who's a reincarnator or transmigrator? This is relatively rare, but if you think about it some more, only the first impression will make people think it's fresh. After that, the rest will still depend on the typical reincarnation clichés. Once the feeling of freshness is over, you might as well have had your main character be a reincarnator instead.
How about having something like demon possession, with an incredibly powerful soul residing within the main character's body, and becoming his teacher? This is fine, and is probably a better bet than the previous example, but there's nothing fresh or exciting about this setting at all.
Then, what about the main character receiving alien technology, or an ancient scroll, or a divine beast teacher, or even the future version of himself visits him to teach himself…
None of these seem that good. For instance, being taught by the future version of himself is fine and all, but in the end, it's still a variant of the reincarnation genre.
After careful consideration, how about making a setting wherein "The main character has a special ability to see what transpired in the past at any specific locations"?
In that case, the main character basically has countless top-quality teachers.
For example, maybe a sect has a top-rate teacher, and the main character could work for that sect as a low-level cleaning boy. After the teacher gives a class, the main character goes into the learning area afterwards to clean up, and also take a look at the content of the class.
Or, he could go to the location of famous battles between powerful individuals and watch fierce fights up close, obtaining combat knowledge he wouldn't have otherwise…
He could go to the location of a place where a person obtained a powerful secret technique to "view" how this technique works…
Countless miracle opportunities can be born from the main character possessing such a power. This is the equivalent of the main character having countless ridiculously strong teachers.
Also, it would be best if the main character can also level up this special ability of his. Perhaps at the start he can only view a few minutes into the past, which gradually improves. As the main character gets stronger, he can view farther and farther into the past, including even vicious battles between demons from legends, which helps him learn incredibly destructive abilities.
Now then, that gives you a really good reason for the main character to be strong. "Because the main character possesses an ability to look into the past, he's incredibly strong at fighting."
Next up is the main character's goal.
Here, you could go with a cliché, and pick a common reason for the main character wanting to be strong. Or, you could make up a personal background story just for your main character and create a goal that's relevant only to him.
For instance, you could make it so that your main character's family is under a strange curse. His family has only one child every generation to carry on the family line, and the adult men never live past forty years of age. This will require the main character to go search for answers in order to save both himself and his descendants.
This can definitely become your main character's goal – finding out the source of the curse on his family, along with finding a way to cure it.
This goal can be made more specific as well as separated into smaller parts.
For instance, the main character knows that there's a castle in the sky with a mythical temple located there. This temple is said to possess all the knowledge in the world that can answer any question. However, only Saint-ranked powerful individuals are allowed access, and each person is limited to only asking one question.
Now then, this gives us a target for the first step of our main character's goal. He needs to reach the Saint rank as quickly as possible before he turns 40 years old, or even 30, and enter this mystical temple in the sky.
By now, all the settings for your main character are half complete already.
He's from a family that's incredibly small in number. Due to the mysterious curse on his family, his father passed away long ago. As for whether his mother is alive or not, this depends on which direction you want to take your own story in.
It would be best if you have a main character whose personality doesn't give up easily. It's also better for you to have a main character who's foundationally a kind person.
Based on this story's current settings, the main character should have many opportunities to play the role of a servant or menial laborer.
So, you could give him an ordinary figure and appearance so that he appears incredibly normal.
This will make it more suitable for him to pretend to be weaker than he really is.
Still, the main character doesn't always need to lay low. He's more appropriate to become the type who doesn't fear authority, because he can always look into his enemies' past battles to carefully look for their weaknesses and shortcomings. So, making him into someone who always challenges the strong would be quite suitable.
As for the romantic aspect, this topic is quite appropriate for making women fall in love with him. Perhaps women will be attracted to the main character's power level or kindness and fall in love with him. But, the main character is worried about his family's curse, and doesn't dare to accept any woman's love. Yet, this creates a situation where all the females who are romantically interested in him have a chance and won't give up, staying by his side.
This pretty much finishes the main character's settings. As for the process by which he accomplishes his goal, that's for your overall outline, and it won't be so difficult anymore now that you've come up with your topic.
He keeps leveling up and finding new and more powerful teachers from the past. This means that the main character needs to constantly change maps.
First, he finds a relatively weak teacher, such as a teacher from a nearby martial arts school. Once he takes advantage of his ability to learn from that teacher, the main character will change locations, for example, working as a servant at a third-rate martial arts sect… and then goes to find an even more powerful teacher.
With this as your core, plus the main character constantly leveling, having clashes with enemies, making various friends, discovering numerous treasures, and interacting with many different women… your novel's overall outline will be born by itself.
All that you need to do then is to settle on the specific story background, your main character's name, age, all major side characters' personalities, a more specific overall outline, and so on.
That's actually all there is to writing a story that can last for 2 or 3 million words.
If you're a newcomer author, do you still think that thinking of a topic for your story is that difficult after reading all these articles?
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