History

Initially, historical novels took real history as the background and brought real characters into the era of Piaotian literature. This type of historical biographies still exists, but it is no longer the mainstream of historical novels. Instead, it is the overhead history and historical overhead types.

Judging from the name, these two types are very confusing, so they are the mainstream of Benpiao Astronomy novels.

Among the major types of online novels, time traveling through history is a very special type. It has strong limitations and stability. Its total number of readers is not large, but it has considerable loyalty. At the same time, works that travel through history are often similar. Apart from changing dynasties and changing characters and professions, it is difficult to see truly novel changes. There is actually only one reason for these characteristics, that is, the fixed selling point of this type.

For other types of novels, genres are just garments that can be discarded at any time. The same type can have completely different selling points to support the work. For example, urban works can adopt the monster-fighting and upgrading mode of online games to attract readers. Xianxia novels can use the urban business war model to interpret the acquisition of the protagonist's magic weapon and wealth, but time-traveling historical novels are completely different. They have a fixed and decisive selling point - the leading advantage of modern civilization in the past.

It is precisely because of this that how to write the differences between ancient and modern civilizations, and how individuals use advanced ideas and culture, science and technology to influence the backward overall are the key to whether time-traveling historical works are popular. To write this well, the author needs to have two abilities: one is to be familiar with history, even politics, economy, military, and culture, and the other is to be able to reasonably use the protagonist's modern identity, choose his appropriate talents, and display it in a suitable scenario. If you want to write time-traveling historical works, these two abilities are indispensable, but if you are truly proficient, you only need to do one of them, and the other can be compensated with some small techniques.

When traveling through history, the selling point is traveling through time, but the basis is history. Therefore, understanding of real history and some related knowledge is necessary to write such novels. As for how deep you need to know history, this first requires exploring the reader group of this type of work and their respective needs.

Reading novels through time-travel history can be roughly divided into two categories: one is historical and military enthusiasts. What they want to see is rigorous historical novels, and they hope to see various political concepts, military tactics, and cultural strategies perfectly reflected in the novel. Compared with the protagonist's happy life under a strong sense of substitution, they care more about the true manifestation of history, and more about the truth and rigor; while the other type of readers compare themselves with the protagonist who is also a modern person and substitute them into the work to experience the superiority of modern people, enjoy the praise of others, and enjoy the success of career and love. What they care more about is the fate of the protagonist, and whether the protagonist can live a happy life.

These two types of readers have room for survival for professional writers who are proficient in history and entertainment writers who are proficient in yy. However, one thing is certain, no matter which type of author, they must be proficient in one of them and cannot completely give up the other one.

Historical novels cannot be separated from history. Therefore, entertainment-type authors cannot completely understand history. Even if they cannot be proficient, they should at least read some historical materials to avoid too obvious loopholes in their works. However, for this type of author, history-related knowledge can be bypassed by most. As a history layman, you can still write time-travel historical novels. The key to doing this is to learn to avoid the real and the virtual, and to play to the strengths and avoid weaknesses.

For this type of author, it is obvious that plots involving specific historical, geography, culture, military, politics, economy and other knowledge should be avoided as much as possible. Try not to let the protagonist escalate in the officialdom and describe the struggle in the temple; don’t let the protagonist escalate in the battlefield and describe the competition in the battlefield; try to avoid describing excessively specific plots, such as buying a big cake for a few cents, how many servants a family has, etc.

Some people may ask, this cannot be written, that cannot be written, what else can be written? What is left? It is very simple, what is left is the protagonist himself, the modern knowledge and modern thoughts he has. In the novel, history is only a background, a historical environment, and historical figures are just to set off the protagonist's talents. The protagonist shocks his predecessors with the literature of later generations, deceives his predecessors with the science of later generations, benefits his predecessors with the technology of later generations, and uses the concepts of later generations to impress his predecessors. Everything develops around the leading advantage of time-traveling the characteristic selling points of historical novels - modern civilization.

In a sense, time-traveling historical works are the easiest to write because of the fixed selling points. Countless predecessors have created countless role models. Later generations can learn from the experience of their predecessors to the greatest extent, learn from the success of their predecessors, and walk on a flat road with gold bricks laid. But at the same time, time-traveling historical works are also the most difficult to write, because the predecessors have developed this selling point quite perfectly. It is really not easy for future generations to continue to maintain innovation on this basis and get rid of the hat of "following the trend" and "censored".

Of course, this is not impossible to imagine. Innovating in essence is indeed quite difficult. It requires the author's flexible thinking and instantaneous inspiration. It cannot be achieved by using some small skills. However, if some changes on the surface are slightly reflected, there are still methods to follow. The key point is to be good at digging, good at connecting, and start from the small. The simplest change is the profession of the protagonist, or the professional knowledge and skills he has.

Looking back at previous works of time travel, we can easily see that the protagonists of this type of work usually start their business by burning glass, making steel, making food and other means, either relying on solar-powered laptops to create an omnipotent protagonist. Obviously, we can work hard to design a relatively unpopular but practical professional skill for the protagonist in ancient times, so that he can rely on this to gain his first pot of gold. After that, whether it is to insist on taking the professional route or returning to the old-fashioned route of fighting for the world, the characteristics of the work already exist, that is, superficial innovation has already existed.

Example: Modern advertising planning goes back to ancient times to be a shop assistant; modern traffic police go back to ancient times to develop traffic lights; modern calligraphers go back to ancient times to show their unique skills; modern acrobatic troupes return to ancient times to sell their skills...

Because this is an entertainment-oriented creation, in fact, there is no need to delve into whether this skill can really be enjoyed in ancient times. For example, when writing about acrobatics members traveling through time, there is no need to consider whether the juggling level in ancient times is higher. It only needs to be explained in the article that the protagonist of the novel is the number one master in the modern acrobatics world. He has been trained by modern systems and used the most advanced equipment and facilities, and spent a lot of money to develop such skills. In this way, when he returned to ancient times, it seems very reasonable, and at least most readers will not ask questions about this.

In addition to the protagonist's professional expertise, the differences in what he carries during time travel, the different personalities, etc., can all be used as novel selling points that distinguish them from similar works. As long as you determine this feature before writing, and then pay attention to enlarge it, exaggerate it during writing, and let it run through the entire text, then this work is novel at least on the surface.

Another important thing for entertainment-based time traveling historical works is that it is the selection of dynasties. This is actually important in which dynasty the protagonist travels to.

Some authors believe that the choice of dynasties must be novel, and they must write about dynasties that others have not written about or few have written about. This is an extremely wrong view. Although the Three Kingdoms, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing dynasties have been written by countless authors, it is obvious that there are reasons for it. Why do those authors choose these eras? Why do books with these eras as the background become popular? Obviously, this is a question of familiarity and acceptance.

Taking the Three Kingdoms as an example, almost everyone knows the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Even if he hasn't read this classical masterpiece, he should know the Three Jehovah of Taoyuan, and also hear the reputation of historical celebrities such as Zhuge Liang, Cao Cao, Zhao Zilong, and Lu Bu. He should also be familiar with the allusions of the Battle of Chibi, the Three Qi Zhou Yu, and the White Emperor's Order. With such a reader base, works of the Three Kingdoms can easily resonate with readers, so they will naturally become more popular. At the same time, this well-known dynasty is also more familiar to the authors. They will write more easily, and it will be easier to read reference materials.

On the contrary, if you write an era that few people know, then the author finds it difficult to write. What is more important is that the reader lacks a sense of familiarity and will also feel impatient when reading, unless the author has strong writing skills, the pujie of such works is almost inevitable.

As for which one to choose among those popular dynasties, it depends on the specific work setting. The protagonists with different personalities, different ranges of abilities, and different focuses of different works, need to correspond to different dynasties and different periods.

For example, if the protagonist's specialty lies in military affairs, it should be allowed to travel to a chaotic world, and military capabilities can also be divided into focus on the arrangement of cold weapons and the use of hot weapons, which should correspond to the cold weapons such as the Three Kingdoms and the era when hot weapons were used in the late Qing Dynasty; if the protagonist's ability lies in literature and chant poetry and lyrics, it should be allowed to be born in a prosperous era. As for the prosperous Tang Dynasty, the Northern Song Dynasty or the Ming Dynasty, it depends on the specific dynasty cultural characteristics and the protagonist's field of expertise; if the protagonist's goal is to innovate ideologically and strengthen the country in politics, it depends on what the protagonist's specific concept is, what kind of social productivity cooperation does this concept require, whether it requires the cooperation of an enlightened monarch, etc., and use these to determine the specific time travel period.

This kind of complete professional time travel seems to be a coincidence that is unreasonable, but we can fully understand that the so-called "no coincidence" is made, and we can completely understand that there are 99 times travelers who travel to dynasties that are not professional, and then the protagonists starve to death. They are either not worthy of being written into books, or they are left unattended after the book is completed, and their works are still buried. In the end, we only see the story of such a successful time traveler.

In short, select a suitable era, choose a suitable protagonist, start with details, magnify and exaggerate, and pay attention to absorbing the experiences and experiences of previous generations. Entertainment-based time-traveling historical novels are relatively easy to succeed.

In contrast, it is much more difficult to create professional time-travel historical novels. In all aspects such as politics, culture, military, history, and economy, the author must be familiar with several of them. When writing, he must combine detailed information to achieve complete rigor. For this reason, he must even sacrifice some storylines and some selling points that could attract many readers to maintain the authenticity and rigor of the work. Otherwise, the work will be unpleasant at both ends, and will not attract many popular readers.

However, professionalism itself is not a true reflection of the difficulty of creating a professional time-travel historical novel. Relatively speaking, it is necessary to take into account both professionalism and entertainment, which is the real difficulty of it.

Because the number of professional readers and entertainment readers is seriously disproportionate, for entertainment works, as long as they can capture the entertainment readers they target, it is enough to become popular. However, even if professional works attract the attention of most professional readers, popularity is still not enough. They must also gain some of them among entertainment readers in order to reach the basic popularity bottom line.

Therefore, for professional time travel historical novels, the real difficulty lies in striving for a balance between rigor and entertainment, weighing the gains and losses appropriately, and while maintaining the loyalty of professional readers, appropriately add entertainment elements to please pure entertainment readers.

To achieve this, the simplest way is to maintain the global structure unchanged, but add some optional scenes to the details to give the protagonist a stage to show the talent. In other words, it is to insert the entertainment elements as embellishments and insert them into the original text.

As for the specific balance grasp, professional authors can also refer to the works of their predecessors. Whether successful or failed, they can find corresponding experiences in them as a stepping stone to their success.

In addition to the above two situations, there are four special variants of time travel history novels, namely the ancient protagonists, the ancient time travel, the future time travel, and the reverse time travel.

Among them, the reverse travel refers to the ancients traveling to the modern era, or the moderns traveling to the future, to a more advanced era. This kind of work has its own unique selling points, using the lost ancient skills mastered by the protagonist, using the shock of advanced civilizations to the ancient protagonist, and using the series of interesting stories generated by the collision of two civilizations to attract readers. These selling points are very different from traditional traveling historical works, so I will not explain them here. However, it is undeniable that this type also has a broad space for survival and development. The key is that the author must be good at grasping details, and be good at comparing and discovering the differences between ancient and modern society.

Example: "The Master of Martial Arts on Campus". The protagonist of the book is a pioneer general under Yue Fei's tent during the Song Dynasty. He is proficient in martial arts and has also been involved in ancient Chinese medicine, calligraphy and painting, ancient literature, etc., and his time travel object is a modern student with a cowardly personality, almost useless. In this strong contrast, the work not only gains rich plot driving force, but also because a generation of masters is hidden under the identity of the weak, deeply integrating the essence of entertainment literature. Whether it is playing a pig or eating a tiger or a shocking explosion, it can maximize the reading pleasure of readers.

Future time travel is an extension of traditional time travel history novels. It inherits the signature selling points of this type of novel, only moving the protagonist through the era before and after, and also traveling from the protagonist with more advanced culture to a relatively backward modern society.

Compared with traditional time-traveling historical works, it does not require the author to have any historical knowledge, but requires certain scientific literacy and rich imagination. From this point of view, this topic type is closer to soft science fiction.

Example: "The God of Immortals and Medicine". The book does not contain time travel on the surface, but in essence, it describes a protagonist with future high-tech traveling to the modern world, using knowledge beyond the times to achieve some of his goals, and using high-tech means to assist his practice. In this sense, the book is considered a future time travel work.

The ancient time travel category is also a type that is essentially different from traditional time travel historical works, because its design is that ancient people travel to ancient people, without the modern knowledge system mixed in it, the impact of different civilizations no longer dominates, and the protagonist's personal insights, experiences, experiences, and mentality are the top priorities of this type of work.

This type of work can also be divided into three situations according to the time travel era, and their main selling points are different.

The first is that the protagonist of the ancients traveled to an earlier era. This type of work is closer to traditional traveling historical novels, and it also takes the protagonist's familiarity with history as its main selling point.

The second type is that the protagonist of the ancients travels to a slightly later era, which is closer to the above-mentioned reverse time-travel text, but is still limited to the ancient scope.

The third type ignores the changes in the times, which is often a time travel that is closer to the times. It emphasizes the changes in the protagonist's identity, such as traveling from an emperor to a beggar.

The above three types can be classified into other major categories at a glance, but if you study them carefully, you will find that they have their own unique charm. These three types, both the protagonist and the background of the times, are limited to ancient times. In addition to abandoning modern civilization, this setting reflects a new surprise while traditional time-traveling historical novels are rampant. More importantly, it loses the sense of substitution brought by abandoning the protagonist of the modern person in exchange for a historical celebrity to act as the protagonist, so that the protagonist image of the work is born full, and the work attracts some readers before it is published. This advantage of ancient celebrities cannot be ignored.

Example: "The Loyal Lu Bu". This book describes the heroic spirit that never dispersed after Lu Bu's death and traveled to an ordinary general in the country of Houzhu Li. As such a well-known historical celebrity, the protagonist Lu Bu had already attracted enough attention before entering the play, and the huge difference in his identities in the two lives also created eye-catching selling points and suspense. In his previous life, he rode the fastest horse, used the sharpest weapons, possessed the most beautiful woman, and had the highest martial arts reputation in this life. However, in this life, he almost had nothing, and the only one was his invincible martial arts. Under such circumstances, how Lu Bu reappeared his glory one by one and how to make up for the shortcomings in his previous life became something readers urgently wanted to know. In addition, the confrontation between Lu Bu and historical celebrities such as Zhao Kuangyin, such a collision between Guan Gong and Qin Qiong, also constituted a great reading pleasure for readers.

As the mainstream time-traveling historical type, as mentioned above, no matter which small category it is, its historical background is a real history. If the real history is changed or even a complete fiction of history is completely created, it is a mutated historical type.

Abandoning the real history means abandoning a sense of identity that readers are familiar with, which brings fewer limitations and broader development space. From this point of view, mutated historical and time-travel historical works have their own advantages and disadvantages.

In terms of creation, abandoning real history does not mean abandoning the truth of history. History is fictional, but the social environment, politics, economy, culture, military, etc. that constitute history must be logical and self-consistent. In fact, it is not easy to do this. Compared to understanding an existing history through information, it is obviously more difficult to use the knowledge structure to construct a new history by yourself. The mastery and comprehensiveness of knowledge are a great test. Therefore, mutated historical works generally have a slight change to the existing history, and there are very few that are truly innovative and successful.

Because we abandon the history that readers are familiar with, the pleasure of changing history brought by modern people after traveling through time also goes away. The mutated historical types have some flaws in their innate selling points. Therefore, it is not difficult to find that successful mutated historical novels often combine other elements and give full play to the strengths of marginal works, so that readers can be truly left behind. However, if too fantasy elements are mixed in this type of work, it is easy to destroy the structure and component ratio of the work, so that the work belongs to other categories. When it cannot affect the main body of the work, but also enhances the attractiveness of the work, martial arts has become the first choice for saving the market.

Here are two examples with very different differences.

Example: "Chunqiu". This is an example of changing real history. Based on the information vaguely revealed in the work, we can guess that before the protagonist, another time traveler returned to the ancient times, he subverted the history we are familiar with. When the protagonist traveled through time, we naturally found that the historical environment is both familiar and unfamiliar. In this strange environment, the protagonist learned peerless martial arts, which attracted the attention of readers to a large extent, thus gradually leading to the author's description of politics, military and other aspects. Before the readers could recall from the martial arts stories, they were immersed in other stories and were completely attracted by the novel.

Example: "A Generation of Military Advisors Driving with the Flow". Many parts of the book are exactly the opposite of "Chu". In "Chu", the protagonist himself has peerless martial arts, but in the book, the protagonist is powerless; in "Chu", the protagonist travels through time is a history that has been changed, but in the book, the protagonist does not travel through time, and he is in a completely fictional history. However, these two novels still have many similarities, such as the two protagonists are resourceful and have a calm mind that is different from ordinary people. More importantly, the construction of the historical environment, the integration of martial arts combined with history, and the shaping of the main characters are very successful.

As for the historical biographical type, due to the limitations of the subject itself, it is more suitable for existence as a rigorous historical novel. If entertainment elements are to be added, the novel will change in genres as the elements are added, and it will no longer become an orthodox historical biographical novel. Here, this category will not be explained in detail.

In short, although the historical type only targets a specific reader group, the number of this group is quite large, which makes this type slightly limited but has extremely stable readers support. Therefore, historical works are still worth trying, especially the time-traveling historical types. Its main selling points are fixed and can largely draw on the achievements of predecessors. For novices who have some historical knowledge but do not know much about online writing, it is worth choosing an introductory topic to try.

Use celebrities

8 Military category

In a sense, military works are an enhanced version of the history category, which requires more professional knowledge, a more targeted readership, and often has more loyal readers.

Military works can be roughly divided into ancient, modern, modern and future military according to their age.

Among them, ancient military included historical military and cold weapons wars under fictional history. The former paid more attention to the combination of history and military, while the latter emphasized military performance. However, no matter which one it was, they described wars in the era of cold weapons, reflecting ancient war art and tactical ideas. Although a few works describing modern people's time travel added some influences of modern military concepts, it is just an auxiliary, and the main body is still the military concept of cold weapons.

Although modern military is still a combination of history and military, it has an essential difference from ancient military, that is, war has entered the era of hot weapons, but it is only at the beginning of the prosperity of hot weapons, and it still retains some remnants of the military concept of cold weapons. Whether in terms of technology or concept, there is no special infiltration of modern warfare and ideological innovation such as information warfare.

Modern military novels have a special branch, that is, anti-Japanese works. Although the eight-year war of resistance was only a short moment in the long river of history, its historical significance was very special, and it was the history that all Chinese people most reluctant to see and want to change the most. Compared with other types, anti-Japanese novels have great limitations, but they have advantages in sensationalism and inspiration of patriotic emotions, which will be mentioned below.

Modern military novels are mainly divided into two types: military life and special war. As the name suggests, military life describes the little things of soldiers in the army, especially works with special forces as the protagonists; while special wars describe some small-scale wars or local wars participated by regular troops or mercenaries. Their era backgrounds are both modern society or fictional worlds similar to modern society.

Future military includes two completely different categories: the war of a powerful country and the interstellar war. Among them, the war of a powerful country is about the story of China's conflicts with other countries and triggering large-scale wars in the process of becoming increasingly powerful. It is difficult for such works to avoid political issues, so it is not recommended to choose this category, so I won't say much about it here. The interstellar war is about the development of science and technology to a higher level, when humans and humans go to the universe, large-scale interstellar wars occur with alien creatures or interstellar wars within humans. This type of work is largely combined with science fiction, but compared with science fiction works, it pays more attention to an imaginary military concept, a new type of war art in the special environment of interstellar space.

In fact, in addition to the above four categories, there is another work closely related to military, that is, the battle for hegemony in another world. However, this type of work either imitates the ancient cold weapon war or is more absurd and magical elements. I won't describe it here.

No matter what period of military works it is, if you want to write them well and attract more readers, you need to have some common points. Below, I will explain these points one by one.

The first point is that although it does not affect the excitement of the novel, it is the top priority. What you must always pay attention to is the political issue of the work.

Even if the subject matter or content involving political issues is attractive, it must not be touched. For example, in the future war of a powerful country, this type of work has considerable advantages and can attract many readers. However, because it has entered a minefield, it is strongly recommended that the authors not touch it, including the allusion of using the fictional world as the background of the novel.

As for how to violate the bottom line of political issues and how to avoid political risks within a small range, this issue will be explained in detail in the special standard grasp chapter below.

The second important thing to write a good military work is to learn to be sensational.

The flesh and blood are filled with wars, which is very exciting in itself, but writing a novel, like you shoot me and I shoot me, is easy to write boring, especially those professional authors who are easily trapped in the description of weapons and equipment and tactical ideas too much, which will undoubtedly make many readers with less professionalism drowsy.

To reverse this disadvantage, you must learn to be sensational, let the reader experience a passion in the boring description, and make the reader feel moved. At this moment, the originally boring description is immediately transformed into the most attractive description, allowing the reader to completely immerse himself in the fictional scene and experience the exciting battlefield atmosphere.

In fact, among the many novel types, military works are relatively the easiest to sensation, but at the same time, they are also the easiest to write boringly. There is only a line between wonderfulness and boredom, and the difference is reflected in this easiness.

Example: "Bullet Trace". This book can be said to be a model of sensationalism. The author fully mobilizes the readers' emotions, allowing them to be happy and sad with the protagonist, rejoice for the protagonist, and cry for the protagonist. Once this emotion is mobilized, it can greatly cover up other shortcomings.

The third point of attention to writing military works is to master the rhythm, which requires moderate tension and relaxation. Among them, the word "relaxation" is more important.

Compared with the slow pace that often appears in other types of works, military novels are just the opposite. Many inexperienced authors often write one battle after another, one battle after another, and one battle after another, always maintaining a storm-like rhythm, always making the readers nervous and unable to breathe. This approach will make the readers feel very exciting in a short time, but over time, reading fatigue will naturally arise. The same plot behind it may make the readers feel bored and then give up the whole novel.
Chapter completed!