It is unpalatable to be rewarded. The real difference between recognized writers and beginners is that their ability to master skills is different: their writing subjects are the same, and the difference between them is mainly lies in their ability to use skills.

You can judge the writing skills of a short story author from two aspects. First, look at his mastery of structure, which can measure an author's ability to conceive; it also reflects an author's ability to observe, recognize, classify, and tailor. Then, look at the author's ability to artistically express his subject matter. In this regard, the mastery of skills includes the ability to combine writing materials into a novel, and make readers unaware of the artificial traces in it, but are only affected by it. This is a "hidden art technique", which comes from the treasure house of language knowledge. These two talents (conception ability and expression ability) of a writer should develop simultaneously. It is absurd to say that one of these two talents is more important than the other; if one of the two is missing, the novel will not exist. However, conception precedes expression, which is the only reason I ask you to consider conception before considering performance.

The first thing short story writers need to remember is that short stories are a modern literary form, which does not only consider creating a single emotional effect, nor is it just a short novel. If the length is its only standard, then a chapter in a novel can become three novels. Readers in the publishing world often give such comments on some "very good" manuscripts: "It's not that bad enough to be novel." A novel that is not very good in other aspects is often accepted by the publishing world. This is because, despite its various shortcomings, it is dramatic; this drama is more about description rather than plot alone.

We started reading two novels, whose plots were roughly the same in the selection and arrangement of events, but because one of them was dramatic (it combined plot interest with description interest), we were attracted by it; at the same time, we were bored with another novel that did not have such characteristics. There are various interests in the novel, and a real writer should know them. However, day after day, the editors received a large number of manuscripts that were not worth sending; if the author knew the essential techniques that could cause interest, they would not send such manuscripts themselves. Fortunately, it was not difficult to understand these techniques, that is, the author had to use the rules of interest.

Interesting, according to the definition of the dictionary, is to maintain people's attention. Trying to gain the continuous attention of readers is the task that every author who writes writing has to face. It is said that the reader is the last judge. This is self-evident - without first grasping the reader's attention, there is no talk of maintaining it. Grasping the reader's interest and then maintaining it, this is the endless task of a short story writer. In this way, there are two questions about interest - grasping the reader's interest and keeping it. To grasp the reader's interest, you must arouse his curiosity; curiosity is to focus on understanding something more. Curiosity captures the reader's attention, but once the reader knows what exactly attracted his curiosity, his attention will decrease.

Before the reader reaches this point, you must arouse another kind of attention, which is not so easy to lose - the so-called maintaining attention. When the only thing that attracts the reader's attention is curiosity, the reader's psychological question is: "What is going on?" and the factors of expectation are added to the reader's mind, which makes the reader ask himself: "What will happen in the future?" And what is essential is "What will happen after the person in the novel encounters that event?" With continuous attention, existing curiosity and expectation are existing, which we usually call suspense.

Let us consider how to use these two kinds of interests in the fragments of the novel structure. These fragments are the beginning, the subject and the end. The method used to capture the readers' interests must be used in the beginning of the novel. The beginning is not just a few passages at the beginning of the novel. Sometimes, it accounts for half of the entire novel, or even two-thirds of the space. The beginning consists of two parts, one is the situation (or the problem that the novel needs to be solved). Through it, the reader knows that the protagonist of the story faces a problem that needs to be solved, and he must take action.

Another part of the beginning of a novel often causes great difficulties for the author, because the author fails to understand its function. This part is composed of explanatory materials, which is very necessary to capture the reader's interest. It captures their interest by making the reader feel that the situation or problem of the novel is interesting and reasonable. The function of the explanatory part of the novel is to show conditions or situations, which creates the problems to be solved in the novel. In some novels, the main problem of the story is very interesting. It does not require explanatory materials, and can be described immediately and relied on it to capture the reader's interest; we say that this is a story situation with inherent interest.

However, in most novels, the main part of the story only becomes interesting after its importance is explained by the material (the conditions or situations faced by the protagonist are presented to the readers. We say this is a story situation with synthetic interest.)

Even in novels with inherent interest, explanatory materials (conditions) are indispensable; even if the introduction of it is delayed. It is extremely important to let the reader understand the things described clearly, which is to achieve reasonableness. It is necessary to show the conditions faced by the protagonist of the novel, so that the reader can feel that his interest is aroused. In order to make the reader understand the details of the characters' past life experiences in the work, which can help the reader understand the characters in the work; you will want the reader to leave an impression on a certain feature in the story background or environment; perhaps, you will also feel that this is the main reason - in order to fully understand the importance or difficulty of the protagonist of the story, or how it urgently needs to be solved, the reader needs to know something that has happened before, especially those that foreshadow the failures that may be encountered and the opponents that may be encountered.

Therefore, when conceiving the beginning of a novel, you must remember these two parts:

1. The main problem or story situation of a novel, its interest or intrinsic, or synthetic.

2. Explanatory material, which enables readers to understand the conditions that cause the problems to be solved in the novel.

There is no problem in speculating like this. If the reader is interested enough to read the beginning of the novel and to the main part, he will continue to read. In this way, the main problem you face is to immediately arouse his interest. In order to do this, you need to arouse his curiosity before gaining the reader's continued interest in the aggregation and communication of the subject of the novel.

This is especially true in novels that only have synthetic interest (here, conditions must be displayed before the story context). In such novels (most novels belong to this category), everything depends on the description unit itself to be interesting. Only after reading some description units can the readers understand the importance of the main story context.

For this requirement of interest, you must always keep in mind when writing novels. Especially when writing explanatory materials at the beginning of the novel, we often rely on this material to capture readers' interest. Whether the beginning of the novel can attract readers' attention often determines whether readers (including professional "readers" in the editorial department) are willing to read the complete novel.

The title should be eye-catching, stimulate associations, and stimulate. Kipling's "The Benefits of No Pastor" meets the above three requirements. Barry's "Every Woman Knows", Leigh James' "Tightening the Screw", Oli's "The Micro-Chapter of the Police Euroen" and John Macond's "A Thousand Dollars in the Bank", all of which are the same. Oketafroli Cohen is even more experienced in this. You can safely say that the first method to capture readers' interests is to choose a title, which makes readers notice your novel and arouse the readers' curiosity.

In the process of choosing and arranging materials to enter the beginning of the novel, you should always let the desire to arouse the curiosity of the readers guide you; in the beginning, we raise questions in the novel and various things involving it.

No matter what kind of novel you plan to write, no matter what stage you have entered in the novel creation, your material is always like this - the stimulus factors, the reactions of characters and characters in the work, which form the narrative pattern.

Maybe you have used all these materials at the beginning of the novel, but they have not attracted the interest of readers. This may be because there is something wrong with the material arrangement, and readers "do not know what you are working hard to do"; therefore, the arrangement of materials must not be messy.

In order for readers to find the beginning of the novel interesting, the material must be arranged in this way: it makes the reader realize that the characters in the work are facing serious crisis in their lives, that they encounter problems that require him to take action, or that they are trapped in a dilemma that he must be freed from, or that they are in such a position - that he must make his own choices in various possible action plans.

With things that need to be done or decisions that need to be made, there are often issues to be narrated. This is the most basic requirement for the beginning of any kind of novel and every novel. It makes a novel a novel a novel.

Yes, maybe you will find such a confusing fact that in all the materials at hand (although there are enough events to show that something is going to be done or decided), you can't find anything interesting enough to be the main storyline. At this time, an important and basic fact about the law of interest begins to be known to us. For example: You sit next to a quiet little lake, a dog is swimming lazily in the water on the shore. At this time, you may ask the dog to grab a stick. When you give orders to the dog, however, if instead of the calm little lake is a steep seaside cliff hit by the wind and waves, the dog is not swimming lazily, but is exhausted

It is difficult to swim to where you let it go; then you are in aroused. If the dog is yours, and a valuable animal, who has won you many times in a race, you will be more interested. Further, if you have agreed to let the dog participate in another match that has been determined (the competition time is coming), if you are not in the game, you will be fined a lot, and then you will be particularly concerned about it. In addition, instead of sitting there leisurely, you are blocked in an overturned car, and your concern will become anxious. Perhaps, it will be even more heartbreaking - you are trying to let the dog swim to save a five-year-old child, who is half drowned, and he is your beloved son.

In the previous occasions, you find that you are not very interested, but in the later occasions, you are extremely concerned. When analyzing the reasons for interest, you will find that the latter situation depends more on what happened. This is the crucial secret about interest - importance. The degree of interest in a situation that contains purpose or choice is proportional to what it determines. The more important the thing to be accomplished, the greater the disaster it will bring. The more significant the choice to be made, the greater the disaster it will bring about when making a wrong decision. For imaginative people, any situation may be important in novel writing because it can give it great significance. When you fully understand and be able to use this law of interest, you have mastered the key to conception.

In this way, another method to grasp the readers' interest is to make the situation important;

When searching for interesting story situations, what the newspaper industry calls "news sense" will help you. Because the purpose is to arouse curiosity, you will seriously investigate what people are curious about. You still remember that in the early years of the World War, Americans greedily read all the news about war they could get. Then, as the new and more "human" aspects of the war were discussed for people, it became "news". Almost everyone knows the story of the experienced journalist, who said to the fledgling newbie, "Dog bites people is not news; if people bites dogs, it is news." Not long ago, a news editor summed up the value of news with a unique mind, saying:

Ordinary people + ordinary life = 0

Ordinary person + ordinary wife = 0

An ordinary person + a car + a gun + a quart of wine = news;

Bank cashier + wife + seven children = 0;

Bank cashier + $100,000 + Opera actress = headline news.

The explanation for this is naturally this: things without news are ordinary things, and things with news are extraordinary. In this way, you know another method of arousing or creating interest - extraordinary. This extraordinary is either in the story situation (those to be completed or decided), or the novel character (he faces this situation). In Paley's novel "Face in the Window", although the story situation is unusual (a woman intends to catch a dangerous murderer), the woman herself is ordinary. She is a rural woman in New England. However, in general, rural women in New England do not spend time doing it.

A kind of hunting. On the other hand, in Puwu's novel "Western Materials", the story situation (thing to be accomplished) is very ordinary (a woman finds that another woman is fascinated by her husband and plans to take her husband back), but the characters in the novel have their own unique features; she is the queen of the horse knight, a rare person. When choosing strange situations as the main narrative problem of the novel, the test method is very simple - ask yourself, among the 100 people you know, how many people have encountered similar problems. You can also use a similar method to choose the type of character, and see how many of the 100 people you meet on the street belong to this special type.

In this extraordinary interest, you find the reason why novels with "local color" are popular in the United States. People are interested in certain places, they either stay there or are willing to go there. Some areas or places have symbolic meanings. Most Americans are interested in New York City, so for a period of time, most novels are based on New York - for many people who have been there, this is exactly what they yearn for. People are willing to read such novels - which describe places they want to know. This rule of location also applies to novel characters. A writer finds that a certain type of character is interesting, so he writes them alive without any effort. Kipling's English living in India

Chinese, the female clerk in New York written by O'Henley, the country bumpkin in New England written by Williams, the black Alabama written by Cohen, and the professional boxer in Witthu. Because the public is fascinated by these characters, other writers who are slightly inferior in originality and talent cannot compare with the former writers also describe such characters, but fail. Soon, there are so many such characters that readers begin to get tired of them. They are no longer living characters, but become genres. Their shadows can be seen everywhere in the lines of second-rate novels and magazines, and the movie screens allow them to occupy them. At first, people with personality, but now they have no personality, and they are already the same.

It can be said that the method of seizing readers' interest is extraordinary, which can become a motto. You will still remember that five of the twenty novels I selected, although they only involve ordinary American backgrounds, are still interesting. This is because they have their novelty in characters or events.

However, you can still see a talented writer like Edna Furble who writes interesting novels, which seem to be the most ordinary thing that ordinary people do in ordinary backgrounds. This is because the writer gives the old theme a new meaning. Interest is obtained in this way - either an extraordinary explanation of ordinary phenomena, or a unique way of transforming an ordinary thing. In this way, you understand another method of grasping interest - describing superficial ordinary things as extraordinary. This is not a matter of wording, but requires the originality of thought.

In a novel written by Edna Furble, there is such an example. A beautiful New York clerk comes from a shabby family. This is the subject that Edna Furble deals with. However, she came up with such a contrast - a beautiful girl with the shabby and dirty environment around her, like a butterfly from a pupa. In Irving Cobb's novel "Our Old South", the subject is a girl who borrows the name from here and the accent from there; and so on. Cobb's imagination makes the subject go out of cliché. He uses the jargon of car workers to compare her to "miscellaneous goods" to make the old subject unique.

Comparative and metaphor belong to the field of imagination. It is imagination that makes the writer realize strange things, especially when the strange looks are not so conspicuous. This ability helps to add a lot of interest to the most boring part of the novel - the explanatory material of the main situation; whether it is possessed also determines how good you are as a creative artist. As a writer, you must be a psychologist and an advertising expert, and you must understand the value of different infectious forces. As we all know, a string of pearls will appear more dazzling on a velvet coat, but not necessarily on a white background. In this way, contrast, or juxtaposition of different things, is another method to gain interest. This can be done between the protagonist and the background.

Meetington uses this contrast method in her novel "Purple Cloth and Line". She describes a woman begging in a certain area of ​​London, which is sacred and inviolable to the rich people in those long-standing and famous clubs. The contrast can also be performed between the protagonist and other important roles. Irving Cobb uses this contrast in "Our Old South". He puts a typical, simple, frank and kind old colonel in the South with an opera actress. Almost naturally, in the juxtaposition of such roles and strange backgrounds, in the juxtaposition of extraordinary people and ordinary people, in the juxtaposition of extraordinary people and ordinary problems, or in the juxtaposition of ordinary people and unique problems, you realize another method of grasping the interests of readers - creating suspense about conflicts, about difficulties to overcome and disasters to be caused.

You will remember that the editor's evaluation of a novel that is "almost acceptable" is often "a little bit less novel flavor". The real "novel flavor" appears with the main part of the novel. At this time, the reader has realized the story situation and the conflict has also begun. After the conflict is expressed in a sudden form, there will be a continuous "novel flavor". However, while you arouse the reader's curiosity about the ending of the main situation, you are also tempting him to remain interested. The method you use for this is to raise suspense about conflict, difficulties or disasters. This is the plot interest, which is different from the reader's interest in the scene itself. In this way, including the title, you have the following techniques to capture the readers' interest in the beginning of the novel. Several techniques are:

1. Highlights, arousing associations (in a good sense) and stimulating titles;

2. Story situation (things to be completed or decided)

3. The importance of this situation or things related to it, and express this importance through one or several scenes;

4. Arrange something unique in the story context or the main character;

5. Use original ideas or explanations to make things that seem ordinary;

6. Contrast or juxtaposition between opposite things;

7. Propose suspense about difficulties, conflicts or disasters, so that readers' interest can enter the main part from the beginning of the novel.

When the editor says "lack of enough novel flavor", he means nothing more than one of the following: either the novel lacks a sufficient number of crises to keep readers' concerns about the ending of the novel, or the aggregation between crises is not interesting enough to keep readers' continuous attention until a new crises arise. In the first case, the flaw is the conception, the choice and arrangement of events that can make readers aware of the crises. In the second case, the flaw is in description, which often means that in the plot you choose, there is no sufficient one.

Enough conflict. This is what ordinary men or women want to express when they say, "I don't like that novel, and there is nothing happening." Most rejected novels make this major mistake. They do not have enough conflict, and the reader cannot see the meaning of conflicts of hostile forces; or they make the reader feel that success is still doubtful, thus leaving the reader in an unresolved anxiety. When the conflict progresses, the story is generated. In a well-structured novel, conflict should be derived from the main story situation.

When describing the aggregation and communication that constitutes the beginning of the novel, you make the reader aware of the main story situation and raise the suspense of the conflict of the novel, thus gaining the interest of the novel. When describing the aggregation and communication of the subject of the novel, you have to show the readers a conflict in a series of conflicts. In all the description units that constitute the novel, the reader sees the novel characters trapped in one or a series of conflicts. This is because he tries to solve a narrative problem, but the ending is unpredictable. In this way, there is such conflict or hostile force

Struggle is the eighth method to create interest; it is also the main method to maintain interest. However, no matter how vivid the writing is when describing the aggregation and communication between these hostile forces, if your plot awareness is so bad that you fail to indicate to the readers that the result of each such aggregation and communication is a crisis encountered by the protagonist of the novel when solving the problems raised by the main story situation (such a crisis creates a new situation, making the final ending of the story still unknown), then you will still receive a refund.

Through suspense, by making the reader wonder what will happen below, every conflict can be interesting. In this way, the novel's interest can be caused by a crisis or aggregation; of course, it is best to have both; because the novel's interest comes from suspense, it can be related to the immediate consequences of the characters in the aggregation, or the consequences of the main situation of the entire novel. However, generally speaking, the interest you want to arouse in the main part of the novel is the interest of continuous attention, or what is commonly called "suspense".

Once you leave the main body of the novel and start to consider the ending part, the third type of interest appears. At the beginning of the novel, you arouse the reader's interest by suggesting that there will be conflicts; this interest is mainly the interest of curiosity. In the main body of the novel, you maintain the curiosity aroused in the beginning part by making the reader lose his mind about the final ending of the conflict; this interest is the interest of suspense. When curiosity is satisfied and suspense is over, the remaining task is to make

Readers feel that it is not in vain to read novels. You must make the reader feel that from what happened in the end, his curiosity makes sense, and it is worth reading the novel. You must make him satisfied with the ending of the story, and feel that the result you describe coincides with the final result of the conflict between the characters and the background he imagines. The ending does not necessarily have to be "happy"; all that is needed is that it should be natural. The fun at the end of the novel is the fun of satisfaction.

When gaining this kind of fun, the writer mainly uses two techniques. One of them is the example of Eu Henry. He is very skilled in giving a clever and sudden turn of the plot. In fact, it is precisely because of his good work that people can remember him today because of this. Of course, his excellence is not only in this aspect. He has a great view of the typical examples of modern people. They are not typical before he depicts them. Nevertheless, people now refer to him as an example, but always because of his skill in using unexpected techniques. The reversal of the initial situation faced by the protagonist is the most popular technique often used to satisfy the ending of the novel.

By surprise, the end of the novel gains drama. Lifield (usually considered one of the founders of British novels) once explained this rule of interest very concisely, as follows:

"...I think that under these few restrictions, any writer can write something wonderful as he wishes; not only that, as long as it does not exceed the reasonable and credible range, the more unexpected it can make the reader feel, the more it can capture the reader's attention and charm the reader."

O'Henry's novel "The Police and the Hymn" is an example of this unexpected situational reversal. The homeless man who wanted to arrest him was arrested only after he changed his mind; after the general reason for putting people in prison failed, he was arrested for listening to the music in the church.

Another technique I have not yet mentioned is extremely effective, but has not been used properly. You have seen that events without inner interest can be obtained by combining them with other events. By making them meaningful, events can also be given synthesis interest. A thing that is dull and meaningless can become meaningful and eye-catching because of its meaningfulness and symbolicity. In the novel "When I Freeze on Hell", Steele asked a woman to stab her hand into a pot of alkaline water to symbolize her confession of her infidelity to her husband. In "Light Signal", Burke asked a character in the novel to pull off the curtain;

This was an action that was not very meaningful, but because it reported to the police that there was a signal of a fugitive hidden in the house, it became important. At the beginning of the novel "Saturday Email", a girl joked to her stepfather that she could control emotional turmoil and that if she was really in love, she would have to telegraph Cyril. Generally speaking, when a person replied to an invitation to ask him for a drink, "Thank you, I won't drink" there was no more meaning; but if it was the result of a fight against alcoholism, it would be interesting. The tenth method used to gain fun includes both symbolic or meaningful actions.

You will be very interested in discovering that novels become interesting because of the above techniques. When reading other people's novels, you can also learn a lot by determining which point you skip and not read because you feel bored. Usually you will find that it is quite interesting to read the scenes of conflict between two characters; but if the end of the scene does not indicate a crisis in the plot, your interest will be depressed. According to this approach, you will see with your own eyes that the scenes of the novel become interesting because they are meaningful. After analyzing and realizing this, your task is to realize it creatively. Novels will no longer be possible for you.

Extraordinary conditions may exist, but they cannot constitute the storyline. Your task is to choose or create a major storyline of great significance. You must first define it as something that the novel character wants to accomplish, or something that the novel character wants to decide. If the narrative problem raised in this way is bland, try to make many problems determined by it, making it important to make it important to the novel character; it is best to make it both important and extraordinary, and to make it interesting. Once you grasp this point, the road ahead will be clear; before you grasp it, everything is just a mess. This is not an easy task.

Proficiency in creation can only come from practice. For many people, conception is easy; in this sense, they will never be good at conception. They can only rely on description, and description is not that easy. Describing the labor that needs to be done makes people feel bored. Many people hate it for this. However, they cannot give up their efforts. Many people find that their muscles are sore and swelling because of physical activities; the more sore and swelling the muscles, the more they need to exercise. The training of imagination is no exception. Imagination and nature

All things in the world are like, and they need to be fed to grow. Most of you will find that the creative side of the conception process is difficult at the beginning; but it will become easier and easier. You must always have clear goals, grasp the readers' interests and keep them. When trying to do this, you are competing with many people; the readers have plenty of choices. Unless your novel attracts him, he will not read it; if he feels boring, he will stop there. Remember, "nothing is rewarded."

ps: Book friends, I am Yaerguan. I recommend a free novel app that supports novel downloads, listening to books, zero advertising, and multiple reading modes. Please follow the WeChat official account: dazhuzaiyuedu (long press and copy for three seconds) Book friends, please follow it!
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