Desire+obstacle = conflict

Conflict+action+ending = story

The core of the novel lies in the conception of the plot. Without conflict, there is no story, and there is no dynamic operation mechanism of story development. When a character has "desire", you must set an obstacle for him. The greater the intensity of this "obstacle", the better. Of course, the intensity of "desire" should also be increased in proportion. When your desires and obstacles reach a certain level, then your story has an element of "dramatic conflict". Any story, any plot. There are enough conflicts, and the story has enough room for development. Never, when your writing is stagnant, look back to see if your story has "desires" and "obstacles". Are they strong enough? Can it be stronger? If you do this, writing will not stagnate.

Then, we already know that "desire+obstacle = conflict" is the most basic writing formula for writers, and "conflict+action+ending = story" is the structural line of novels, a new formula:

Conflict+action+ending+emotion+display = novel

There are new elements "emotion" and "display", which are important tools to fill the novel. "Emotion" is the difficulty in writing novels. It is not something I can explain clearly here to accumulate experience through continuous writing. The meaning of "presentation" is: the basic writing skills to show your existing specific experience through a series of events, dialogues, behaviors and psychological activities. Let readers get the same experience. Remember, even a little "showing" is much better than your long "telling". For example:

The door of Henry's restaurant opened and two men came in. They sat down beside the counter.

"What do you eat?" George asked them.

"I don't know." One of them said, "What do you want to eat, Al?"

"I don't know." Al said, "I don't know what I want to eat."

It's dark outside, and the street lamp outside the window is still on. These two people look at the menu. Nick adams looked at them at the other end of the counter. He was talking to George when they came in.

-Hemingway's Black Boy

This is the performance. It can bring vivid and vivid concrete experiences to readers, so that readers can spontaneously have the same experiences and feelings. The story goes like this:

"One person asks another person what he wants to eat, and the other person says he doesn't know what he wants to eat."

This is very telling.

"I thought I would be blank and calmly wait for the paper to come to my hand, but when I saw the teacher coming to the classroom with the paper, I felt anxious, as if there was a foreign body in my throat. Looking at the little black spots on the table, my mind quickly turned to cramming for the last two days, but Ogawa had nothing to do with this exam. The teacher was marking the papers, and I subconsciously looked at my classmates around me. Everyone's expression is different, but they look nervous, and they feel nervous all over their muscles. I opened my pencil case to check whether my stationery was complete, but I thought to myself, that Chinese book in my pocket won't make the teacher think I cheated, will it? The exam has begun. "

This is a program, and the story is:

"I was very scared when the teacher came into the classroom ...)"

Which do you think moves you more?

Therefore, as a beginner, you must master these formulas skillfully:

Desire+obstacle = conflict

Conflict+action+ending = story

Conflict+action+ending+emotion+display = novel

Conflict, action and obstacles are the basic framework (lines) of the novel, and emotion and display are the author's basic writing techniques.

In addition, I can't elaborate on many skills such as angle control and character setting. But with these formulas, you have enough basic skills to write novels on any subject.

If you want to learn more advanced technology, I recommend a book for you: Jerry? Cliff's novel writing course-a crash course in fictional literature, is very practical and suitable for you. You can go to Dangdang or Amazon to have a look. The original price is 36.00 yuan, and the discount is more than 20 yuan.

Here is a website you can visit:/book/2011-01-31/2202.html.

Novice subsidies are as follows (basic writing course):

"To friends who are interested in novels.

Chatting with friends and putting cigarette ash in the wine. The setting sun is burning on a yellow canopy, and the light with uncertain light twists and turns in the room, hesitating, suddenly turning around and throwing it into the glass, bursting out with small black petals. I picked up the cup and gulped down the wine. Someone walked past the door. Footsteps rustled. Tiny stone grains rolled and groaned under their feet, and some dead leaves kept breaking.

My conversation with my friends started with "rhythm".

"Rhythm" is a regular phenomenon of alternating strength and length. A novel's sense of rhythm is good or not. In short, it depends on whether it has a sense of music and harmony. This does not necessarily mean that small bridges and flowing water, deserts, yellow sand, Gobi, sunset and so on, whether it is light, dry or rich, are all sounds of nature. The quality of rhythm is often understandable and difficult to describe. For a beginner in writing, there is a more "stupid" method to use. That is: pick out a few paragraphs of the article at will, erase punctuation marks, line up and turn it into a poem, then read aloud and feel the melody with your heart.

The "rhythm" of the novel first comes from the sense of language.

Language sense is an intuition of Chinese characters, which is beyond reason. It can wipe away the dust left in daily secular life to the maximum extent, restore the luster of Chinese characters, rediscover the connotation of Chinese characters, expand the extension of Chinese characters, and give Chinese characters a fragrant new life. For example, when it comes to "happiness", people may think of "feeling happy or satisfied" mentioned in the dictionary, but an excellent novelist may make the following expression-"fast" to describe the speed, such as "happy" to describe the appearance of happiness, and "happy" together with "fast" and "happy" means happiness. Another example is "perfection", which is usually a commendatory term, but it may not be beautiful in the eyes of novelists, because the word "perfection" is more dangerous. When the water is full, it will overflow and the monthly surplus will be gone.

Synaesthesia is a prominent feature of a good or bad sense of language. Stars are bleeding bullet holes; A line of egrets flew out of the yellowed pages; The bird farted; Stones sing like rain ... everything is full of things and uncertain. Flowers, birds, insects, fish, grass and stone trees are all life, and they meet with people to form an ocean-in the world of novels, anything is possible. This is a fictional country, and its logic does not need to obey the real world, so it makes sense.

The sense of language also depends on how to make sentences with these vital Chinese characters.

Words should be uneven, sentences should be uneven. Virtual and real, dynamic and static, yin and mutual appearance, we don't have to stick to the grammar in the textbook. We should be brave enough to break through some common expressions, meet the enemy with righteousness and win by surprise. Novelists play with creation, not repetition, and dare to take the lead.

Words, phrases and sentences created by language sense are only building materials. No matter how good the building materials are, skyscrapers can't be built. There must be creative design blueprints, and this creativity is to fill the whole body of the building. Everything is established in advance, and it is abolished if it is not foreseen. Be sure to memorize the blueprint before construction. Paragraphs composed of words, words and sentences should be like snakes, corresponding far away, interlocking and connected end to end. The chapter constructed by paragraphs should be like a fairy, with bright lips and bright teeth, and carefree. These structures are the key to the existence and quality of rhythm. Structure is not meaning. Not high, solemn, gorgeous, magnificent and so on. It is a frame made of reinforced concrete and a wall built with painstaking efforts.

My friend smiled when he said this. I laughed too. I can understand that he is more interested in "rhythm", but in fact "rhythm" is full of every inch of living space. Walking, eating, drinking and even breathing all require us to relax, while Zhang Chi is moderate.

I have to admit that his "rhythm" is indeed a platform for evaluating novels, but it is obviously not the only one. Sure enough, he didn't let me down, and then mentioned two concepts-"conflict" and "character".

He said that in fact, the creation of novels can absorb the creative techniques of drama and film, and show all kinds of conflicts incisively and vividly in limited space and time. Conflict includes three aspects: the inner conflict of characters, the conflict between characters and others, and the conflict between characters and natural environment. Structure, language, story, etc. Everything in the novel is carried by the characters, that is to say, the most important thing for a good novel is to see whether it creates a typical character or a group of characters, boring, trivial, stingy, generous, brave and clever ... pushing the characters to the extreme and loving them to death for 300 times; Hate, hate for a thousand years. In this way, the characters can be as sharp as knives and axes, shocking the readers and giving new life to the novel. Because we live in a reality that can be copied every day.

The extreme temptation in the novel is to save the soul.

Have a drink. My friend's face was red and his fingers were banging on the table. His hands are clean and there is no dirt under his nails. He suddenly thought of something and squinted at the waiter standing by for a while. The waiter's face suddenly turned red. He bowed his head and walked away in embarrassment.

He smiled and asked me how I would describe the waiter.

I said, I will write about her eyes. There are confusion and curiosity. She took twelve steps, and when she bent down to pour tea for another table, she glanced back here. She may be wondering who we are. Her face is pink and tender, which makes people drool and want to chew. It's good to be young.

He nodded and said that he hated adjectives and adverbs. He believes that a good novel should and can only be composed of verbs and nouns-accurate, fast and easy to escape. Before the blood spilled, the sword was gone, and people were gone.

I like him. It can be seen that he is very sad, because he is ambitious, but his ambition has not been paid.

He said that his novel was well written. I believe. What he said was accurate, but he didn't say the best. Unfortunately, the word hen is also an adverb. There is no need to stick to the part of speech in the writing of novels. In fact, what he said should belong to irony. I have read many of his novels, and there are also many adjectives and adverbs. The reason why he said this may be because this writing is too popular in the current literary world. Open any literary journal and find out one of the novels to read. Most of them are nouns and actions, just like a group of "plowmen" with crossed hands and feet and thick bones.

Of course, The Ploughman is not bad, but it won't be very interesting if you watch it all. In fact, eight out of ten "plowmen" in these novels like painting, which is getting weirder and weirder.

My friend drank another glass of wine, winked at me, and whispered again, "The sword is gone, the man is gone", suddenly showing a bright smile like a child. He is really naughty. Alas, China's writing is really profound, and I also smiled. These eight words really do not bode well. To tell the truth, many of my friends' views are very good, but they are a little confused and lack a clear system.

He asked me, what is a novel? Isn't it just a whisper of literati entertaining themselves?

I said, novels have passed the era of whispering. A pluralistic society means infinite possibilities, and any expression is reasonable as long as it appears. Although feathers float on the water and stones sink to the bottom, some really good novels can't meet the public because of the limitations of the times, but after all, they are written, which is enough regardless of whether there is a chance to publish them in the future. Novel, in the final analysis, is an intellectual's self-entertainment.

He also asked, is the novel still a propaganda weapon that embodies the will of the country or a literary form that serves the broad masses?

I said that as long as there are professional writers and the state pays, it is necessary to reflect the will of the state. This is the same as doing business. It's fair to buy one and sell the other. People's survival is the first, they have their difficulties, so they don't have to be too demanding. As for the "masses", this is a big basket. Everything seems to be filled with the past, but there is often only a pile of rubbish inside. It's strange, but it's true.

Because no one knows whether he belongs to the "masses", "masses" is a term with strong political color after all. On the other hand, modern society requires people to be a "top" and can be whipped by "things" in order to stand on tiptoe. Thus, under the slogan of standard, health and speed, KFC-style cultural fast food entered the market and occupied people's throats and stomachs. I'm full, but I'm just full Everyone can't wait to tell stories and listen to stories. There is a lot of noise. The situation is a bit like the kings in the kingdom of no intestines. This metaphor is a bit interesting. I am ashamed, but the novel is really not a story, otherwise there would be a "story meeting" under the sun.

He then asked, what is the difference between it and prose, poetry, prose and drama?

I said that the biggest feature of novels is to create truth in fantasy. It is carried by stories, highlighted by characters and driven by fascinating and cleverly conceived plots. The greatest feature of poetry is the refinement of language. The so-called song, is to chant ambition, is lucky. A branch of stylistic sentence-breaking. True poetry, whether ancient or modern, is a dance of language, has its own internal melody and can be sung with music. The biggest feature of drama is the extreme characters in the scene, and the stage, script and actors are all organic parts of drama. What is prose?

To be precise, it's mood. The only thing that can be truly free in this world is our thoughts. The true record of a flower, a grass and a thing dripping from the depths of the soul is prose, or joy or sadness or anger or hate, or a small bridge flowing water, or a desert sandstorm. True prose is bold and unconstrained. I'm thinking of Wan Li. At this moment, London and Beijing, this smell has passed for thousands of years. If you don't be melodramatic and don't apply makeup, you are sloppy. A sword on my shoulder, an "I" walking in the north, south, east and west, the breeze and the bright moon, whistling and ringing. The greatest feature of prose is beauty. Divided into two categories, one is to integrate into the world with the feeling of "self". Seeing the big ego with the small ego, heaven is endless. Finally, the harmony between man and nature will be realized. It's like Guanyin compassion. Prose is another branch of prose. It shows strength and is full of masculine beauty. It is like a dagger and a long knife, shocking thousands of miles. It glared, like a king kong. Prose is not afraid of prejudice. People's ideas are all kinds of prejudices.

He asked again, what is a good novel?

This problem is more troublesome. There are good and bad novels. Who is in charge? Theoretically, everyone has the right to make his own voice. But God knows-they don't always know exactly what they said. They think that the sound they make, in many cases, is just what others put in their throats. People are eager for God, and the shadow of authority can be exchanged for the sense of belonging of the soul in a certain period of time. So Hitler simply set fire to the parliament, and the voices of punching and kicking in the parliament quickly disappeared, and the banner of Nazi aesthetics flew high from then on. Frankly speaking, only when any kind of ideology can't occupy the absolute dominant position, can literature return to its origin and form a more objective and fair standard in the space where various ideologies are intertwined and compromised, so as to make an evaluation. Writing should be impulsive and paranoid, and personal wisdom will be full of real vitality because of passion and irreplaceable uniqueness. The evaluation should be rational, don't emphasize the theme first, just explain the theme of the article and make an analysis on the technical level.

The universe is chaotic and unknowable, and elephants can't see it. All they can touch is claws and scales. Cold and hot, moving and static, the sound of snow, what are their meanings? Fog rises around us, and we are all blind to touch elephants.

What is it like? Elephant trunk, elephant body, elephant tail, elephant leg ... what we all feel is the meaning of elephant to individuals. Some people stand far away, others walk close, with different angles, different experiences and different results. In fact, the answers given are not much different. It's just that the sounds are big and small, and some can't make a sound. Looking at the mountain side as a peak, the distance is different. I don't know the true face of Lushan Mountain, but toward which corner of the mountain.

The existence of literary works is limited. But its connotation and extension are infinite. We can all interpret and understand it in our own way. Don't be afraid of being accused of misreading. Misreading is actually a new interpretation of this work, and you have given it another life. Your feelings are precious and irreplaceable. The relationship between the author and the work is like the relationship between the mother and the child. The child absorbs the nutrition in the mother's body and breeds growth. Mother gave birth to him, loved him and loved him. Children are the continuation of their mothers, and there are marks in their blood. But the child is not a copy of the mother after all. He grows up day by day, and one day he will leave his mother and go to the outside world.

The mother created the child, but the child does not belong to the mother. Mothers have all kinds of beautiful wishes for their children, but only God knows whether the children can realize them. Mothers always think that their children are the best. This is beyond reproach. But you can't complain about other people's accusations against children. Mothers often make a logical mistake: how can my children be so considerate in front of me? There are several reasons for this: others are not the mothers of your children, and they will not pay attention to it. Even if you put your heart into it, you will look at it from different angles.

For example, children are a little white, you feel good-looking, others may feel unhealthy; Children's recognition in society often depends on opportunities. And society is always impetuous, and often talks about heroes by birth. A Jianghu artist may be more brilliant than a master, but he has no chance to stand in front of the society and make his own voice. Not everyone has the luck of blind A Bing. Your child is indeed worse than other children in some commonly accepted standards. Every child is born ugly.

Once the work is finished, the author should have a tolerant attitude. We should correctly face others' criticism and misreading of the works. The growth of children is independent of your will. Imperfection means incompleteness and blank. Imagination and re-creation will have their place, and it can draw a perfect concept in people's respective brains that is consistent with their own aesthetic experience. A dream of red mansions is Venus with a broken arm. It can be said that without the annihilation of the last forty times, there would be no present admiration. Take Water Margin as an example. The first 70 episodes are wonderful, and the last 50 episodes are dull. Integrity is not the best, and the integrity of content sometimes hurts artistic charm. If Shi Naian can cut off the last fifty broadswords and leave a mystery to feed countless people, I'm afraid there will also be a "water science".

No matter how good the work is, you should also know how to manage it. Even the graffiti of the master, we will meditate for a long time. The word "master" contains enough gold. Management has two directions. The "public" of reading and the "circle" of judging. For the public, like commodity competition, it can be upgraded from product quality, packaging, service and brand to attention and word of mouth, such as operating works as commodities, advertising, promotion, packaging and distribution channels. For the "circle", it is very simple, learn to speak in their words, get a pass, and then try to get the approval of an authority. In ancient times, someone sold horses and gave Bole ten gold to ride around the horse several times. The price of horses suddenly soared. It is human nature to learn from teachers. Real writers are often bad-tempered, know what they can do and disdain to do it, so most of them starve to death and will not be recognized before they die. They only deserve to enjoy the cold pork that has been smoked beyond recognition by incense. It hurts to think about it.

My friend coughed with a smile. It's really wordy. Where is it? What I want to hear is what a good novel is, not how to get recognition. We may not be recognized by the public and circles, but we know that it is enough to admit ourselves in our hearts. Writing, in the final analysis, is to obey the inner writing.

I smiled, took a sip of wine, and then said that a good novel should have the following characteristics-profound, fresh, compassionate and interesting, as well as technical conception, structure, language, plot and characters. By the way, we should also put a mark on all these qualities-wisdom.

I have said too much about "profound, fresh, compassionate, interesting, and technical conception, structure, language, plot, and characters" in the postscript of Talking about Writing and Others and Stupid Gun. You can look for it. What I want to say now is wisdom.

Fiction creates reality in fiction, and constructs a universe closely related to everyone's mind with fictional logic. Countless fragments collide and fuse here, like a mirror, to see everything in the world clearly. Virtual and reality constantly overlap and replace. Space and time are flashing. The structure, language, story and so on of a novel are like the color and size of a deck of cards.

They can dance with their fingers. But no matter how easy, fast and accurate this hand is, or whether it is unique or complicated, it always needs to be washed over and over again. The result is uncertain. The cards spread out on the table change endlessly all the time.

Heaven and earth are pitiful, and people's hearts are boundless. In the infinite universe, the individual is insignificant. There is no doubt that the novel provides a possibility to break through the limitations of individual body and enter the "big self" of the universe with "small self" in order to achieve the unity of man and nature. This possibility is infinite, but not absolute. "Tao" is like a cloud steaming fog, water surging, born in the fingers, died in the breath. There is no fixed way to follow.

People have five needs: food and clothing in kind; Freedom from fear; Social harmony and friendship; Fame and status, that is, self-esteem and recognition by others; Self-realization. The five needs are intertwined, showing a downward trend, but they will shrink back when encountering setbacks, and some of them, such as love and faith, can even be crossed. Fiction is the reflection of these five needs. There are many genres of novels at present, but most of them are limited to the description of the first four needs. In fact, when people reach a certain level, their desire for fame, money and love will not be very strong. Like electricity, like a dream, like a bubble, like a phantom. People continue to work tirelessly, purely for the pleasure they feel when they realize themselves. This is a profound aesthetic experience, ecstasy, ecstasy. It will only be brought by wisdom, nothing else. Archimedes climbed out of the water tank and ran naked into the street, shouting as he ran-I found it! This sound of nature fills the whole body, making every pore of the body swell, and then we really start flying.

Without wisdom, all games are boring.

The most wonderful entertainment is intellectual meditation.

When the mystery is solved, the God of the Sphinx collapses because it has no wisdom.

The acme of the novel is also the dwelling place of wisdom.

Countless paths lurk in the grass, and there are great surprises behind every problem.

The vast universe does not care about people's birth, illness, death or suffering. Who cares that a group of ants under a tree in the tropical rain forest will be devastated? The earth is flooded, and only wisdom can build Noah's Ark, so that we can go beyond these decades of flesh, step into the void and breathe with the universe.

The cornerstone of wisdom is knowledge. Without knowledge, everything is impossible, and flame can't exist in the void.

But knowledge is not just something in books. In the final analysis, knowledge is only the accumulation, summary, induction and reasoning of experience. In fact, many experts and scholars are often more ignorant than a farmer. They just have the right to speak. Nature has endless knowledge, but the more knowledge, the better. Countless "why" shows in front of you, which will only make people dizzy, so we need to find out its law.

Wisdom is the way to find.

We will find that what we usually ignore is that there are so many thrilling beautiful women who don't need to look for fish at the edge of the ancient temple at all. They are available everywhere and at your fingertips. Wisdom can't give us food and clothing, but it can make us quiet, happy and calm. There are really no two leaves in this world. Everyone is unique, but that doesn't mean more. It's just an objective vulgar existence, and wisdom makes us completely awake from these countless meaningless uniqueness. "If you listen, you will die at dusk." Many things can't be explained by the laws we know now. Learn to forget knowledge, no longer limited to knowledge. More important than knowledge is cognitive method. This is also wisdom. Expose yourself, don't be alert, don't be suspicious and frightened. Strangeness and familiarity, flowers and insects and fish, are the arrangement and combination of some tiny atoms. Nothing can be lost.

I like some simple words more and more. They contain far more than what we give them now. I want to dust them off. They are clever creatures. By the way, fiction is a technical activity, and it is not just a technical activity. Wisdom can make it heavy and rich in texture. Wisdom is not simply to press the camera to restore the truth of reality, but to understand the surrounding light, distance and so on. Find out the essence of things and highlight sculpture. This immanence only pleases the individual's mind, and has nothing to do with the existence of society or its "things" of length, width and height. There is a table in front of you. What do you care about-the price? Style? Or the smell, like the dust on it? The table is alive, and everything that exists has its own language and soul. As long as we are willing to touch it and listen attentively, we can hear those voices. A really good novel, like a cultural relic, cannot be copied. It penetrates the back of the paper, and the swallows return from the wind and rain, and the flowers are independent. "