18 Discussing originality in webnovels

1 – Even something you personally see might not be real

Recently, I've been wanting to discuss the topic of originality in webnovels. But since I'm incredibly busy with my work, I can only split this up into several parts and update once every few days. Today, as the topic indicates, I'd like to discuss how even something you personally see might not be real. Let me start with my personal experience.

The first time that I visited France, I took a train to arrive there. I still remember that the moment I got out of the train at the Paris train station, I met with a gigantic tour group that stood in front of me in line for over twenty minutes before the tour group's members finally all got through. At the time, I was incredibly astonished and exclaimed that it was to be expected of France.

Finally, I managed to leave the train station and went to my hotel to meet with a former classmate of mine who was currently living in Paris. He took me around everywhere and showed me the sights. According to the tour he gave me, he said that this place was where some revolution began, while that place was where a certain emperor had his head cut off… Once again, at the time, I was incredibly astonished and exclaimed that it was to be expected of France.

But later that night, I was intending to take the subway back to my hotel, when I discovered that all the subways were stopped and that the entire subway system in all of Paris wasn't working at all. When I asked around, I learned that this was because the subway workers had gone on strike. The person I asked also told me that he was from the city of Lyon, and that the street cleaners in Lyon were currently on strike as well, making it so that rats were running about everywhere on the streets that were filled with trash. Once again, at the time, I was incredibly astonished and exclaimed that it was to be expected of France.

Actually, regardless if it was revolution, tour groups, or strikes, I'd heard of these local specialties long before I visited France. In fact, I even took many tests about the French Revolution back when I was learning the topic of world history in middle school. However, what I read in my textbooks or saw in other media wasn't anywhere near the deep impression that seeing these things personally up close would leave me.

After I returned to China, any time that I had friends or relatives that were planning on visiting France, I would remind them to consider the potential impact of strikes on their travel plans, for instance, if the airport workers went on strike and caused their planes to become late.

However, all my friends and relatives visited France and returned to China, telling me that nothing eventful happened as well. And I visited France two more times as well, once by ship, and once by plane. Neither time did I ever come across another workers' strike event again. Nor did I ever meet such a huge tour group. Later, I checked the statistics, and discovered that although French people do love to go on strike, the number of times they go on strike was far less than what I anticipated. It could be said that I was previously misled.

As for why I'm telling you about my experience, that's because I wondered afterwards, why did I have such a misunderstanding to begin with?

I believe that this is probably the double influence of rumors combined with personal experience. If it was only rumors, I might not believe them so easily. And if I only had one experience, I wouldn't treat it as the norm, either. But rumors combined with personal experience can be greatly influential on a person.

Even if this rumor might not be real, and even if this personal experience might be affected by coincidence, as long as these two happen to coincide, a powerful chemical reaction will occur between them.

In that case, are there similar situations in webnovels? I think that the answer is an obvious yes, and that similar situations are quite common. For instance, in the topic of webnovel originality that I wish to discuss.

Ever since the birth of webnovels, rumors about webnovel originality have never stopped spreading. For instance, rumors that all webnovels are the same, that all wenobvels are plagiarized, that all books have the same plot, that the authors have no creativity at all…

Do these rumors have any foundation to them? I think that they definitely do. With so many novels out there, no matter if we want to find some bandwagoning novels, or content that's almost exactly the same, it's quite easy to do so. In fact, we don't even need to intentionally look for such things. Just in the course of normal reading, we can meet a large amount of cliché plots that we've seen before.

However, does this mean that the rumors are true? That webnovels have no originality to them? That they're all identical? I think that before answering this question, we should first consider my personal experience that I just mentioned, and first think about whether what we're thinking is the same as what I just mentioned about rumors plus personal experience, this double influence?

Have we seen such rumors before in the past? Have we deepened our impression of such rumors by reading incredibly similar novels? I feel that the answer is a definite yes.

In that case, just what is the truth of the matter? Are webnovels still creating original content? And as an author, how should you create new content? Let's discuss these questions over the next few weeks.

2 - We're constantly progressing

Continuing my article from last week, let's take a look at whether or not there's been originality in webnovels ever since they were born, and how original they are.

I feel that the answer is undoubtedly that they're incredibly original. Not only are they original, it's difficult to describe how original they are with only the adjective incredible. Just take a look at all the sub-genres of books that have appeared on the internet in recent years. Large genres, small genres, popular genres, and niche genres, there's hundreds of new ones out there. Weren't all these new genres developed by originality?

And, the more important thing is, under the same genre, are all novels truly the same?

Let's use the transmigration genre that people are incredibly familiar with as an example. I've seen a very common criticism in many articles about webnovels that says this: "All webnovels are the same and involve transmigration in some way." or a statement like: "All transmigration webnovels have the same plot…"

But what's the actual situation? For those readers who truly understand webnovels, just the transmigration stories that take place on earth, limited only to main characters who go back into the past, have already been written in countless ways.

At first, authors wrote about how modern people transmigrated to ancient times and used modern technological knowledge of creating steel, making guns and artillery, and then ruling the world. But soon, authors realized that conquering the world might not necessarily require guns and steel. Perhaps it would also be possible for some specialized knowledge like glassmaking to be useful in ancient times for making a business empire and ruling the world through wealth.

Also, there's plenty of other methods out there for ruling the world, aren't there? For modern day people who don't have so much technical knowledge, can't they use their knowledge of history to influence events and become successful? Aren't there many creative, specialized paths out there to take? Besides, does a modern person really have to work at conquering the world in the ancient times? What about just becoming really rich, or becoming a major government official, or being a genius poet, or miracle doctor, aren't all these just fine as well?

And in the method of transmigration, it doesn't need to be limited to the main character physically transmigrating to the past. Soul transmigrations are possible as well, becoming some person in the past. A commoner, a government official, a warrior, or even the emperor. Every type of new status represents a different angle and a new style of writing, doesn't it?

Even if it's an emperor, there's huge differences between the Tang and Song Dynasty, and emperors that ruled at the start or the end of a dynasty have completely different situations as well. Different historical eras, different characters, and different circumstances can all create different stories.

Besides, does it really have to be a modern person that's transmigrating? For instance, you could write a story about how the first Song Emperor transmigrated onto the body of one of his descendants, and discovered that there was a famous warrior named Yue Fei who's scheduled to be executed, and that the empire he founded was almost on the verge of ruin. Isn't this a type of wish fulfillment method as well?

We can write about modern people transmigrating to the past, or about ancient people transmigrating to the present. There's also future people transmigrating to the present… We can transmigrate just one person, or a group of people, and we can transmigrate anyone we want… Also, when transmigrating, the person might be empty-handed, or possess a watch and lighter, or a laptop computer, or a sniper rifle, or even a river, dimensional storage, or an entire military fleet…

And all these topics are limited to transmigration on Earth. If we expand our topic, we can even transmigrate to other worlds, or have a mage transmigrate to Earth, have a mecha operator transmigrate to an eastern fantasy world, or have a cultivator immortal transmigrate to a magical world, or have a game player transmigrate to a video game world…

With all these countless methods of transmigration, any one of them out there can develop countless new ideas. Let's just use one earlier example I mentioned – transmigrating onto a younger version of yourself. Back in the day, when I was reading some alternate history fiction, I came up with the idea of this type of alternate transmigration.

If you transmigrate to only a few years in the past, and back on your own body, what will happen? Any reader who's familiar with webnovel literature should realize that this is actually the so-called reincarnation novel. Reincarnation novels are actually a subcategory of transmigration novels. And as a subcategory, reincarnation is naturally a major genre of its own which can develop countless additional subcategories.

What needs to be noted is that every single subcategory I mentioned in this article is one that exists already, already done by an author.

In that case, we can see that just the topic of transmigration alone has developed almost a countless number of possibilities.

With webnovels having developed for so many years, is there truly no originality anymore?

Perhaps, some authors will say that webnovels had countless amounts of originality in the past, and that the problem is that, by today, the original topics have all been used up by previous authors, so that all possible topics have been used already. Not being able to come up with original topics isn't their fault. As for this point, I'll address it in my next article.

3 – Two major methods of creating something new

Many authors will say that there's too many webnovels out there now and that it's getting more and more difficult to write something original. So-called clichés and the idea that all novels looking the same isn't the authors' fault, it's what reality has forced upon them.

Yet, is the truth really like this? Writing something original, taking an uncommon path, is that really so difficult? I feel that this isn't actually the case.

First, we need to correct a way of thinking. Having something new that isn't cliché is a different concept from having something that nobody has ever written about before. Otherwise, not only webnovels, is there any novel out there that hasn't used ideas from other novels before, ever since the birth of novels? And no matter if it's transmigration, reincarnation, flying, traveling underground, fairies, magic, and so on, haven't all such concepts been explored by other people before?

If you haven't read it, that's only because you don't know about it. That doesn't mean it hasn't been written about before.

Even if you haven't read it, he hasn't read it, she hasn't read it, and everyone you know hasn't read it, that still doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Perhaps some person in some previous generation has written about it before, only for the text to be gathering dust in some library or corner of some museum.

But, is the issue of someone having written about it before or not, truly an important one? As long as you and your readers haven't read such a story before, isn't that what counts as something original to you?

That's why we need to understand that so-called originality isn't absolute. It's a much more relative concept. And as long as this idea isn't overly common, and not too many authors are writing about it, that means that very few readers know about it, which means it's still original in a sense.

Once we confirm our definition, that makes it much clearer for how we should approach originality. This should be something approached from two levels.

The first level could be called major creation, or overall creation. This is foundationally creating a new path, in topic and concept.

Basically, every new genre or new writing style that appears depends on this type of major creation to help give it a push. Without a doubt, this requires a flash of inspiration that can only be met, not found. The great majority of us will lack this type of ability. And even for the authors that were the creators of groundbreaking new genres, asking them for a second flash of inspiration after the first will likely be quite difficult.

So, without a doubt, this isn't a path that we can commonly take in normal circumstances.

The second level, in comparison, can be called minor creation, or partial creation. This isn't something that requires a foundationally brand-new story. Instead, you should focus on one point or just a few points and make your own changes.

Basically, all the previous examples I gave earlier count as this type of minor creation. Maybe you read a story by an author that's about transmigrating to the past, into the Ming Dynasty, and becoming an Emperor. You could write a story about transmigrating into the Song Dynasty and becoming an evil government official. This type of change doesn't require an astonishing amount of creativity. In fact, it could even be said that anyone is capable of coming up with such an idea. But, this is still approaching a new topic, and we need this type of minor creation as well.

Obviously, this is the common way of creating originality, and the way of thinking that we need as well. We don't need to design a brand-new product. We only need to make modifications to existing products, and change the way it appears, or even make it into an entirely different product. For instance, if a two-headed, gold-eyed rattlesnake appeared as a monster in one story, we could change the color, amount, body part, and species, turning it into a purple beaked, three-clawed condor.

Of course, maybe this example isn't the most appropriate one. That's because in webnovels, these types of changes aren't actually important. We need changes, but not all random changes can become something original.

For instance, if one book you read has a 23-year-old main character named Zhang San, and you write about a 22-year-old main character named Li Si, this doesn't count as originality. That's because making such changes won't bring about foundationally different plot changes.

In that case, what exactly is a foundational change, and what truly counts as creating originality? Let's visit this topic in the next article.

4 – True and false creation

Last week, I discussed partial creation in creating webnovels, which is what we should mainly focus when writing. However, how should we differentiate partial creation from false creation?

Actually, it's quite simple. We can easily differentiate by using substitution. As for what I mean by substitution, just insert the changed element into the story that you're borrowing ideas from. If the story can still stand by itself without needing any changes, then it's false creation. But if the story won't work anymore, and needs plot changes, then that's true partial creation. And, the bigger the changes, that means the greater the originality.

Earlier, I gave the example that an originally 23-year-old main character being changed by you into 22-years-old wouldn't bring about any foundational changes at all. This can easily be seen by substitution, which is why it's false creation.

But, to still use the topic of changing the main character's age, if you change the 23-year-old into a 73-year-old, and your setting is the modern genre, then that would typically mean you'd need a great deal of change to your plot. And if you change the age to 373 years old instead, then that would require changing the entire genre, into science fiction, eastern fantasy, xianxia, or so on. Without a doubt, if your novel can still stand on its own after making such changes, that's creating something new.

As for something similar, changing the main character's name in most typical situations won't affect the plot. Changing Zhang San into Li Si, or Taylor into Tyler won't normally affect the plot, which is why it's false creation.

But in extremely few situations, the main character's name will have a great influence on the plot. For instance, the main character of a story has an identical name with a famous person, which causes a series of misunderstandings, leading him to have a miracle-filled life. If we change the main character's name, even if we imitate this novel and use the same techniques to have the main character experience all sorts of misunderstandings, the new story will certainly be much different from the original one because of the different famous people being used for the misunderstanding. That's why this can be considered something original.

Also, as for the changes in cheats used, maybe the original story has an incredibly gifted main character who was born with a far stronger and sturdier body than others, and has ten times greater effectiveness when cultivation. If we could create a main character who possesses a mystic artifact that can assist in cultivation and give him ten times the normal rate of cultivation, this doesn't have any foundational difference. With such a change, all the original plot factors can still stand without any changes, which doubtlessly makes this into false creation.

Even if it seems like you're making big changes to the original plot, such as giving the main character a secret technique that greatly increases cultivation speed, or just giving him a magical cultivation dimension where time flows slowly and he can spend ten days inside with only one day having passed outside. However, it's quite obvious that no matter how much you change his cultivation method, the original plot won't need any changes at all, which is why this is still only false creation.

But if we change the cheat's power, giving him some new ability other than increased cultivation effectiveness, such as invisibility, this will definitely change the story. Maybe your main character will be hiding around, invisible, while others are reading secret technique manuals, or when an expert is teaching his student. Maybe he'll hide himself while watching powerful individuals fight, or he'll become a thief who steals treasures and artifacts… it's obvious that these plots won't be present in the original story, which is why this type of change is true partial creation.

After giving so many examples, I hope that everyone can now differentiate between true partial creation and false creation.

Normally speaking, any surface-level settings, or names that you change, is nothing more than false creation. For instance, if you change internal energy to mystic essence, magic power to spiritual power, cultivating to become an immortal to cultivating to godhood, changing silver and gold ranked martial artists to king and emperor ranked martial artists…

Meanwhile, the changes that easily make partial creation are typically modifications to the cheat's effect, the world's background, the main character's personality, background, and so on.

Of course, there are no absolutes to anything. You should still use the substitution method to check if you're truly creating something new or not. Next week, I shall discuss how to do partial creation.

5 – How to do partial creation

Last week, I mentioned how to differentiate between partial and false creation. Now then, how should we go about doing partial creation? Just where are we supposed to obtain our creativity from?

Actually, it's quite simple. When we lack ideas for creativity, we can simply use the method of modifying everything we can think of about a specific point.

First, we should choose a novel that we want to base ours on, and then choose a specific factor and try modifying everything you can come up with about this factor. Then, you should put all your modifications through substitution to see if it's true partial creation or false creation. Then finally, choose the best modification, or reject all your changes and find another factor to modify and begin analyzing that one instead.

Here's an example.

Metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, are the eastern five elements that many people are familiar with. In many eastern fantasy novels, martial arts cultivators will also practice with elemental affinities. This type of setting is quite common as well. In that case, with this setting as our main topic, what type of wish fulfillment can we come up with?

The easiest idea to come up with is having all five elements. You could make it so that most people in the world only possess talent for one type of elemental affinity, so they can only cultivate in one element. Perhaps there will be some powerful individuals that can cultivate two elements. However, your main character is the only one who can cultivate all five elements. This will bring him a huge advantage. Not only will he be able to cultivate at five times the speed of others, he can also counter anyone else's element as well as use his power in whatever creative ways the author comes up with.

Of course, this is just wish fulfillment to have control over all five elements. What about having no control over any of the five elements? The main character has zero elemental affinity whatsoever, and he's considered completely useless. You could take the weak to strong route, which would give people a different type of wish fulfillment, wouldn't it? As for how to make your main character stronger in the future, that's up to whatever idea you want to use as an author. For instance, since the main character has zero elemental talent, he has no elemental power which instead allows him to use divine power. Once the main character is injured by an enemy, he discovers that he can communicate directly with the heavens and use all the spiritual power in the world…

Apart from having all five elements, or missing all five elements, what about simply having four out of five? Maybe you could have it so that everyone in the world practices all five elements in balance, and that the five elements need to be in balance in order to steadily increase in power level. However, the main character just happens to have great elemental affinity for four out of five elements, but is incredibly lacking in one element, making his elemental balance completely out of whack, so everyone believes that he's just useless. However, nobody expected that the natural laws of heaven and earth are about the five elements forever being in balance, so the main character forcefully cultivating his four elements means that the one element he lacks will automatically be filled in by the heavens with the purest of spiritual power that's amazing to use. And once the main character learns the benefits, he instantly casts off the yoke of being useless…

If four out of five is fine, what about having two out of five? You could use a similar setting, making it so that normal cultivators in the world need to have a balance of all five elements as the foundation, while the main character only has water and fire, two opposing elements, making it so that others thought of him as useless. However, the main character slowly discovers that his elements aren't truly water and fire, but instead something more wondrous that's in opposition to each other. To describe it more accurately, the main character thinks that it's actually Yin and Yang…

Similar to this, you could make the main character have three out of five elements, lacking only water and fire, but coincidentally, he managed to use Yin and Yang to replace them…

Speaking of Yin and Yang, it's easy enough to think about, do you really only need to stick with five elements? What if your main character has a sixth element? You could make the sixth element be light, darkness, Yin, Yang, chaos, void, destruction… you could make it some unique sixth element, or even another element, such as saying the sixth element is Yin, while metal, fire, water, wood, and earth combine to become Yang…

All of my above examples were making modifications to the numbers of the five element system, but of course, there's far more that you can do for wish fulfillment factors apart from numbers.

Everyone else has mortal affinities, and perhaps need excellent talent along with endless amounts of hard work in order to reach the divine realm, while only the main character coincidentally has reached the divine realm right from the very start…

The main character has some garbage elemental affinity, but he found a powerful artifact of that element to deal with this problem for him. He never expected that this was a mystical artifact which possessed the foundational power of heaven and earth…

The main character captured a mysterious fire element pet, while he just happened to lack fire out of his elements…

A main character who's a modern day physicist uses his scientific knowledge, such as knowing oxygen's role in combustion to make greater use of his elemental affinities than others, increasing his power…

The main character uses the five elements to create a five-based number system and created an elemental computer within his body which is capable of calculating techniques, skills, and conquer the world…

The main character accidentally entered a dimensional slipstream and has extremely chaotic elemental affinities, and has great difficulty casting even the easiest of magic spells. In such an environment, he managed to survive for one hundred years, and the main character now possesses unfathomable control over the five elements. After returning to a normal cultivation world, all enemy spells seem filled with weaknesses in his eyes. An incredibly powerful top-level spell is something easily countered by him by poking at its weakness with only a tiny, low-level spell…

The main character is of the fire element, but has a water element artifact inside his body, which is why he was mistakenly appraised to be of the water element, so he cultivated water element spells instead and had incredibly slow progress. However, this incredibly rare situation not only helped to improve the water element artifact's power, along with making the main character's pitiful mana incredibly pure…

The main character is the living incarnation of the fire element…

A cultivator from Earth arrived in another world and discovers that the citizens there have no idea about how to use the five elements except in random assortments together, which actually weakens the power and makes the effectiveness pathetically low…

The main character arrives in another world and discovers that although people know how to use the five elements, they only know how to use one element at a time, without knowing about the concept of spell arrays…

With so many examples, I think that should be enough with no need for me to list any further. With so many different settings as the foundation, we can use the method of substitution to determine which are too similar and are only false creation, while others may lead to different plots and greater changes.

Discard all false creation settings, and we can analyze the possibilities in all remaining settings, and see if there's any good wish fulfillment factors for them to develop your plot with. Will these ideas be suitable for your setting? After you analyze them further, you'll be able to delete some more options. Finally, with the options that remain, you can just pick whatever one you like the most that you think you're the most suitable to write. That counts as completing your process of creation.

What if there are some authors who are incredibly imaginative, and can come up with ten times, or even one hundred times the number of changes I listed above? Wouldn't it be quite difficult to choose after making such a gigantic list? What should an author do in such a situation?

It's quite simple. Don't finish your list. Just do something similar to what I did above. Once you feel like you have enough choices to choose from, just stop yourself from listing any more. There's no need to think so much into things. There's no need for us to seek perfection, and to tell the truth, perfection is impossible to come by.

And what if some authors say that they're not good at brainstorming and lack creativity, so that they're unable to even list the number of changes I did above, with only a few changes that are rejected in the end? What does one do in such a situation?

Actually, this is easy as well. If you can't use this path, then just take another path.

If you can't come up with any ideas with the five element system, try tackling it from the cheat power angle. For instance, you could have an old grandpa who enters an ancient forbidden treasury and ends up dying and reincarnating, which gives him a mystical ability…

And if you still can't figure out some creative point with the cheat, keep looking for other points. For instance, the main character's personality. If you change him or her from sly and vicious to honest and kind, or change the main character from brave and reckless to cowardly and cautious, would that give the story a new look?

If none of that is any good, you could try changing the main character's background. Bastard child of a noble, ordinary commoner, scion of an illustrious family, immortal in the mortal realm, half-blood human and demon… wouldn't all these different background settings give you different plots?

If your main character's background is no good, then change the entire world. From Earth to another world, a magical world, a highly technological world, ancient times, or a futuristic setting…

If just changing one point isn't enough, then what about changing several points as one so that they're all complementary? What kind of setting will you be able to create then?

For instance, thinking about various different factors and modifying all of them, combining these modified factors with your setting, and trying to come up with the best one by process of elimination. I'm confident that you'll definitely be able to find an original story to create in the end. After all, the combination of all these factors is basically infinite, with so many factors that can be changed.

Maybe some people will say that they're truly limited in creativity, and that their minds are completely blank with no ideas that they can come up with whatsoever. What does one do in such a situation?

In that case, even I have no method to help you at all. Only you can save yourself. That's because this situation only means one thing – you've not read enough books.

Just like that famous quote, the more we know, the more we realize how little we know. Only after reading more books will we have a better foundation from which to imagine even more possibilities.

For instance, it should be quite easy to come up with the idea of a transmigration to Ming Dynasty novel after reading a novel about transmigrating to the Song Dynasty. However, if I've never read a single transmigration novel before, coming up with the idea of transmigration by myself would be incredibly difficult.

And so, to conclude our analysis, we can find that apart from using the above method to create originality, the more basic, most important factor of all is actually the amount of books you've read before.

As long as you've read a sufficient amount of books, and know the correct way, it should become quite easy to make your own unique novel that's obviously different from others, even if you can't come up with some astonishingly unique concept that nobody before you has ever written before. Are you ready to create something partially original?