まろ's writing classroom: Lesson 5 [Preparation Assignment] Elements and World View (Part 2)

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The author of this article まろ is the author of the light novel “Southern Cross”. He hopes to use his own experience to help more friends write good stories. Thank you for authorizing the “Content Hacker” website to reprint it. Thank you hereby.

Working on a play is like driving a car. The accelerator, brake, and steering wheel cooperate and control each other. They must be taught separately, but the degree of integration is the value.

Recently, netizens have been asking me about “how to write good novels”. Therefore, I organized my experience in writing light novels into 34 themes, divided into three stages: [Preparation Assignment], [Plot Process] and [Writing Management].

Whether you want to write a novel, a biography, or a business history, these articles can help. No matter what your writing level is, I will guide you through the two stages of [preparation] and [plot flow] to complete a piece of work, so start right away!

In order for the world view to be complete and complete, it needs to sprout from the premise and grow according to the context.

Hi! Welcome back to the writing classroom. We talked about the balance and rules of fantasy stories in the previous article [Lesson 5: Elements and World View (Part 1) - Fantasy World View]. So guess what we are going to talk about this time? A non-fantasy world view? No, in this article we will talk about the [general elements and context] that apply to all. Before starting, it is recommended that you check from “まろ’s writing classroom tag” to confirm whether you have read the first to fourth lessons. If you don’t want to create a fantasy story, you can skip Lesson 5 (Part 1).

First of all, I will start with a myth. Whether it is my friends or friends who ask me for help, they often have the myth that “non-modern worldviews are more charming.” There are also many people who challenge medieval fantasy or futuristic science fiction for the first time, and usually there is no next work.

I would like to use a more popular metaphor to describe this phenomenon: stories about the modern worldview are as ordinary on the surface as pork rice or pork ribs bento; stories about the Middle Ages or the future are as exquisite as palace cuisine. However, this sentence can be interpreted from another perspective, that is, “If you can make palace cuisine, of course it will be a bonus, otherwise you must at least make something edible, even if it is pork rice.” Besides, who said pork rice is worthless? There is also high-priced pork rice!

Why is medieval fantasy or futuristic science fiction so difficult? There are two main factors: era research and fantasy elements. Fantasy elements are the theme of the previous article, so I won’t go into details; era research is a matter that seems simple, but is actually very troublesome. Moreover, all the details that need to be verified are trivial content of the story, which will make people feel unproductive, but the worldview is originally composed of these details, and there are no shortcuts.

For example, suppose you live in the countryside and a relative suddenly becomes seriously ill. The doctor in the village says that only doctors in big cities can cure the illness. In modern times, you only need to prepare money and health insurance card, find a taxi driver or an ambulance and you are ready to go. But did you know that in the Middle Ages, this little thing could turn into an adventure?

First of all, because there are no minion and ambulance, you must modify the cart to transport goods to carry people. There are no convenience stores on the road, so you must prepare drinking water and food, and most importantly, you must prepare weapons to deal with thieves and thieves you may encounter on the road. The above details are not taught to you in history textbooks, and I believe you may not have noticed these details from other works.

Regardless of whether you want to set the worldview in history or the future, the difficulty is almost equivalent to living in a completely unfamiliar country, and you must also integrate into local life and cannot just stay at home.

For beginners, I would like to give a suggestion that may be a bit arbitrary, that is, don’t think about writing stories about history or future worldviews for beginners. But on the contrary, I want to tell you an important point, that is, even with a modern world view, you can still have the charm of fantasy!

It is difficult to find a modern version of a magical story in movies. A more suitable one is [“Death Battle between Demon Boys”](http://shoovi.pixnet.net/blog/post/58208283-%E3% 80%90%E5%A8%98%E5%A8%98%E4%B8%8D%E5%B0%88%E6%A5%AD%E5%BD%B1%E8%A9%95%E3%80%91%E9%A D%94%E7%94%B7%E7%94%9F%E6%AD%BB%E9%AC%A5the-covenant%282006%29), to be tolerant, [“Harry Potter”](htt ps://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%93%88%E5%88%A9%C2%B7%E6%B3%A2%E7%89%B9) Part of the story takes place in modern times. If it is a science fiction story, there are relatively many, such as “Iron Man”, [“Hulk”] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BB%BF%E5%B7%A8%E4%BA%BA_\(%E7%94%B5%E5%BD%B1\)) They are all set in modern times. There are many detailed elements of magic and science fiction, please refer to the extended reading items.

Speaking of this, I think everyone should have a concept and understand the setting of the world view, which at least includes aspects such as food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, and entertainment. If we go into more detail, there are also history (within the worldview, not necessarily the real history), the atmosphere of the times, the weak and the strong, geography and climate, economy and currency, festivals and holidays, politics and religion, etc. However, I think there are two most important ones: communication and transportation.

This point of communication is particularly important in works with modern or future world views. Tsubaki Izumi explains in [“Monthly Girls Nozaki-san”](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%88%E5%88%8A%E5%B0%91%E5%A5%B3%E9%87%8E%E5%B4%8E%E5%90%8C%E5% AD%B8) No. 35 wrote this dialogue: “When there is no mobile phone, just waiting for someone can produce a touching story.” This is also the reason why many works weaken the ability of mobile phones or directly remove mobile phones (for example, “Southern Cross” does not have mobile phones). Of course, even if you have a mobile phone, you can still create good stories, such as “Desperate Connection”, a story with a rescue center operator as the protagonist. But after all, mobile phones are a convenient gateway, and it is easy for authors who are too lazy to think about human interaction to end up turning their stories into dialogues.

However, high-tech communication such as mobile phones is almost indispensable in modern espionage or crime works. For example, when infiltrating an enemy camp, communication is suddenly interrupted, and the undercover character is asked to hand over the mobile phone to check the records. Therefore, we can conclude that in works with modern or future worldviews, do not let the communication function of the worldview overtake the actual interaction of the characters.

As for transportation, I think the previous example of a loved one who became seriously ill can give you some inspiration. In the story, the characters will be constantly moving, such as gathering, rushing to rescue, chasing, escaping, etc. The transportation methods available in the story determine the urgency of the event.

For example, suppose you were a defender of the Great Wall and you saw a large group of troops advancing in the distance. Would you rush to light a beacon or wait leisurely for them to get closer? If your reinforcements see that the beacon fire will take a long time to arrive, of course you should light the beacon fire as soon as possible. But if your reinforcements can be teleported directly using magic, there is actually no need to rush in such a hurry.

If we look at transportation movement in turn, it is very important in history. Even when horses were the only means of transportation for thousands of years, humans continued to invent various harnesses, and they knew how the method of movement could significantly reduce the urgency of an incident.

But in the world of drama, it is completely opposite. You can almost try your best to make everything that can happen happen. For example, “Hunting U571” was discovered by the US military because of the malfunction of the Nazi submarine. The US submarine that went to hunt was sunk by another Nazi submarine, which led to the wonderful story of the US military driving a Nazi submarine against the Nazi navy.

Therefore, pay attention to the movement of transportation in your world view, and use various reasons to allow transportation to increase tension, such as: the magic power is not enough to use movement magic, the movement spell is just used up, the horse is let go, the flying monster cannot hear the call, the car is out of gas, cannot catch a taxi, the MRT or train is stopped, etc.

We have briefly discussed the elements before, and at the end of the course we will talk about the more in-depth part - context. Let’s first review this picture we saw before: [](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm9lo-XpQrCkflA38aujkY O3W2W4nWC4Emskmfw48dlWj4-PmsRg38oghBkct6HJOH2kNszKZqsQraKd3JeVvxEqx4sUg6J7CETzLXpdQK OEUDt7seY2UghvQ14lNHn6eIVqgMJ5UpvHj5/s1600/%25E8%2596%25A9%25E6%258F%2590%25E7%2588% 25BE%25EF%25BC%259A%25E5%2586%25B0%25E5%25B1%25B1%25E7%2590%2586%25E8%25AB%2596.png)

This period will be more difficult in terms of study and practice. Please try your best to learn and practice. If it is too difficult for you at this stage, as long as you keep trying, you will gradually be able to master it.

The so-called context is that the reason why everything is what it is now is because of its origin.

The context includes the gray and black parts of the iceberg diagram above, including the character’s personal and worldview past. Let me use a more practical example to explain. If you have been using mobile phones for 15 years, you should know that the design of mobile phones has gone through many changes before it unified into the square design it has now.

Early mobile phone shapes were full of experimental spirit. In addition to the common rectangular shape, there were also designs that tended to be oval and square. There used to be various designs such as covers on the keyboard and the entire body folding in half. But when everyone understood that mobile phones were more than just communication tools, they began to remove physical keyboards because users needed the largest screen area. This premise (users need the largest screen area) and context (the physical keyboard area shrinks to disappears) can be used to estimate future mobile phone trends. For example, it can be connected to AR glasses to maximize the field of view and project the keyboard to facilitate quick input.

Ideally, you might have to master nearly a hundred years of history in the world you’re creating. But it does not need to be a detailed record, but a major event over the past century, because these events have shaped the “present day” that readers see, and they do not come out of thin air.

Taking the near-future science fiction masterpiece “Mobile Police” as an example, the context is very clear. Because there is a large demand for construction, machines such as strange hands are not enough. Therefore, people intuitively think that if people are enlarged, the problem of machine power and versatility can be solved.

With such a premise, the subsequent context can be extended. When humanoid construction robots became mainstream, their powerful strength and mobility caused problems. Although it does increase the speed of building construction, it also creates the destruction of workers using robots to fight, which puts people in a dilemma. Therefore, the police must set up a special department to deal with robot fighting incidents, so the unit the protagonist group serves [Special Vehicle Section 2] was established.

In the beginning, the special vehicle department did deal with conflicts among construction workers, but soon various social dissidents also saw the destructive potential of robots and began to use robots to carry out protests and other destructive actions. Some people have even obtained military robots, whose performance in some aspects is better than the robots in the special vehicle department. This is a major foreshadowing, foretelling that robots will become more powerful enemies in the future.

As expected, the achievements of the special vehicle department attracted the security unit of the International Military and Arms Corporation. In the name of experiment, they used military robots to challenge the robots of the special vehicle department. In the end, the extremists with powerful robots were not controlled by the company and became real terrorists, launching a decisive battle with the police.

“Patlabor” is an extremely rare and perfect work in terms of character setting, premise, conflict, context and world view. Its charm is not only people’s longing for power, but also the conflict of human nature, the persistence and efforts made to defeat the strong with the weak. It is recommended that you read the original comic, which may help you wash away the idea that “robot works = for children”.

This time the length is overwhelming again (dead fish eyes), so I can only provide you with more reference works next time. See you next time at [Lesson 5: Elements and World View (Part 2) - Work Analysis] (Click to read).

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Further reading

• まろ’s Writing Classroom: Lesson 5 [Preparation Assignment] Elements and World View (Part 2)
• まろ’s Writing Classroom: Lesson 5 [Preparation Assignment] Elements and World View (Part 1)
• Misaki’s Writing Classroom: Lesson 7 [Plot Process] Prologue (Part 2)

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