modern novel

odern novels

This genre refers to novels that take place in a modern day urban setting. The city background is typically where the author has lived and is familiar with.

Compared with fan fiction, modern novels have the added difficulty of having to create your own characters. Still, it does decrease the amount of trouble you have to go to in creating a setting. Not only that, when writing character introductions, you can save a lot of effort in having to explain a lot of common knowledge, such as what a character's job entails, or their social status. Saving all this effort is quite precious for newcomers.

And compared to fan fiction, modern novels have their own advantages as well. That is to say, the author can more easily write themselves into the main character, making the storyline easier to think about. Normally speaking, all you need to do is to give the main character a special cheat, or a unique advantage, and the rest will flow as naturally as water.

For example, there's a very popular modern novel with a reincarnated main character. The protagonist has only a very simple cheat—being reincarnated to several years in the past. This is quite an easy scenario for newcomer authors to insert themselves into. Just think about it, if you can reincarnate back to the past with all your memories intact, what will you do?

Most authors can probably imagine it. If you return to several years in the past with knowledge of the future, there's just far too many ways of earning money. Even if you have zero business skills, can't remember a single stock market pick, and don't remember who won the World Cup of Soccer, at the very absolute minimum, shouldn't you know something like what company you should invest in?

Apart from earning money, don't you, the author, have any other regrets as well? For example, do you regret not treating your parents better while they were still alive? Do you regret choosing the wrong major in college? Are you embarrassed at your awkward attempts to get a boyfriend/girlfriend?

And so on, and so forth. Why are you afraid of not being able to think of plots for your storyline and making it longer?

As for the specific details, those are quite easy as well. For example, if you intended to sell off everything you owned back in the day and take out a huge loan to invest in one specific company, what would your parents say, and how would they react? How would all your other friends and relatives react as well? Who would you try to borrow money from, and how would they respond? What's the specific process of investing in a company, and what procedures are necessary? What if the company you invest in temporarily loses value after you invest in it? Would your parents complain at you and tell you to retract your investment? And how will people react after the company you invested in suddenly does super well and you make a huge profit? And, what will you do with the money…

Just this one storyline arc about investing in a company has plenty of content to write about even simply by following the natural process of how people would act. And if you use that as the foundation and intentionally write some conflicts, such as how the protagonist discovered that his friend who he wanted to borrow money from is actually investing in a different company, how he pretended to have a casual attitude when opening up an investment account made the investment company female employee misunderstand him to be someone really rich, or how people scoffed at him after investing in a company and he made a bet…

Wouldn't you agree that all these related events can add plenty of content to your story? Not only that, it shouldn't be all that difficult even for a newcomer author to write such a story arc.

Even if you're one of the few who feel like you lack imaginative prowess, and you don't have the confidence to create interesting scenarios and conflicts, well, there's still one more advantage of writing a modern story—you can borrow ideas from plenty of sources.

The most direct sources of all would be television dramas, especially those set in the current day. This should be easy to understand.

Apart from television shows and movies, there's also hot topics in society, the news, or local gossip and family conflicts… These are sources that are easy to overlook or maybe often considered boring. But actually, it's quite common to make some modifications and write them into your own novel and borrow from such sources.

This is why, from a certain standpoint, modern novels are the easiest novels for newcomers to begin with and to write a long story about.