Why is the Internet novels so long in the fast -paced era

One possible reason is that the text of the novel has gone through a long technical change. Writing costs gradually decrease with the development of technology and the increase in literacy. People use the media to carry text from the tortoise shells to bamboo slips, to paper, and finally to the computer. After human beings entered the information age, companies with the cost of R & D maintenance and network bandwidth provide network services at low prices. Creators only need to pay for the expensive broadband costs, so they can enjoy almost free entire network information. In the traditional sense, material costs have been compressed to extremely low numbers, and the simplicity of the issuance costs with the sharing of network information is reduced to almost zero. The increase in literacy rates in the past two centuries is also explosive. Almost everyone is literate, and the scene where everyone has the ability to read and create is also unimaginable by people in the Middle Ages.

There are always some people in the world who are born with the desire to create and read long novels, but it is difficult to achieve the original high materials, distribution and education costs. The ancient people's creation novels often require several generations of people, or based on predecessors. Among the four famous works, "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Water Margin" and "Journey to the West" are based on the biography of "Three Kingdoms", "Dang Kou Zhi" and Master Xuanzang. The volume of thousands of words. After the late Qing Dynasty, Cao Xueqin, who was talented, exhausted his life and left "Dream of Red Mansions". This purely original million -character novel has approached the ceiling of the personal creation of novels in the Middle Ages.

When printing is truly popular, people can use pens instead of woolen pens, and the number of words created by Jin Yong, Gu Long and others can easily break through the ceiling. If the works of Gu Long's series are merged into one book, the most famous little Li Fei Dao series "Love Swordsman Ruthless Sword", "Border City Prodigal Son", "September Eagle Fly" and "Tianya Mingyue Sword" are about 1.2 million words. Jin Yong's "Tianlong Babu" and "Lu Ding Ji" are around 1.5 million words. This breaks through the huge works of the upper limit of their lives. Western popular literary works, such as the Dadidanion Trilogy and the Earl of Christia, are about millions of words, and this is also a small part of Dazhong Ma's own works. Considering that "Three Workers" is also a serialization of newspapers and periodicals, there are many similarities at this stage at this stage, and it also proves that the serialized literary works have a magnificent volume of more than one million words or more.

Many of the early works of online literature still stay in the range of 15 to 2 million words, such as 1.8 million words in "Piaoyu Tour", "Xianxian" 1.6 million words, etc. In the same period, "Goku Biography" has only more than 200,000 words. At the same time, the "Grand Prince" of "Story of Fengzi" has also appeared. It can be said that early online literature was affected by paper media literature, especially the literature of Jin Yong and the ancient dragon era, but the increase in cost decline has emerged.时至今日，我们一般认为300万字是一部传统网文的常规字数，然而突破了1000万字的超长篇也不在少数，如《修真四万年》1080万字，《神话版三国》1230万字，《 Wu Lian Peak "18 million words and so on. When the creative cost is low enough to ignore the degree of negligence, the restriction of the novel has become other factors such as the author's energy and cost benefits.

If social tools such as WeChat, various news and paragraphs, subtitles, barrage and other information are converted into words from various channels, the number of words that modern people read the day may exceed the life of the ancients. Under such a high -intensity "exercise", people have already practiced very fast reading speed and information acquisition ability, and even lost the patience of careful reading. People with reading habits are even more prominent. For them, chasing several online novels at the same time, tens of thousands of words per day have become just needed. Therefore, the number of words and traditional literary works by cross -era comparison is not significant.

The more characteristics of the online literature make readers only read a small part of each novel between about 4000 words and 20,000 words every day, and the total reading time will not exceed half an hour. It is not long if cutting to every day. The long -term novels are basically a linear development of the linear development of the protagonist or protagonist team. The serialization time is about several years. After half an hour every day is related to fixed characters, readers who chase for several years can easily have a certain relationship with the characters in the novel, turning reading online novels into lifestyle and habits. In order to maintain and use this habit, the author often chooses the daily plowing while trying to grow the length of the story, and obtain the maximum return as much as possible under the cost of low creation. After several years of accumulation, these long online novels gradually emerged.

And when these long traditional online texts become mainstream, readers of online literature have also been cultivated to read the habit of reading ultra -long novels, and it is difficult to adapt to shorter and more than 100,000 words of novels. So the authors of the later Jin will design a story of about 3 million words at the beginning. The author and readers have formed a certain tacit understanding with the continuous maturity and development of the industry, and the volume of online novels is fixed.

However, some people have the desire to create and read long novels, and naturally some people have the need to read short and fast. The "brain hole text", which is opposite to traditional web, seized this market. This type of online novels are concentrated on "Feilu" and other websites. With a brain hole in the sky as the main tool that attracts eyeballs, it is known for many times in a very short space to create "refreshing points".这样的小说故事情节单薄，往往只能支撑不超过50万字，读者和作者都非常清楚此书不可能“完结”而只会“太监”（在未完结状态下停止更新）或者“烂尾”（ Ending in a hurry to end). But readers of this type of novel only want to get simple and rude direct stimulation, and do not pursue a complete, head -ended story. So in the Internet era, this "brain hole" with a small amount of overall volume also has its own place. From the perspective of creating online novels, the arrangement and design of "cooling points" are also a science. Online novel writers often design a small climax in Chapter 35, design a large climax in more than ten chapters and complete a plot. One point that online novels are often criticized are the monotonous and repeated routines, which also shows that the online novels can actually be subdivided into many small plots. These plots are essentially exactly the same as the story routines created by Shakespeare and others, and at the same time have been greatly streamlined. From this view, traditional web articles other than "brain hole text" are also short and fast on each unit. The huge volume is only due to the large number of units. Readers who are accustomed to reading online novels When reading "classic literature", even if the total number of these classic works is not large, a large number of descriptions of some details will make them feel tedious. It is also a story of "Prince Revenge". "Hamlet" will depict Hamlet's psychology in a large space, making the monologue of "to be or not to be" a classic. The same bridge segment will choose to focus on the master's actions in the online novel. The psychology behind it will be slightly removed, so that readers will have their own freedom of blankness, thereby enhancing the reader's sense of substitution. The author's explanation of the reason for revenge will be disgusted by readers. From this perspective, online novels and traditional literature are more concise in the narrative of the same story.

We can already see that after the technological progress to the industrial era, if the online novel is cut at the time frequency of the update time or the event, its length is not as huge as expected. Due to the higher degree of commercialization of online novels, there are more types of subdivisions, and some types of online novels are shorter than previous popular literature. If you choose a similar storyline in traditional literature and online novels for comparison, online novels do have "concise" characteristics from some angles. However, the low creative cost of the Internet era and the gradually formation of creative models in the development of online novels make online novels longer than traditional literature.

Content source: Literature and Art News on September 16, 2022

WeChat editor: Lu Yimeng

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