THE THREE FEELINGS RULE OF XIANXIA NOVELS
After reading hundreds of novels I reached the conclusion that (for a male at least) the perfect xianxia novel needs THREE ingredients to engage the reader without boring him on the long term:
1 - STRENGTH : Constant MC drive to Increase his power/strength via cultivation or other means. The greater the obstacles he overcomes, the hardship he endures and the explosion of his power after he strengthened himself, the greater is the psychological reward. Even if the MC is not necessarily power-hungry, he should be forced to react when witnessing the cruelty of strong vicious people against the weak. Xianxia cultivation is the greatest narrative formula ever invented to satisfy the huge human psychological craving toward power, allowing the MC to become an immortal god. But to be exciting
cultivation must be challenging, so you should avoid skills like
Devour (to absorb enemy cultivation),
Soul Scrying or
Copy Eyes (to instant learn enemy's techniques or skills) because, like all cheats, those are tension-killers. Also, cultivation degrees must be meaningful and abundant, with many realms each one more awe-inspiring that the last. Dull and shallow cultivation realms, like the nameless 5 tiers of
Versatile Mage for example, are a sure recipe for a boring novel.
The true voyage of an MC in a xianxia novel is through the realms of the cultivation ladder, so each of those realms must be a marvel. To paraphrase GoT, "Only the ladder is real, the climb is all there is." And this is also why experience based cultivation systems, as in the LitRPG genre novels, are trash compared to xianxia.
EXAMPLES:
I Shall Seal The Heavens, Against The Gods, Martial God Asura, God of Slaughter, The Desolate Era, Martial World, A Record of a Mortal’s Journey to Immortality.
2 - BEAUTY : An unending series of beauties in distress, with saving them as the main motivation to go on with the story. The MC should not be necessary a righteous person, but he should have a soft spot for damsels in distress. The beauties must not necessarily become part of the MC harem, they just need to be grateful to him. Of course the greatest psychological reward is for them to fall in love and have sex with the MC, but it should always require some additional work to conquer a girl's heart and earn a reward from her. Unless you are writing a comedy, 'yandere' girls are tiresome and uninteresting. Also ecchi scenes (involuntary flashing and accidental skinship) are good, but explicit sex scenes are boring. Sex must always be a mystery unveiling journey, it should be only hinted or described with poetic paraphrasing (
Heaven is Not Lonely is a great master in this art), leaving the rest to the reader imagination.
EXAMPLES:
Womanizing Mage, Ancient Strengthening Technique, Battle Through the Heavens, Martial Peak, Nine Star Hegemon Body Art, Heavenly Jewel Change, Heavenly Star, My Wife Is A Beautiful CEO.
3 - WISDOM : The MC must outsmart his enemies. The more cunning is the MC, the better. Battle strength alone is not going to keep interest up in the long run. Scheming and strategy, especially long term grand designs and political ploys, keep the story interesting. Antagonists also need to be crafty to make defeating them a rewarding experience. Kingdom building on the other hand reduces interest, because the power of the MC becomes manifest and boring. The best MC is one kthat is always scheming against the system and hiding his strength. Unless he is undercover or secretly harboring rebellious plans, bestowing any position of authority to the MC will make him a part of the system and hence a much less interesting character.
EXAMPLES:
Legend of Ling Tian, Otherworldy Evil Monarch, Nirvana in Fire, Transcending the Nine Heavens, Lord of The Mysteries, Immortal.
So the basic formula for long term interest in a novel is
Cultivation +
Save-The-Beauties +
Cunning Protagonist. Note that this three ingredients are necessary but not sufficient conditions to make a good novel. You still need a great story, some great characters and a fascinating world around those, otherwise even if you are hooked by the formula it would be an empty experience.
IMPORTANT:
A Xianxia that respects those three rules does not have to be repetitive or factory produced garbage! One of the most common criticisms of the Xianxia genre is that it's repetitive. The main characters commonly sets out to prove their strength in their hometown, offend several people more powerful than them, flee or mask themselves, grow until they surpass their previous rivals, and then move to a new area inhabited by people with a higer cultivation to repeat the
provoke - flee - growth - victory - transition cycle all over again. This is called the "
mountain beyond mountain" model. While it is true that the increment in strength of the MC must be followed by the appearance of new enemies of comparable strength, otherwise the tension disappears, this must not happens in the aforementioned way, but can be realized in millions of different ways.
A writer that sticks to the "mountain beyond mountain" model is surely lacking in imagination. A great writer uses his creativity to narrate much more interesting stories, realistic or idealistic. The first type depicts life in all his gritty, ugly details and inconsistent, fickle nature, and leaves all abstractions and judgements to the reader. The second type is the most "poetic" and loved by intellectuals, because it uses the classical literary technique invented by the greeks of making characters out of single ideas, and then weave stories derived from the interactions and conflicts of those ideas. This allows the author to put the ideas to test, showing how much each idea is worthy and why some ideas are good and others are bad. Do my three rules above stop you from doing that? No. No one can stop you from writing high quality idealistic original stories and at the same time respecting the three rules mentioned above. Those three rules are like minimal safeguard devices, like saying that "a car must have wheels, seats and an engine" does not limit the car designers in any way. If you want to make a flying car with no wheels, then you are to invent the flying car first as a new genre and prove that it works.
No xianxia should to be written recycling any repetitive story pattern: invent a new, fresh story every time and then just add the three ingredients above to make it psychologically edible. If you cannot do it, it's not the formula's fault but your lack of imagination...
If anything, my formula does the very opposite: it helps breaking the shackles of the genre. Many authors wrote their first xianxia following verbatim the story format of the most pupular xianxia, because they are scared that if they write something differently, the reader would not like it. But my three rules ensure that you are finally free to write anything you want, all you need to be sure that the reader is not going to be bored is to follow those 3 simple rules.
EXAMPLES:
Zhu Xian, The Joy of Life, Nightfall, Way Of Choices, Lord Of The Mysteries, Immortal Devil Transformation, Grasping Evil, Immortal.
COROLLARY 1: IT IS ALL ABOUT FEELINGS
If you need to boil it down somehow, you can think of it as
The Three Feelings Rule of Xianxia:
First:
The feeling of increasing one's strength.
Second:
The feeling of having always a new beauty to help.
Third:
The feeling to outsmart a cunning adversary.
The moment you stop feeling anyone of those 3, your interest in the novel drops. You can be lacking in any other narrative element but those three.
While writing a xianxia you should always ask yourself: how long since I’ve last let the reader feel to have increased the MC strength? How long since I’ve last let the MC to have a new beauty to save? How long since I’ve last let the MC outsmart a cunning adversary? If too many pages or chapters are gone without having the reader experience those 3 feelings, then you are at risk of having him drop the novel.
COROLLARY 2: SHOJO XIANXIA WOULD PROBABLY NEED A MODIFIED FORMULA
Xianxia is not a genre tailored for female readers, because women lack the craving for strength that men have. There is a minority of women that makes exception anyway, mostly the tomboysh kind, so a xianxia for women is theoretically possible. But being male and female psychology different in too many aspects, some formula rules should be changed. With female readers and a female MC, I recon that we should at least change the 2nd rule to something like: ‘
the feeling of having an attractive or mysterious male character suddenly caring (openly or not) about the female lead in trouble’. But I’m a male, so I’m not the right person to define the rules for a theoretical female or ‘
shojo’ xianxia.
COROLLARY 3: THE CULTIVATION SYSTEM OF A XIANXIA IS NOT LIMITED TO DAOISM
An essential part of the xianxia ("immortal hero") genre is the cultivation system. Historically all xianxia cultivation systems stem from Daoism and the daoist doctrine of
inner cultivation, but you are not limited to it. Truthfully, as long as you respect rule one (constant growth of the MC strength up to godhood, with no cheating tricks), any cultivation system will do. Even a genetic or cybernetic based cultivation system would work. The sky is the limit, literally. The truly difficult thing creating a cultivation system is being choerent and profound at the same time.
To grasp the logic of cultivation systems I suggest any writer to read the following five novels. The following novels feature five among the best cultivation systems ever written, and should be read in this exact order:
- ‘The Desolate Era’;
- 'A Record of a Mortal’s Journey to Immortality';
- ‘I Shall Seal The Heaven’;
- ‘Heavenly Jewel Change’;
- ‘Lord of the Mysteries‘.
The first teaches you how to write a ‘canon’ based system, the second teaches you the way to create the slow "build up" of cultivation, the third teaches you how to expand beyond the canon still ensuring a system that is profound and captivating, the fourth teaches you how to write a completely original but still very powerful system, and the fifth teaches you how to make even the most strange western esotericism into a cultivation system xianxia like. Once you have mastered those five, you can invent any system for your novel and it would work fine.
But beware:
cultivation must never be boring for the reader. Cultivation must be challenging. And in many ways. It is often said that cultivation is made of 4 ingredients (the so called
P.U.R.E. paradigm):
- People (e.g. dao protectors, teachers, guiding souls, artifacts spirits, acupuncturists, dual cultivation partners...)
- Understanding (e.g. books, jade slips, engravings, paintings, runes, talismans, spiritual objects, legacy wills or intents, dao treasures...)
- Resources (e.g. Qi, spiritual or elemental energy, spirit stones, pills, plants, alchemic potions, blood, marrow, beast cores, natural treasures, dao treasures and weapons, souls to refine…)
- Environment (e.g. Qi rich places, spiritual places, places filled with the aura of powerful cultivators, sources of dense elemental energy, special cultivation rooms, spiritual formations, corpses or tombs of powerful beings, places exerting spiritual or physical pressure…)
Finding powerful dao protectors (people who guard the MC while he cultivates, help him if a Qi deviation occours or infuse him with energy needed to breakthrough a bottleneck), rare resources and hard to reach environments are all already challenging tasks for the average MC in every novel. But the understanding part is often omitted when the author describes the MC cultivating. The inner thoughts of the MC are often ignored and the author just mentions that he is meditating or just circulating and refining spiritual energy. Making his inner train of thought explicit and at the same time interesting for the reader is often too hard. This is because the author has to came up with original ideas and questions that the MC must ponder and solve in a meaningful, coherent intellectual journey. Desolate Era and ISSTH are both the best in this regard. Techniques are not just read, but each level poses a question that the MC must solve to successfully train in it, sometimes from observing the world outside and sometimes reflecting on his inner Dao. To advance and improve his understanding of the cultivation realms the MC must solve profound mysteries, investigating with the occasional help of great teachers, or experiencing enigmatic visions that should be decoded like a rebus. The deep mysteries that the MC experience and struggle with in ErGen novels are what make his xianxia novels the best.
The perfect xianxia novel is the one that makes the reader understand the Dao (or any other metaphysical doctrine used in the novel) together with the MC. And this should be challenging for both the reader and the MC, like meditating and solving a new kōan zen at each cultivation step, giving a sense of satisfaction like when from a paradox a great truth is unveiled. This is the reason why the U letter in the PURE cultivation paradigm is both difficult to write and incredibly rewarding for the reader if done right.
COROLLARY 4: YOU CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING BUT THE 3 RULES
Face-slapping is the perfect example of a common but non necessary element of the xianxia genre. Even if face-slapping is absent, if the 3 rules are there, the novel works. Take
Lord of The Mysteries for instance: many of the most common tropes of the xianxia novels are missing, including face slapping, and yet it is still a genuine great xianxia novel because it respects all the 3 rules. No one is going to loose interest in a xianxia novel if you stop giving the reader flace-slapping scenes. But try to miss any of the three-feelings-rule, for example the save-the-beauty element, and replace it with something else, like money-hoarding, status-rising or kingdom-building, and you will see the reader suddenly dropping the novel after other 50-100 chapters at best. Even if you add an entire harem, but those girls have not been individually saved by the MC in a save-the-beauty scene, the reader would get bored.
COROLLARY 5: THE FORMULA PROVIDES YOU WITH THE HOOKS, BUT YOU SHOULD PUT THE MEAT
Can a xianxia novel still be interesting even if it does not adhere to the three-feelings-rule? ‘Interesting’ is a word with a broad meaning. I would rater split the interest in two categories:
hooks and meat. Hooks are those elements deemed psychologically necessary in a novel to grab the attention of the reader so you can feed him the meat. And the meat is what the novel is truly all about. The original ideas of the author are in the meat, and those are the difficult part to write. Hooks are necessary but not sufficient conditions to make a good novel. You still need the meat (an intriguing story, great characters and a fascinating world) to make the novel good. But the hooks cannot be underestimated, because if those are missing no matter how good the train is, without rails is not going to reach his destination, the reader mind. I mean, there are great artists that can break the rules of a genre, and still succeed in keeping the interest, but those are able to do this only because they have invented new rules that work, and with those are going to estabilish a new genre. But if you don’t first master the rules that work, you cannot create new rules. No artist likes to stick to the rules, but creating new rules that work is very hard. Before inventing cubism, Picasso mastered all previous painting styles. But if you are not Picasso and you don’t want to estabilish a new genre, staying within the 3 rules of xianxia it is enough to create an infinitely rich world with stories and ideas that are truly ‘interesting’.
COROLLARY 6: HAVING MANY LOVE STORIES IS NORMAL FOR PEOPLE WHO LIVE FOREVER
First of all, an harem is not something degenerate or immoral.
Harem is a choice, and a choice perfectly understandable for a xianxia. Having many love stories is normal for people who live forever. Second, rule N.2 does
NOT transform a xianxia novel in
jack off material! As I said, rule n.2 only dictates that the MC should often save a beauty in distress, getting in return her sincere gratitude. Everything beyond that is optional and up to the author.
I really do not understand why the act of saving a beauty can be categorized by some as a ‘jack-off material’. The instinct to help a woman in trouble is one of the most noble and admirable traits in the human male (one of the very few ‘good ones’ if you ask me), because women are ultimately more fragile than men. The added requirement of being beautiful is just to make the experience more rewarding for the reader, because the appreciation of beauty is an universal psychological trait (in both male and female) and even if it is not fair towards ugly women, if an author starts writing novels where the MC prefers ugly girls to beautiful girls, it would be not believable at all and at worst the MC would be categorized as a weirdo with an ugly fetish. Of course you can make the MC save ugly girls too if they are in trouble, but that would never be as psychological rewarding as saving beautiful ones. And because we are talking about rules to make a novel more interesting and more rewarding for the reader, since there are only advantages and not disadvantages, why should anyone oppose it? This is xianxia, not some realistic literary genre required to adhere to the nitty-gritty aspects of real life even if the reader is not pleased with them.
Xianxia is a genre born to allow us little human beings to dream to be immortals and as powerful as a gods. It is the ultimate redemption of the soul by means of imagination from the shakles of the bitter reality of life. Then why in the world I should reduce the excitment in reading it?
COROLLARY 7: EVEN THE MOST SIMPLE XIANXIA NOVEL CAN BE MADE ADDICTIVE
AN EXAMPLE OF THE FORMULA WORKING MIRACLES EVEN IN XIANXIA NOVELS WITH REPEATING PATTERNS IS 'MARTIAL GOD ASURA'. Many criticized the novel for being formulaic and for following the 'Mountain Beyond Mountain' story pattern. But most of those critics simply do not like the xianxia genre. If Martial God Asura is so popular and it is still going on after almost 5000 chapters is because IT IS VERY GOOD. The universe, the story, the characters, the humor, the adventures, the fightings.. while it follows the usual MBM scheme, all is very well made and entertaining, because it cares about following the
Three Feelings Rule of Xianxia Novels.
The Author, Kindhearted Bee, is not a peerless genius like Er Gen, so you won't find the depth and mysticism you would find in Er Gen novels. He is not a simbolist, so you won't find the poetical meanings that you would find in Mao Ni novels. Nor he is a smart geek like I Eat Tomatoes, so you would not find the rich and detailed exploration of cultivation methods and realms, like in The Desolate Era. He is also not a very romantic fellow, so while there are a lot of beauties falling for the MC in his novels, their love stories are far simpler and colder compared to those of Heavenly Silkworm Potato or Cabbage Flatbread.
Yet, the story is always intriguing, the characters are always fascinating, and even at chapter 4920 I'm still eager to read the next one. I'm still hooked to MGA, and I hope it would never end. If even the most simple xianxia novel can become addictive with the 3 rules, imagine how much more a good xianxia novel would gain.
I hope that the above notes of mine will help western authors to write more novels belonging to the xianxia genre! :-)
