Sentimental novel

The writing of emotional novels takes people and feelings as the core, so how to deal with emotional relations clearly and richly, and how to make emotional changes within reason and unexpected, is particularly important for the writing of such novels. In this lesson, I will mainly discuss the writing techniques of emotional novels based on a textbook of emotional novels. The book was Love in the Time of Cholera, and it has been called "the book of love in our time." Novel depicts the feelings of young love, husband and wife love, conservative, dissolute love, love of the flesh and spirit, accidental and eternal love, stick to and give up love, struggle and reconciliation, forgotten and memory, betrayal and loyalty and so on the theme, in more than 50 years of development, broad and clear story time. Then we will concretely analyze the writing skills of emotional novels hidden in this epic of love.

First, emotional clues: master and slave clear, light and dark interweave

Love in the Time of Cholera mainly talks about the two emotional lines of Fermina, Ariza and Urbino, but different from the general "triangle" love mode, the novel does not let the two emotional lines directly conflict, but the double clues parallel, do not interfere with each other. After the first part recounted Urbino's death, the remaining five parts of the novel chronologically recount Ariza's half-century of love and Urvino's marriage. The whole story flows smoothly without the reversal of the story. Although the two main lines revolve around the same heroine, they are independent and fully developed internally, so the feeling of reading is orderly.

At the same time, with Ariza as the fulcrum, the novel has numerous secondary lines, that is, Ariza's huge group of lovers. It is challenging to manage the emotional relationships of many characters and voices, and Marquez manages it well. In order to limit the length and save the reader's attention, each branch line should be mentioned to the end, with a little detail, but at the same time, the emotional characteristics should be different according to the character's personality. For EXAMPLE, THE WILD AND PASSIONATE WIDOW OF Nazareth represents physical and dissolute love, WHILE THE intelligent AND ENTERPRISING Leona focuses on spiritual and mutual love. In addition, if you need to set the emotional changes of a secondary character but it is difficult to fully unfold, you can "point with surface" -- using a montage of several segments to suggest the emotional development process. For example, the ending of the novel explains the suicide of America, Arisa's last "little lover". Although she "left no words" for people to speculate on the cause of death, the novel writes about her for the last time before the ending, when she discovered the correspondence between Arisa and Fermina. Through the simple group of fragments, the author not only leaves a logical clue for readers to interpret, but also maintains a certain ambiguity and imagination space, which stops abruptly and has a long lingering rhyme.

In addition to the explicit love relationships described above, the novel also sets several dark lines, that is, the feelings of the previous generation. For example, Ferminna's father, aunt, Alissa's father, their love stories are not explicitly described, but through the next generation of love to show. Fermina's father represents a conservative view of love and interferes in order not to let his daughter repeat his own tragedy of love, while Arsa's father's insistence on love is passed on to his son, who believes that "the only pain that death makes me feel is that I cannot die for love." The affection view of the two generations in the explicit or implicit game, affect the main line of love. Through the dark line, the love is discussed in a larger background, and the intergenerational change of feelings is presented, so that the emotion writing of the novel has the complexity of The Times and the sense of the cycle of fate. Especially when the novel involves many themes such as history and fate, such emotional processing can add layers to the novel.

Second, emotional change: sudden turn and gradual change

The change of emotional relationship is the key to the plot development of this kind of novel. According to the rhythm, the change of relationship can be roughly divided into two kinds: abrupt transition and gradual transition. Abrupt changes require fast pace, dramatic changes, and the most easy to mobilize the reader's mood. A wonderful sudden turn can make a love story have a strong sense of legend and accident. For example, in Eileen Chang's novel Love in a City, the love that the hero and the heroine try to test each other is fulfilled because of the sudden fall of Hong Kong, while Gu Manzhen in Half Life Fate loses the love that has been brewing for a long time because of the defilment. Sudden turn is often the climax of emotional novels, successful sudden turn can let the reader's reading have "mountains and rivers after doubt no way, willow hidden flowers and a village" feeling. But it should be noted that, although there must be a certain amount of accident, but also to ensure that in reason, in line with the character's emotional logic. Therefore, the author often needs to make a certain detail foreshadowing before the sudden turn, so that the sudden turn can be traced.

Compared with the abrupt transition, the gradual change of feelings is relatively slow, the reader is not easy to detect; Because it has to be placed in a long time line, it also increases the difficulty of writing. More importantly, "gradual change" is often disguised as "invariance" in fiction, which requires the author to deal with the relationship between "change" and "invariance", not only to maintain the stability of feelings in a long time, but also to implicitly show the subtle changes. Love in the Time of Cholera is an exemplary depiction of Ariza's emotional and psychological changes over the past 50 years, showing many exquisite writing skills. In order to ensure that Ariza's love for Fermina is "unchanged", Marquez arranged a unique way of feeling time: all the time calculation starts from the afternoon when he first met Fermina. Therefore, every time Ariza thinks about the process of his life, he always has to go back to that day. It can be seen that love with Ferminna has become the weight and measure of his life. Not only that, Marquez even let Ariza's time calculation accurate to "day", so in the end, when he said "life", the readers were moved not only by this sentence, but also because this sentence prepared "fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days". As for the gradual change of feelings in time, Marquez arranged a few brief encounters, which were not even encounters. It was only Ariza who saw Fermina in the square, in the cinema and other places. Her marital status and the fading of her youth were clearly shown through Ariza's distant glance. And caused Alissa to life, marriage, death and other issues of thinking and suspicion, and Alissa to Ferminna love changes although not explicitly said, but also hidden under these thinking. This method of writing makes the change of feelings implicit and profound, which does not destroy the stability of long-term writing of feelings, and naturally presents the time change of feelings.

Third, emotional symbol: the choice of image

Finally, in order to visualize abstract feelings, emotional novels often set up some images as symbols to metaphorize love and activate emotions. This emotional symbol can be external to the character. Although it does not directly touch the character's psychology, it has a metaphorical relationship with the emotion outside the novel. For example, the selection of the symbol "cholera" has become the soul of the novel. In the novel, on the one hand, cholera causes the same disease as love, so whenever Ariza is in the throes of love, she is thought to be infected with cholera; On the other hand, cholera runs through the heroine Ferminna's two love relationships: she got to know her future husband because of the misdiagnosis of cholera when she was young, and finally she was able to renew her old love with Ariza on the ship under the name of cholera. Cholera provides a metaphorical bridge between love, life and death, so to some extent, the protagonist of Love in the Time of Cholera is Cholera itself. Emotional symbols also activate characters' emotions in the text. For example, the image of "thunder" can always activate Fermina's love pain for Ariza: "Every afternoon at three o 'clock from the Vianueva mountain, the lone, deafening and precise thunder, became her irreparable wound." However, the camellia that Ariza gave to Fermina when she was young played the function of courtship again fifty years later. Needless to say, just sending the camellia with the letter caused Fermina's emotional fluctuations.

Appropriate image selection can not only make the expression of emotion implicit and coherent, if the selection is clever enough, it will also leave a deep impression on the reader and become the unique logo of the whole work. Although classical love images such as roses and letters seem to be universal, if the author can select special images according to the unique era and regional culture of the novel, the novel will not only have a specific sense of time and space, but also create a memory point of the novel. For example, in the Song of Everlasting Regret, Wang Anyi transformed several love stories of the heroine Wang Qiyao into spatial symbols such as lane hall, Wu Bridge and Alice's apartment. Different places belong to lovers of different identities, which also indicate the differences in love patterns. But at the same time, these symbols have the regional characteristics of Shanghai culture. In this way, these symbols connect characters, love and places, explaining and generating each other, adding memorable features to the novel.

To sum up, for writers of emotional novels, the most important thing is to master the processing ability of emotional clues. The main line relationship needs to be clear, while the secondary line is responsible for making the relationship between characters more three-dimensional. In addition, dark lines and bright lines can be set for reference. The clear master-slave, light and dark interweaving clue emotional novel is full of layers. Secondly, the change of emotional relationship can be abrupt or gradual, but must conform to the character's inner emotional logic, so it requires a certain foreshadow. Finally, the selection of emotional images can give metaphorical and memory points to the works. Although these techniques are all included in Love in the Time of Cholera, but for the specific writing, it is not necessary to use all of them. As long as the clear emotional relationship is guaranteed and some reasonable drama is given on the basis of it, the overall structure of the work will be roughly complete and clear.

The imagination question in this lesson: Choose a scene or image that you think is suitable for love and start a first meeting between the hero and the heroine.