The Three Things you Need to Write a Successful Web Novel
Three Tenets to mimic and reproduce what the best web novel writers are doing to get that big bag of cash.
The Three Tenets of Success for a Web Serial
This is an article meant for those who already know web novels and want to get better at analyzing others’ work and their own. I’ll reference some web novels without going into great detail about each and every one of them. You might get lost with some quotes and thoughts if you have no previous knowledge of web novels.
While analyzing some of the most famous web novels, I was looking for a common denominator of success. I wanted to replicate the same thing in my new series, I Wear It Black, and I chose to focus on Primal Hunter, He Who Fights with Monsters, Paranoid Mage, and Defiance of the Fall. I've recently started gathering excerpts from and analyzing Path of Ascension, Unsouled (Cradle, Book 1), and Beneath the Dragoneye Moons; I’ve also made some notes on All the Skills, [Maid] to Kill, and Industrial Strength magic, three recent Rising Stars breakouts. All these novels so far presented the same three characteristics I initially discovered in the aforementioned four novels.
I do not believe I made a great discovery of sorts. Dan Brown talks about making promises, as does Sanderson. And that's what I call a 'Projection,’ in a way [ but actually not]. Superimposition of Animus is what most would call 'empathy with the main character,' and Consistency... well, it's self-explanatory, really [but actually not].
Superimposition of Animus
I’m not a Jungian, nor am I an expert on Psychology. I just found this framework extremely convenient for explaining the complexities of success in web serials. I’m really sorry about the inherent complexity of this definition, but it just clicked so well in my head that I couldn’t help but give it a name like this. I personally dislike those in need of making up new terms for already established things, but I ended up doing pretty much the same thing.
In his work on the collective unconscious, Jung describes Animus as the unconscious masculine side of a woman and Anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man. As I mentioned in my previous article, young men all across the first-world countries are repressing their masculine side, making masculine idols more and more popular, whether they are toxic or not. Also, men have been repressing their feminine side for centuries, or maybe millennia, across all societies. That’s the Anima, the feminine qualities that a man should reconcile with for a better life. However, now we have the repression of the core qualities of each sex, effectively giving ectopic birth to Animus in men and Anima in women. It is only natural that men prefer literature with a strong masculine figure.
In Primal Hunter, you are brought to empathize with Jake with a very ‘on the nose’ telling. Just look at the 7th Chapter of Primal Hunter.
In university, he had purposefully worked on improving his social skills and actively aimed to take part in gatherings and such. While he never got completely comfortable doing it, it improved his self-confidence tremendously during those years. Getting a girlfriend and a few close friends did even more for that confidence to develop. All until it was brought down the day he walked in on his girlfriend and his supposed best friend. Apparently, it had been an open secret in their little group. Open to everyone but Jake. All the work and development he had gone through had been for naught, and his self-confidence and self-worth were tossed in the gutter. His girlfriend had claimed it was just “having fun” and that it was nothing serious, while his so-called best friend had seemed to think it was no big deal at all, and that he just had to “stop being a pussy about it. ” This was a sentiment apparently shared by everyone else in their little university group. Or maybe they’d just feared social excommunication from the group if they spoke up. [...] This event had led to Jake returning to his old, introverted ways. He’d studied, done archery, played games, watched TV, and gone to classes. A good day was one where he hadn’t spoken a single word to anyone but his parents when they called, asking how he was doing.
I have an essay on Primal Hunter coming out in the foreseeable future, so I’ll not go too deep into Jake’s psychology in this instance.
It doesn’t matter that Zogarth employs blatant telling, he makes you angry, and you start empathizing with Jake. It’s bringing a sledgehammer to hang a little picture, but it works wonderfully. You get angry because it’s such an absurd situation you can’t help but get angry at such a group of people. And the fact that in the previous chapters of Primal Hunter, in the face of a literal apocalypse, Jake was the only ‘reasonable’ character makes it all the more effective. Zogarth slowly brings the reader to empathize with the situation: Jake’s colleagues are idiots, he lived a life apparently surrounded by idiots, so why shouldn’t you feel for the guy at least a bit?
Also, he’s been ‘improving his social skills.’ What does that mean, in this context? Well, that he was getting more in touch with his ‘feminine’ side—because he’s socializing in a societal context, not a - pardon the pun - Primal one. Chimps bash each other to death to assert dominance, they form quicksilver-y alliances to bring down their enemies and climb the hierarchies. What Jake is doing is not inherently masculine. Navigating an intricate social landscape is something females are much more adept at without the slightest doubt.
So, this description acts as a primer for our own - again, sorry - Primal masculine energy. We get angry, our own instincts awaken [forcefully]. That’s one of the way the Superimposition of Animus can manifest. And this is just one instance. Zogarth peppers, trickle-charges his readers, with a myriad of similar Animus-injections.
Now, let’s take a look at Paranoid Mage, where a similar effect is achieved through a vastly different method:
For some reason, there was one of them at the funeral. Ever since Callum Wells was young he’d seen things. People. Things that were people, or people that were things. The not-quite-human. They were not very common, but not so vanishingly rare that he could write it off as imagination. He’d mentioned it, once, as a child, and the doctors had prescribed pills. Callum Sr., paranoid soul that he was, had stopped his son from taking them after a week when they did no more than make him fuzzy and stupid. [...] The fire was clearly not a normal blaze, since it spread faster and was far hotter than any normal fire should be. By the time he got the second person out he was having to crawl under the smoke. It had only been a few seconds, and the wall of fire was licking along the ceiling and the floor both. Callum knew he should call it in, but there were only five other people in the gym. Four of them were close enough to the windows that he could pull them outside easily, it was just the last one who was slumped on an elliptical machine in the back. But the air was hot, too hot, searing his lungs and making him lightheaded as he crawled toward the unconscious woman, but he thought he could handle it. Until the too-fast fire brought down the roof. Or rather, the massive fans and rows of televisions and electrical wiring, plummeting down with a horrendous noise. The collapse sent a shower of liquid sparks over the ground. And over him. [...] The rough concrete dug into his hands as he tried to lever himself upright, wheezing as he dug for his phone. Part of him found it strange there were no sirens already, but it wasn’t a movie set. In the real world, emergency services took time to arrive. He was dialing when a voice startled him.“What are you doing?”
Paranoid Mage has a much more subtle approach, mixing showing and telling to its advantage. We are presented with Callum’s power, but we soon forget about it, in a matter of a few paragraphs, and we are thrust into a live-or-die situation—the fire.
But then, we are struck with a hammer, the ‘What are you doing?’ that makes us realize we had been led by the nose all along. Not only InadvisablyCompelled explained Callum’s power upfront, but he now skillfully maneuvered the reader to find themselves in the same position of our unfortunate main character.
And so, that last sentence is the turning point of the book. Up until there, the author has built the background knowledge we needed to interpret what’s happening. That’s what makes it click in your head: “Callum fucked up. He didn’t consider that this could have been a supernatural event, and so invisible to any normal person. He just outed himself.” You don’t need a further explanation; if the author had opted for shorter chapters that might have been a good point to end chapter 1 on. And now, we are in a ‘reactive’ stance; we are trapped. That realization hit Callum as much as it hit the reader - and that’s where the magic happens. Now the reader’s stomach is twisting.
Let’s explain what happens here with a comparison; have you even found an ad on your phone where someone is playing a puzzle game and making the clear wrong moves? That’s made on purpose because they want you to think ‘I could do much better than this.’ It’s not rare to find the same feeling in many books—which, by the way, leads many to start writing their own books. But in this case, you are not better than Callum - you would have made the exact same moves and now you found out you are fucked - and that’s even stronger than the mobile ad. We could, indeed, talk about a transfer of emotions, coercing your own expertise into the character’s one. When you are brought on the same level as the character, who’s not an idiot, you are now his shadow. This deep level of immersion means that you need Callum to succeed after his screw-up. Because if Callum is in trouble, you are in trouble as well. If you don’t go on to discover why Callum messed up and how he’s going to save himself, you are going to be left in an emotional limbo yourself.
These two examples were very different, but they achieved the same effect. They superimposed the reader and the main character, creating empathy that revolves around very masculine energy.
And so, the superimposition of animus is simply a visceral grappling move that puts the reader in a chokehold and shoves empathy - doesn’t matter if negative or positive - down his throat.
You could postulate as easily the existence of superimposition of Anima in romance books.
Consistency
Consistency can be divided between the author’s consistency in his own life and consistency inside the narrative. I’m not going to discuss an author’s life consistency here, but just his work.
As a general rule of thumb, with each passing chapter that advances the story, the chances that the story will degenerate get higher. The faster a story is, the more the chances it will mess up. Every plot point is yet another chance for failure. Imagine you are in charge of a football team and they play every day of the week. In a matter of days, you are going to have serious injuries on your hands: and it’s not just about too many matches at once, but the fact that they pile on each other, where you feel the consequences of your last match on the current one; that means you should have planned beforehand to manage your energies, doing some turnover and whatnot. And most writers do not properly manage the energy of their own stories. As soon as they have their big plot point, the story starts deflating, and it meets an inevitable decline.
One of the most likely causes is that most good writing is made subconsciously, meaning that not even the writer has a clear conception of the ethos of his story.
The ethos of a story, for the sake of clarity, is the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize said story.
Is there only one ethos? Let’s start by saying that following the ethos could be paired with following a pattern. There’s both a pattern in how the narrative is presented and a pattern in how the story unfolds. The story unfolds following a logic that has to be both internally and externally consistent. If the readers cannot follow the logic of the story, they will find it faulty even if it doesn’t contradict itself. If the story contradicts itself, instead, it’s violating internal consistency.
Looking at the word ‘consistency,’ we might be tempted to think in terms of coherent characters. However, coherency and consistency are not the same things and it appears that some might confuse the two. Coherency is not necessary as long as there’s consistency. Depending on the pattern established, you can approve or reject coherency. Again, not just on a character level, but story-wise. Romance books might have very inconsistent characters who are needed for a coherent ‘crazy-in-love’ narration, making weird choices to keep up with the narrative.
Paranoid Mage loses its ethos in different ways, the first of which is definitely the structure of the narrative. Whereas the first six chapters retain a common structure, later on, InadvisablyCompelled does not follow his guiding principles anymore: he transitions from ‘hint-to-blimp’ to just writing out things without any rules.
When you read The Wandering Inn, you start realizing that there are some internal rules that the author follows religiously. The more you read, the more your perspective starts to superimpose with the rules, and you become extremely sensitive to any rule-breaking: this, by the way, is the reason why some chapters of web serials can be terribly boring but still not increase the churning rate of the series; as long as something is consistent, it’s most likely good [enough].
The Wandering Inn’s consistency might take more than one dedicated essay, but let’s just examine a few points to understand better what we are talking about.
No single event is capable of upsetting the world at large at once. Whether it’s the Death of Magic coming back, or Nawalishifra forging a blade that could end wars upon wars, the internal consistency dictates that events can only upset the plot to a point. There’s not one event that ripples through the entire narrative. The Death of Magic might be back, but there are still so many POVs that will be unaffected. Flos’s vassal refuses to use the blade and breaks it down even though it could guarantee to win the battle - and then the war, by extension - even when his wife has just died trying to defend Reim, the capital. This rule needs a deep analysis because it’s tied to the meteorological pace of the series, meaning that events cannot advance the timeline too fast. Once you establish a pace, you cannot deviate from it. Even if you are suggesting that you can, like in Nawalishifra’s case, you need to go back to the baseline right after by breaking the blade. You get hints of the immense chaos there could have been, but chaos in the series is never actualized, just projected.
Primal Hunter employs an interesting strategy against the degeneration of consistency: where The Wandering Inn takes the high road, and Paranoid Mage simply fails, Zogarth, the author of Primal Hunter, displays his masterful skills in dealing with his own weaknesses. He didn’t set up the story on the right rails from the start because he relied too much on telling at first; that means that he is likely conscious of his own weakness on a level, maybe not entirely, but definitely, enough to pull off something extremely smart. Telling too much at the beginning and triggering too many conflicts at once means that now the pace of the story is too fast. Way too fast. Once you pulled so many narrative threads by chapter 15, there’s nothing, story-wise, you can do because you would need to have a slaughter by chapter 25 and the Tutorial would end there and then. What Zogarth does should be taught to every starting-out LitRPG author: he artificially slowed down the pace with a massive amount of LitRPG content - some might argue this should be considered ‘Filler,’ but once again that warrants yet another essay of his own. Zogarth does not [always] use LitRPG as the main element, save for chapter 2, which is essentially LitRPG eye-candy - he uses it to slow down the story, to provide more content without the need to advance the actual narrative that ropes you in in the first ten-twelve chapters.
If you want an example of a very different approach compared to what Zogarth does, think of the Grand Game, where you can observe ten chapters of purely LitRPG eye-candy. Zogarth has gone a step beyond and uses it as a divider to let the narrative breathe, effectively giving himself room to write more without having to write himself into a corner and advance the story at its ideal pace.
Not every web novel writers starts out with a clear idea of what they are going to do, but there are definitely several strategies one might employ to create breathing room in a web serial.
So, Consistency mostly focuses on the ethos of the novel. But then there’s also what readers see that might not be evident to the author. In the end, it’s the hardest element to manage in a story. I’ll write more on the topic in the upcoming months.
Projection
My Projection might be mistaken for what Sanderson and Dan Brown call ‘Promise.’ However, I believe there’s a fundamental difference between the two. Promises and Payoffs pile up differently for a normal book and a web novel; do understand that web novel and web serial are effectively synonyms. When you consider the meaning Sanderson gives to ‘Promise,’ it’s much closer to what I define as internal consistency in a novel. The Sanderson’s Promises encompass everything from the tone, the genre, the expectations on the plot, and they develop through progress to reach a payoff. In my opinion, you can sum up and repackage all that stuff inside ‘Consistency.’
A projection, instead, is an element that includes foreshadowing of the future and, at the same time, lets the reader wildly fantasize about what is possible inside one novel. If you have ever played any card games like Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh, you might have experienced a similar feeling when you see all the possible cool combos that you could possibly play.
From The Beginning After the End:
I was a king. I could have my country’s army assemble at my feet, kneeling down with the snap of a finger. I’ve outdueled my competitors from different countries as well as my own people to settle disputes and maintain my position. In terms of swordsmanship and controlling ki, I was second to none, for having personal strength was essential to becoming a ruler in my past world on Earth. Kings weren’t born, but raised. Yet, I couldn’t think of a prouder moment in my two lives than now. [...] Now, if I could still practice the way ki practitioners used their ki, but with mana that was both present inside the mana core and in the surrounding atmosphere, couldn’t I essentially double… no… triple the strength that I had before?
Long story short, the protagonist discovers in chapter 2 that the way he cultivated his Ki in his past life means that he’s used to much harsher conditions, and now he can cultivate the energy of the world, Mana, much more easily than anyone else. On top of that, he was the strongest king of his old world. This is like creating an array of cards on the field that complement each other so perfectly that you stacked a massive amount of bonuses on your monsters. By now, readers are imagining what kind of amazing power there will be in his hands in the future. Plus, in the subsequent chapters, you’ll see a slow but steady rise in ability levels and how amazed his parents are that he’s making all this progress at a young age. The rush of the blue boxes adds to the overall projection, reinforcing the feeling and creating the progression.
Salvos and Beneath the Dragoneye Moons do the exact same thing with variations. But the projection ‘type’ is pretty much the same.
In Primal Hunter, the first big projection you can see is in Chapter 7, when Jake starts training and we get the foreshadowing, or Promise, of the Bloodline of the Primal Hunter he will gain in Chapter 9. The skill broad usage gives out the same type of ‘unfair advantage’ the main character has on others, letting you wonder what will happen in future fights; and just to be clear, this is exactly what a projection is: wonder about the future.
Conclusions
The Superimposition of Animus and Consistency are not always present in every successful novel, and even when they are, they can be displayed in different degrees. Projection, instead, is something you will find every single time. I don’t know if it’s because web novels are effectively a ‘power fantasy,’ but there are novels where very weak Superimposition of Animus and Consistency will not make a story fail because there’s such a strong Projection that the expectations alone will keep the readers turning pages. This is obviously a general take and there are many ways in which a Projection can fail to make a successful story, but in general, that’s the first thing a novel should display to its readers to make a quick buck.
I reckon that Superimposition of Animus is mostly an amplifier or a substitute for projections, especially at the beginning. Most novels do not keep up this mechanic beyond the first few chapters.
If a Projection is what can make a story profitable, Consistency is what keeps a web novel [and its revenue] growing.
Anyway, subscribe to my free newsletter if you want to read more articles like this one.