Character, plot and environment are the three elements of a novel. The plot generally includes four parts: beginning, development, climax and ending, and some also include prologue and ending. Environment includes natural environment and social environment. Novels can be divided into novels, novellas, short stories and mini-novels (short stories) according to their length and capacity. According to the performance content, it can be divided into science fiction, case-solving, legend, martial arts, romance, fan, official and so on. According to the system, it can be divided into chapter novels, diary novels, epistolary novels and autobiographical novels. According to language forms, it can be divided into classical Chinese novels and vernacular novels.
Novel, poetry, prose and drama are also called "four major literary genres".
Methods of portraying characters in novels: psychological description, action description, language description, appearance description and expression description.
Novel: It is one of the four major literary styles (prose, novel, poetry and drama). It is a literary genre that focuses on shaping characters and reflects social life through the narrative of complete stories and the description of specific environments. It is a literary work with complete layout, development and theme. The three elements of the novel are: the characters, the plot and the environment.
Novel is a literary style, which generally describes the story of characters and shapes various characters, but there are exceptions.
It is a literary work with complete layout, development and theme. Whether the dialogue has a distinct personality and whether each character's words have a unique language style is an important criterion to measure the level of novels.
The word "novel" first appeared in Zhuangzi Foreign Things: "Decorative novels are far from county orders. Zhuangzi's so-called "novel" refers to trivial remarks, which is far from today's novel concept. Until the Eastern Han Dynasty, Huan Tan's new theory: "Novelists combine small words and take metaphors, make simple books, manage their bodies and homes, and have considerable words. After Ban Gu listed "novelists" as ten types in the Records of Han Shu Literature and Art, he defined them as: "Novelists' flow was established by officials, gossip and hearsay [4]." Just slightly similar to the meaning of today's novel. The biggest feature of China's novels is that there are two different novel systems, classical Chinese novels and vernacular novels, since the Song Dynasty. China's classical novels originated from the gossip in the pre-Qin period, which is a record of poor knowledge. After the long-term development of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, Sui and Tang Dynasties, China's classical novels have made remarkable progress, forming two novel types: notes and legends. Vernacular novels, on the other hand, originated from the speaker's scripts in the Tang and Song Dynasties, and the stories were based on folk materials, mainly expressing people's life and ideology. However, both classical Chinese novels and vernacular novels have a long history, showing their own different artistic characteristics.