Lovely Writing System

130 Experience is Crucial

Nie Chang couldn't help but laugh when he saw Su Yan's expression. "Why do you look so shocked? You've written so many stories prior to this. If I remember correctly, quite a few of the characters weren't disciples of a sect either."

Su Yan pursed his lips. Now that Nie Chang said so ... "I kind of ignored it because of the system. After all, it doesn't want me to write xianxia. I'm supposed to write romance now."

Nie Chang continued to laugh. "Isn't it still the same? Everyone can fall in love."

Su Yan threw him an angry look. He had already understood! Why was Nie Chang still talking about it! Did he feel like it wasn't embarrassing enough already?

Nie Chang hurriedly coughed when he saw Su Yan's resentful gaze. Uh-oh. This was dangerous territory. It seemed he had to divert his darling's attention as fast as possible. "So ... If you consider it that way, what would you like to write about?"

Su Yan slowly continued eating while his thoughts churned. He had indeed a lot more choices like this but ... "There are still a lot of things I can't take. Those masters and grandmasters are all really old and a magical beast is a beast even if it has a human form. Who would want to read something like that? Wouldn't that be strange?"

Nie Chang stared at his boyfriend and seriously considered how to state his opinion. "Well ... cultivators don't age, do they? So even though a master might be old, he wouldn't look like it. He could still be a handsome man."

Su Yan shook his head. "Yeah, but you said it yourself: Even if he looks like that, he'd still be old."

"What's bad about that? There's many a good tune played on an old fiddle."

Su Yan tilted his head. "What are you even talking about? Nobody said they wouldn't be good cultivators just because they're old. They'd probably be even better considering that they have more experience." After all, especially for the fights the readers wanted him to include in the stories, experience was something crucial!

Nie Chang nodded. "Of course, of course! But don't you think love is the same?"

Su Yan pondered for a moment and shook his head. "No? Why should it? I mean love isn't like cultivation. It's nothing you have to train."

"No, that's true." Nie Chang turned back to his bowl of food.

Love certainly wasn't anything you'd need to train but ... the things you'd do with the one you loved were certainly something that would use some experience. To be honest, he was a little worried about that himself. After so many years of being in love with Su Yan, he had never even thought of doing it with somebody else.

Now, if Su Yan and he had sex in two week's time ... Wouldn't it be really awkward? He did know what to do in theory but who knew if he'd be able to do it in a way that Su Yan liked when they tried for real?

Su Yan had no idea what Nie Chang was thinking about and just rejected the idea of having one of his main characters be a master in a sect. After all, disregarding the age there was one other thing wrong with that. "Don't even mention being old. It's not possible anyway. Have you never heard of that saying 'a master for a day, a father for life'? Who would fall in love with his father?"

Nie Chang was pulled out of his thoughts and smiled wryly. There was nothing he could do about his lacking experience besides slowly accumulating it with Su Yan. In a way, that was also good.

"I don't think that's a problem. Eh? Didn't the system want you to find reasons to break up? That would be one. Society forces some beliefs on us that are hard to get rid of. Being gay is a problem in itself sometimes. I guess falling in love with your master in a xianxia story is the same.

Even if you're very much in love and even if the other person loves you too, a lot of other people will never accept it. They'd probably try to advise you to break up because ... well, it's not normal? But just because they think it's immoral that's not necessarily true, is it?"

Su Yan nodded slowly. What Nie Chang said just now ... had sounded really deep. "I need some time to think about it."

Nie Chang raised his brows. They knew each other for more than a decade. If he still didn't understand that 'needing some time to think things through' translated to having no idea what they were talking about, then he should just roll into the corner and feel ashamed of himself for having wasted his time.

"You've probably never thought about it before because you just stumbled into our relationship somehow and it hasn't been long since then but I've been in love with you for a long time already. Whenever I heard someone talk shit about gay relationships I couldn't help but feel bad. Especially in the beginning. Actually, I even felt a little guilty. We were friends, after all. I couldn't really explain to myself how I fell in love with you."

"It's because I'm so great!" Su Yan smiled smugly. Never mind that he had just questioned his own character a while ago, after calming down for a while and hearing Nie Chang talk about him he felt that he was actually a good catch. Ah, he might not be as good-looking or intelligent as Nie Chang but he was still cute, wasn't he? That also counted for something!

"Mn." Nie Chang nodded with a smile. "You're the best. And I already knew that back then. But it was still hard to cope with these feelings for a while and the fact that a lot of people felt that they needed to tell the world that they didn't like homosexual couples didn't help with overcoming that.

So, what I wanted to say is that even though in most xianxia novels it might be the norm that a master is regarded as a father figure I guess that's also what would make a love story between a disciple and his master interesting. How would they overcome that problem?"

Su Yan slowly nodded. Now that Nie Chang put it like that he also felt that this wasn't too bad. Maybe he should really try and write a story like that?