The prototype embodies the literary tradition.

Life prototype refers to some typical real characters and stories in real life, among which the typical real characters are also called "models". On the basis of life prototype, writers process, refine and summarize social life, and create artistic images with distinctive and profound personality characteristics. This method is "typicalization" in literary creation.

To make a life prototype become an artistic image, it is necessary to go through the process of typification. This process is that the writer uses imagination and fiction to select, refine, process, condense and summarize some original materials in real life, and creates an artistic image that not only reflects the essence and laws of social life, but also has a distinct, vivid and unique personality, making the social life reflected in his works more intense, concentrated, typical and ideal than real life, and therefore more universal.

Due to the difference of writers' ideology, life experience and artistic accomplishment, the ways to make the prototype of life reach the artistic image are also different. Some are based on their familiar and typical life prototypes, and then add other life materials to process and transform them into artistic images. Some gather scattered things that are interrelated and have certain characteristics to form an artistic image; Some dig and process rare but common things in life into artistic images. There is also an extremely strict method of depicting characters according to models, which is often used in biographical literature, reportage, memoirs and other genres. Turning a life prototype into an artistic image depends not only on the writer's ideological accomplishment and artistic accomplishment, but also on the writer's familiarity and understanding of this image.