The picture of this article comes from the film "Midnight in Paris"
One type of writer has an experience that ordinary people do not have, such as Jamaica Qinkaide, such as Mo Yan; the other type of writer mainly relies on imagination, such as George Orwell, such as Wang Xiaobo.
The first-person little girl in My Mother's My Mother, whose mother died when she was born, and whose father put him in someone else's house until he was seven years old, and then brought her back to a family with a stepmother who hoped for her death every day, was an experience that few people had, so when she said" "No one loves me", it was so sad and desperate. I believe that people who do not have such an experience will never be able to write it, and even if they do, it is not as natural as she writes. "Hungry Daughter" is also moved by the fact that the author is always looking for her father under the fence as an illegitimate daughter, and the author's other novels cannot be read. When Mo Yan said that the black child in "Transparent Carrot" was himself, there were quite a lot of real elements in the words.
Unlike writers who have experienced themselves, other types of writers are mostly imaginative, but have the ability to empathize. George Orwell wrote 1984, just a circle from England to the Soviet Union, and the totalitarian society he wrote about was all imaginary, completely unaware of its situation, and deeply affected by it. Hugo's Les Misérables and '93 are all based on a romantic imagination of the story and characters, and the social life and French Revolution in France at that time were only the background of the story, not the focus of the author's writing. Wang Xiaobo's "Red Breeze Night Run" is even more imaginative, going through ancient and modern time and space, doing whatever they want, people have become fish, like a big flat piece, swimming through the cracks in the door.
If there is no extraordinary sensitivity, no extraordinary feelings about things, the writer has no impulse to write, and the things he writes will not look good. But this extraordinary feeling, the first type of writer often comes from personal experience, is the stimulation of the external environment on the sensitive skin, making the author feel tingling. Chinkaide smashed her adoptive mother's cherished colored disc and was punished by her for kneeling, and the torture of the hard stone on the little girl's knee brought her a physical sting. Mo Yan's black child struggled with hunger, and the emptiness in his stomach made him dizzy and miserable. The second type of writer's supernormal feelings about things often come from the heart, they all have supernormal sensitive minds, for the same things, ordinary people feel one, but their feelings are ten.
This classification of writers is, of course, only a generalization, in fact, realist writers must also have imaginations far beyond ordinary people; romantic or surrealist writers also need rich experiences, especially inner experiences. The common denominator of both types of writers is that they must have a sensitive mind that transcends ordinary people, whether it is exogenous stimulation or endogenous stimulation, they must have the sensitivity that transcends ordinary people.