Sometime more than forty years ago, I started writing novels, I started writing short stories. After many years, the memory is somewhat blurred, and the history is no longer clear. At that time, I didn't know how to write it, but I wrote it vaguely and published it in a vague way. Since then, although I have experienced five years of not being able to publish any text, I have always insisted on writing, basically never stopped writing, always writing, writing, and surviving to this day.
Literary creation is a long marathon, and the last novel I wrote, "Unforgettable Heart", was in 2017, and I was very tired, very bitter, and the most difficult moment, I was very frustrated and told my daughter that this was probably my last novel. Then, finally finished writing, finally finished, relieved, and then began to write the non-fiction "Nanjing Biography".
Writing "Nanjing Biography" is a different experience, of course, it is also very tired, very bitter, but unlike writing novels, it seems to be more relaxed, more different, a whole year, back to the era of graduate school, completely restore the appearance of students, this year, is to tirelessly write, check books, check the information. In an interview with reporters, I described this period of time as if I were writing a dissertation.
Writing is never possible to graduate, when writing "Nanjing Biography", there was a period of good state, almost ten hours a day. Write it down one day, the sky is dark, the sky is spinning, tell this feeling to your family, tell your friends, family and friends are a little worried, say you don't want to die, say that you are old comrades, you can't play like this. As a writer, I am actually very proud to have such a state, after all, I am in my early sixties, how can my capital be compared with when I was young. It was also during this time that the daughter and son-in-law decided to travel to Turkey, they did their homework online, chose the travel route, rented a car, and could take the old couple to play together. My wife was very impressed by this, it was indeed a good opportunity to travel, the whole family rented a car, roamed Turkey together, it was beautiful and comfortable to think about.
But I gave up the idea of going to Turkey, or in other words, I didn't have the idea at all. At that time, the state of writing was very brave, and I could not imagine what would happen if I went to Turkey and rested for half a month. Once the writing starts, if it really stops suddenly and temporarily brakes, it is likely to cause a very terrible situation. During writing, the brain is usually chaotic, there are many clues, the nerves are not normal, this time out, this time to experience some other things, is equivalent to using a big scissors to repair the branches, reaching into the head to cut a knife, all the clues are broken, and if you don't get it right, you can't pick it up again.
I know something, and to give up is to give up forever. The daughter and son-in-law went to Turkey to prepare for pregnancy. Once our family has a third generation, the possibility of helping the elderly and children to travel abroad is basically zero in the short term. At that time, there was no new crown epidemic, after all, the children had to go to work, the son-in-law was engaged in finance, and it was not easy to save a vacation. My daughter said at the time: "Dad can't go with us, of course it's a good opportunity, and we really want to take you two old people, but I know My Dad too well, I know that he won't go, I know he can't go." ”
The "Biography of Nanjing" was written for a whole year, and after writing this book, I wrote other words intermittently. I'm always writing, I want to write every day, I'm insatiable. For this reason, you often feel bored, others think you are boring, and you yourself feel bored. Every day is written, every day is repeated. Sometimes I boast to my daughter about how much I have written, and my daughter doesn't even bother to pay attention to it, thinking that I am showing off, putting pressure on her, and thinking that she has not worked hard enough to study, not hard enough. My daughter is a teacher in college, and today's young teachers are under very heavy pressure to publish papers in core journals and strive for this and that key project, and the evaluation title has become the top priority.
After writing "Nanjing Biography", for a while, I suddenly found that writing became easier. I started with short stories, in fact, writing for more than forty years, the production of short stories has not been high. Basically, a collection of short stories is compiled every ten years. Almost a decade ago, at the time of thirty years of his writing career, he published a three-volume "short story chronicle" that basically included all the short stories he had written. Then another decade passed, and the number was ready for volume IV. It was at this time that I suddenly developed an irrepressible passion for short stories, and as a result, in a short period of time, I wrote short stories in a row, and it took only one year to compile a new volume. That is to say, with the addition of the three volumes that have been previously published, a combination of old and new can be re-produced with a five-volume set of "short story chronicles".
When the five-volume contract was signed with the publisher, the newly written short story had not yet been submitted to the magazine for publication. This feeling is very wonderful, and I am secretly proud in my heart, because I already have a lot of food on hand, just like I have money in my savings card, and then I can start writing a long story very calmly. The soldiers and horses did not move, the grain and grass went first, I sent the newly written short story "Teresa's Madness" to Cheng Yongxin of "Harvest", telling him that if he could use it, he was not in a hurry, and kept it for publication slowly. After that, I controlled the rhythm of publication, and after a while, I sent out a novel that had already been written, and in a few days, I sent out another one. So in 2021, my short stories began to appear in different literary journals from time to time. Someone joked with me that your old man is so powerful, how like a blowout, suddenly wrote so many short stories.
The old man talked about juvenile madness, and the so-called family had grain, and his heart was not panicked. So slow, not in a hurry, not busy, one after another to submit articles, just to cover a new long story. On the one hand, I don't want others to know that I am writing a long story again, on the other hand, I just do it, and I say that the beginning begins. "The Gate of Yi Feng" can be said to be a long-planned book, but no matter how long it is planned, before it is written, it is nothing. The state of the writer is not very clear, suddenly good and bad, good times are overwhelmed, bad times even have the idea of dying. Writing a long story is a very dark thing, once it starts, there is no turning back, the boat is broken, it is equivalent to being sentenced to life imprisonment, you don't know when you can finish writing, the rest, you can only go forward alone.
I suddenly realized that the panic I carried in my heart when I wrote a long story this time was more serious than before. Hoarded a batch of grain and grass, just to fight a protracted war, because I don't know the Year of the Monkey, Ma Yue, in order to complete this "Gate of Yi Feng". I just made a round, played a little clever, published short stories in literary journals, every five minutes, fantasizing about giving people the illusion that I was writing a long story. There is no doubt that a writer's deep self-confidence is absolutely inexplicable. I have already begun to write "The Gate of Yi Feng", and I vaguely know what I want to write, how to write, and how not to write. However, in the actual writing process, there will be too many gods and ghosts, and there will be too much providence. Writing this thing, it is not good to be smooth, and it is certainly not good to be too smooth.
I am always inexplicably competing with myself, and the pain of writing long stories is natural, and when I can't write, I often do it. For other members of the family, a person who is writing a long story, the mental state is basically abnormal, because in writing a long story, because at work, he can be moody, can be willful, can be unreasonable. I don't want to tell my daughter that this may be my last novel, and to say that, somewhat Versailles, too pretentious, but when I really can't write it, when my brain is deprived of oxygen, when I am dazzled, I have more than one thought flashing in my heart. I know that one cannot write forever, that exhaustion is a natural thing, and that the writer is doomed to failure in the end. It is inevitable that I will not be able to write and will not be able to write, so I have to work tirelessly and tirelessly to write, all because I am afraid that the day will come.
Regardless of whether this "Gate of Yi Feng" is the last novel, its completion of its book is gratifying after all. For the sake of the haggard people, the belt gradually widened and finally unrepentant, perhaps I have exaggerated the pain of writing, emphasized one point, and ignored the other. In fact, the joy of writing is also indescribable. The horsetooth is increased, the childlike heart is still there, and regarding writing, I belong to the old heart of the person. In the past years, I have been more immersed in the pride of writing. Complacency is a very bad mood, in fact, during the writing of "The Gate of Yi Feng", people were talking about the short stories I published in the magazine this year, and I was inevitably a little bit of a villain, and I hated not being able to announce it loudly to others, saying that I was quietly building a long novel building. As "The Gate of Yi Feng" is nearing completion, this pride is almost impossible to hold back.
I can't tell others what "Yi Feng's Gate" wrote, and the last thing I am good at is doing this. A very thick book, of course, will have a lot of meaning, a lot of stories, a lot of words that dig out the heart, and there are also some irrelevant words and descriptions. It is impossible to say clearly in three words, it may also be Mongolian, and it is possible to summarize and judge such things, which should be left to the reader. If you have to do advertising, you can only say that this book writes about how women give strength to men, how love and unlove are transformed, how revolutions occur, how wealth is created, how ideals are destroyed, and how history is rewritten. Of course, what really happened, in the end, I still have to read the novel to explain it to you.
In the past few years, he has moved to live by the Yangtze River. Just under my window, the vast Yangtze River suddenly turned a corner, and it was no longer coming from the west, but was majestically moving south. The river has a sound, and for me, the Yangtze River is endless and there is no end in sight. Thanks to the gushing Yangtze River, it makes people have endless reverie and gives me a lot of energy. "The Gate of Yifeng" is a story that takes place on the banks of the Yangtze River, with changes in the wind and clouds, from the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, to the entry of the National Revolutionary Army into Nanjing, the formal establishment of the National Government, and the subsequent change of various military and political forces inside and outside Nanjing...
During the year of writing, I almost always started working before dawn, the window gradually brightened, the Yangtze River appeared in the morning fog, sometimes the moon was full, sometimes the moon was missing, and time and space were thus crossed. I would not say that it is a novel that wins by truth, and in fictional literature, of course, it must be true, and there must be a very solid truth, but a good novel, the truth is often negligible. Truth can come at hand, truth is not the goal, good novels are always to write different things, to make something out of nothing, to pursue and create recklessly.
January 8, 2022 Sanfen River
Author: Ye Zhaoyan
Editor: Guo Chaohao
Planner: Wang Xueying
Editor-in-Charge: Huang Qizhe
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.
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