The Surging News reporter Fan Jialai intern Li Xiang
"Respect the rules, really consider the problem, solve the problem, observe the color, maintain a humble and cooperative attitude, and don't beautify yourself when talking to others, and don't use big words to describe yourself." And you can't quote the words of the great writers endlessly, because everyone comes from different sources and is not worthy, and you have to say what you believe. In a podcast show, writer Shen Dacheng described his "little clerk" creed this way.
Humble, reserved, and even a little afraid of life. When talking, I always unconsciously pinch something in my hand, sometimes a small stack of napkins, sometimes an interview outline full of notes. Shen Dacheng, who temporarily left the office and sat in a café for an interview, still adheres to his "small staff creed" to some extent. The wonderful metaphors that suddenly pop up in the speech are like a hint - Shen Dacheng in front of him has published a number of short story collections, and the stories he writes are often imaginative and have an unfettered imagination.
The people who escape the everyday life after catching a glimpse of the cosmic mysteries in the Starry Sky Theater, the warehouse attendants who take care of The Star Wars war supplies, the department store that has been abandoned for many years but still coexists with the townspeople... In the new work "Lost", what can be continued is Shen Dacheng's consistent strange imagination. Compared with the previous book "Asteroids Fall to the Ground", the previous witty and cunning tone has added a different color, "As you get older, you can't help but be disappointed in the things around you, but at the same time want to make a little joke." 」 ”
Shen Dacheng Photo: Yang Ming
"Names reveal secrets"
In the minds of most Shanghainese, the name "Shen Dacheng" refers to an old cake shop, opened in the streets and alleys, as a pen name, in addition to pointing to this person may be a Shanghai writer, the three words "Shen Dacheng" do not reveal any information, or even distinguish between male and female.
"Names reveal a lot of secrets." Shen Dacheng's novels do not write people's names, but instead they are pronouns such as you and me and ABC, which are not confused in short story writing. "Secret" can refer to a person's upbringing or to the regional city to which he/she belongs. "These secrets can be like rivets that solidify a person in one place... I want my character to be me, you, him, or even on another continent. Just like the stories and characters written by Haruki Murakami, they are a unit of life that can be implanted in any place. My novels are also about averaged people and cities, which can represent some commonalities and make the text more translatable. ”
As a student in the 1970s, Shen Dacheng grew up reading Zhiqing literature and martial arts novels as a student, the former showing the pain of the reality of a special period, the latter full of imagination and sword light and blood, but never a person is really writing about life in the city. When the time came to the 2000s, the Shanghai Translation Publishing House published a complete collection of Haruki Murakami's writings, and the novel stories poured into the eyes of Shen Dacheng and his contemporaries, which had a profound impact. Haruki Murakami writes about urban life in capitalist society, and the protagonist in the story listens to music, drinks coffee and whiskey. His novels taught me that I could go and write about a "raid on a bakery" and about the city life I was in right now. ”
Although she grew up, studied, and worked in Shanghai, Shen Dacheng's writing has never had a clear urban color, and her "averaged" cities cannot make people associate with Shanghai. "Maybe it's because I don't love a specific and small place or a street so much, and I don't love life so much." She confessed.
"Although I have been living in Shanghai, I don't seem to have anything, and I have to rack my brains to use something, such as if I want to find a place to be interviewed, and I have to search hard." She seems to have created for herself a small universe that floats above reality, and can only wander through it with her open imagination.
Work is a human exoskeleton
When he officially started writing columns, Shen Dacheng was a small clerk at an advertising agency. When the third book was published, she worked as an editor in the World of Fiction and still cherished her life as a small clerk. The biggest wish is to "work peacefully and steadily in the post until the day of retirement like Liu Cixin.". In reality, she compares work to a fall-proof net outside a building: "Two threads make up a net, one is income, one is interpersonal relationships, and together they catch your life." In fiction writing, the work is the exoskeleton of her characters, supporting a person's sense of reality with clear financial resources and time arrangements.
Shen Dacheng's reason for taking over the column at the earliest was simple: this matter had nothing to do with work. "I didn't tell my colleagues about writing novels, because I experienced a secret joy from it, and it also helped me get rid of some of my troubles." On the one hand, the copywriting work of the advertising agency made her develop the habit of short writing, and on the other hand, it also satisfied Shen Dacheng's interest in various work conditions - in the meeting of the client company, she silently observed how a company operated and quietly accumulated creative materials.
Shen Dacheng, who graduated from college in 1999 and entered the workplace in the millennium, sometimes does not fully understand the troubles of contemporary young people about work, which she attributes to the factors of the times. "In my time, being a small clerk was still a pretty good thing, it was the most stable and comfortable state. Small employees usually do not encounter any big troubles, and the big things are borne and digested by the big leaders of the leadership team. But now, it seems that the two-way foil has begun to attack the world, whether you are a golf boss or a small clerk, you have to share the fate with your boss in this two-dimensional world, and the small clerk has become a hard job. ”
Shen Dacheng, who came to the magazine from an advertising agency, now has a job that looks like an ideal, but he has not completely escaped the troubles of the world. "The main problem with the world is that it requires you to do some very specific actions to deal with, which is very time- and energy-consuming. If there are many worldly distractions in life, it is difficult to have a very light imagination. I wish there were fewer worldly troubles. Shen Dacheng said frankly. But these things are necessary to maintain the order of life, I can't do less, and I still have to do it to simplify life. I don't know how to find time to write fully, this one is really difficult. ”
Moments of insight for ordinary people
For Shen Dacheng, what she has written becomes history, and she does not like to elaborate on it. "I often receive private microblog messages from young friends, they ask me what this article means, what that article means, and I don't respond much." Readers tend to be self-absorbed, vaguely hoping that the articles that describe the daily stresses of small employees and the conception of social models are attacking something, but this is not the author's intention. "I just take out the interesting details of life that I find, show those details, and if it shows criticality, it means that it comes with being critical."
"The unusual things in ordinary people" is the main object of Shen Dacheng's writing, what is not ordinary? In Shen Dacheng's view, it is a person's insight, that is, his/her different views on something make it unusual at a certain moment, even if it is just a flash of inspiration that has not been put into action, can achieve an extraordinary moment. In "The First Summer Vacation of College" included in "The Lost Man", such an "insight moment" is written. Shen Dacheng wrote about an ugly-looking businessman who told his son's classmates after he was drunk: In fact, the magical experience of this life of a person stayed in the first summer vacation of college, and everything was encountered here. At that moment, an ordinary father began to have a few minutes of sparkling moments.
"I myself am an ordinary person", Shen Dacheng has long been accustomed to the existing rhythm of life: every day to complete their own small staff work, in the cracks of the work in a regular way. But she also looks forward to rebuilding a set of life order, so that she can have time to write to the fullest and fullest. "There are constant stories happening and characters improving in the novel, and that kind of writing should be a pretty refreshing experience, and if I have more time, I will try to write a novella." Shen Dacheng longed.
Editor-in-Charge: Liang Jia
Proofreader: Luan Meng