Qilu Evening News Qilu One Point reporter Sun Yuanming Cao Zhuqing Zhang Zhanbo Li Xiaoxu design Xu Chen
On February 15, during the second Qingwei Prose Award, the reporter embarked on the first stop to find the chairman of the Shandong Sixteen Cities Writers Association, went to Zibo, and listened to Zong Lihua, chairman of the Zibo Writers Association, talk about his literary creation.
People who have seen Zong Lihua will be attracted by the mystery in him. He has a dual identity, one identity is a police officer of the Zibo City Public Security Bureau, and the other is the chairman of the Zibo Writers Association. Two identities, one rational and one emotional. It seems unrelated, but it is really cleverly integrated into one person.
Attachment and preference for literature
Between Zong Lihua and literature, there is always a thread connecting, and this thread is called hobby. Even if fate takes him away from literature, he will be persistently pulled back to the track of literature.
Zong Lihua was born in Zibo, the hometown of Pu Songling, the "king of the world's short stories". In high school, Zong Lihua and several classmates set up a literary club to exchange favorite writers and reading experiences. After losing his re-examination, Zong Lihua worked as an electrician in a silk factory and as a security guard who read the gate and delivered newspapers. During this period, Zong Lihua would cut out and bind the articles in the scrap newspapers that people discarded and did not use, and began to secretly write some short prose, and when he wrote it, he quietly kept it, never submitting an article.
His two-year career at the police academy had nothing to do with literature, but Zong Lihua insisted on writing and began to submit articles to local newspapers. In 1994, Zong Lihua published his first work in Zibo Daily for a fee of 15 yuan, and Zong Lihua decided to buy a book to reward himself. "This book is still in my bookcase."
Zong Lihua really wanted to be a writer after joining the work. "At that time, the Municipal Public Security Bureau wanted to run a newspaper, and it needed a group of new forces, who may have learned about my writing and directly transferred me to an internship." After the internship is completed, just stay. That little newspaper had four pages, and the fourth page was a supplement, and I happened to be the editor of that page. In the past few years, Zong Lihua began to know some writers, and gradually developed the desire to become a writer.
Writers have to be "miscellaneous"
Because he liked to read "Selected Small Novels", Zong Lihua gradually found out his literary direction: to create small novels. Zong Lihua began to create in 1996, debuted with "Green Beans", and knocked on the door of small novels. This was his famous work and the first peak of his small fiction creation, and the Selected Short Fiction reprinted and awarded it the 1999-2000 National Small Fiction Award.
In 2005, Zong Lihua won the second "Chinese Small Fiction Golden Sparrow Award", the highest award in the small fiction industry, with 10 works led by "Offside". His work is jumpy, tense, fast-paced and varied. Some critics have commented on his works: whether it is depicting real life or online life, there is an unpredictability of the fate of the characters, so it is more readable. At the same time, Zong Lihua's novels have a strong sense of torture and criticism of human nature. His language is full of rhythm and the atmosphere of the times, good at using character dialogue to express personality characteristics, and there is no lack of vividness and enthusiasm for facing life.
The short and exquisite novel has its own framework, language and meaning, and it is not easy to write well, but Zong Lihua has repeatedly broken through himself and has always surprised readers. He has a wide range of hobbies, such as painting, film, football, reading, etc., which provide inspiration and material for his writing. For example, "Thangka" related to painting, "Ten Commandments" related to movies, "Offside" related to football... In Zong Lihua's view, hobbies and literature are the same, a writer must be a "miscellaneous family", writers must constantly broaden their horizons, can not write more and more narrowly. At the same time, for the expression of meaning, film, painting, dance, etc. have the same role as words, but the forms of expression are different. Therefore, in Zong Lihua's blog, we can often see his thinking about many hobbies, to examine their narrative methods, expression methods and so on.
Writer in police uniform
Writer and policeman, two very different job roles, also once gave Zong Lihua a headache. But as he walked along the way, he gradually found that walking on "two legs" would walk more steadily.
Zong Lihua has successively studied in the first national public security writers class of Lu Xun Literature College (1999), the second young writers advanced research class of Shandong Writers Association (2007), the 13th advanced research class of young and middle-aged writers of Lu Xun Literature College (2010), and the 28th middle-aged and young writers' advanced study class of Lu Xun Literature College (2015).
In 2010, while studying at Lu Xun Academy of Letters, Zong Lihua published an essay entitled "Anxiety and Breakthroughs", at which point he began to dissect himself: on the one hand, how to break through the bottleneck in literature; on the other hand, how to reconcile the conflict caused by two seemingly distinct roles. "At the grassroots level, most of the time, I have to face many practical, detailed, unknowable, and often ruthless choices. When you like two professions with completely different rhythmic senses at the same time, there is bound to be some kind of pain. These are two models, ideal and realistic, emotional and rational. ”
In the first ten years of Zong Lihua's literary creation, he has been focusing on the creation of small novels, and since 2007, Zong Lihua has gradually transformed into a medium novel. He explains: "In the field of small fiction, I can't subvert myself. It was also at this time that Zong Lihua encountered an opportunity. From the propaganda department of the zibo city public security bureau, he was sent down to a county police station as a grassroots policeman. The police station was in the suburban junction, and what he saw and heard in the past two years led to Zong Lihua's novella "Xiangshu Street" and later a series of novels set in "Xiangshu Street". The work of the grass-roots police allows Zong Lihua to face many contradictions and conflicts, human nature is good and evil, giving him a deeper observation and experience of life and life, which is a different perspective brought to the writer by the profession of police. Critic Li Yeping said: "Zong Lihua built his own literary landmark with Xiangshu Street. This street has also become a spiritual hometown of Zong Lihua, just like Shen Congwen's Xiangxi and Mo Yan's Gaomi Northeast Township.
Up to now, Zong Lihua has created 17 novels and novel collections. Among them, "Feast" and "Running More and Chasing More" are two long novels with public security themes, which have been widely praised by readers.
The work must have the fireworks of the life of the times
In Zong Lihua's body, many places reflect his desire for "change" and "newness". For example, self-subversion and the successful transformation of the creation of novels in small stories; such as the creation of novels with a high sense of popularity such as "Please Close Your Eyes When It Gets Dark" and "Libra"; for example, as the chairman of the Municipal Writers Association, the acceptance and promotion of online writers in the "Literary Qi Army"...
From the appearance point of view, Zong Lihua gives people a sense of rigor and thickness, but his thinking is very active and keeps up with the trend. As a member of the "post-70s" literary new Lu Army, Zong Lihua's literary creation has always strived to go deep into life and keep a close eye on the pulse of the times. Zong Lihua proposed that writers in each region will have distinct regional symbols in their works, which is unavoidable, although it is difficult to change in the short term, but it can make the symbols continue to progress with the development of the times. In the current era of "fast food" reading, writers should calm down and polish their works to produce works that are close to life and the background of the current era, and have pyrotechnics.
How is writing not limited to the ego? How do you write depth instead of floating on the surface? For writing enthusiasts who participated in the second Qingwei Prose Award, Zong Lihua also made some suggestions. For the height and depth of the work's intention, this writer cannot achieve it overnight, and it can be improved in a short period of time. Writers of this part may wish to start from the language, hide emotions, information points, etc. in the language, form their own characteristics, and the works will also be interesting to read and more readable.
Writer Profile:
Zong Lihua, born in 1971, is a member of the Chinese Writers Association and the chairman of the Zibo Writers Association. He has published 17 novels such as "Feast", "Jiacheng", the novel collection "Aquarius", "Xiangshu Street", "Please Close Your Eyes When Dark", etc., and most of the novels have been reprinted by "Novel Selection", "Novel monthly", "Novella Selection", etc., and some works have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, and Korean, and have won the Golden Shield Literature Award of the Ministry of Public Security, the Taishan Literature Award of Shandong Province, the Shandong Provincial Literary and Art Excellence Project Award, and the Golden Sparrow Award for Chinese Small Novels.