Distance from the Master and beyond
Wen 丨 North City
Distance from the Master
One day, I asked my friend for his opinion on my recent prose work, "How far away am I from them compared to the world's leading literary masters, such as Thoreau, Defu Luhua, Prishvin, etc.?" Or for example, if the World Master is a hundred points, how many points have I reached? According to your understanding of the master and me..."
"The score is not good, I will say the problem!" My friend said: "Compared with the masters, you still lack a little composure, and the strength of expression and reasoning is a little big, and you have not reached the realm of natural perfection." You're too sharp and need a little bit of introversion. ”
"It may be expressively related to my character..." I said.
"Yes, so you have to overcome, you have to write natural literature, you have to be like nature, broad-minded and calm. When we walk into the forest, we can't see its wildness, but we can feel its depth; we stand on the seashore, we can't see its waves, but we can feel its wildness. The master should be like the sea, like the forest, usually calm, but when wild, he can swallow the heavens and the earth. Your current state is that you have to swallow the heavens and the earth when you open your mouth, and you have to strive to make people feel your vastness without opening your mouth, which is by no means a kung fu on the pen, but an internal skill. With the whole universe in your chest, will you not be able to swallow the heavens and the earth with your mouth open? Our problem now is to see potatoes as potatoes, to see as, and to see not nature's potatoes, nature's. ”
"It's true that I feel like I lack the overall naturalness..." I said.
Yes, write potatoes, write, and have the whole nature in your heart. For example, when others look at your potatoes, if they can feel the naturalness within you, but you do not deliberately guide it with language, then it is pure fire. You are now writing about 'how human beings are like' and 'how nature is like', and this kind of verbal overexertion reflects the lack of internal force. You see in martial arts novels, people with deep internal strength can beat people down with a few strokes. If the internal strength is not good, no matter how good the moves are, they will not reach the first-class realm after all. We all have to practice our internal skills well. In terms of language expression, we are not far behind, and the master does not write classics with strange words. The basic tools of writing are basic enough for us to master, and while practicing internal skills, we continue to accumulate and supplement others. ”
Then there is the folk proverb that I have quoted in other works: "As big as the yellow, there is the big yellow base." "The foundation is not big, the stall can not be spread yellow, the first thing I should solve is the problem of spreading yellow tweezers ..."
"Yes, that's what you're asking, the distance between you and the master." Friends said.
Writers have to get out of the quagmire of prejudice
Writing is all about getting as close and homage to truth as possible. In the process of creation, a writer must abandon all kinds of prejudices and some errors in writing common sense, so that he can meet with the truth. Prejudice is both a paranoid opinion and synonymous with ignorance. In short, self-righteous. Russell said: "Thinking we know and actually not knowing it is a fatal mistake that we are all prone to make. "Self-righteousness is a kind of false judgment of self-subjective lack of consideration, but it is originally an authentic existence of objective facts. This deadly prejudice is pervading our surroundings and consciousness in large quantities, like germs growing in our bodies.
Of all these prejudices, I'll just give an example that illustrates the whole picture: some writers use only their own likes and dislikes ("some" include novices and writers who have been writing for decades, and there is no shortage of literary enthusiasts) arbitrarily emphasize that poetry must be short, and the longest should not exceed twenty lines! "Busy and even even priced, written long who read!" (Here I would like to ask two questions: 1. How busy are you living? 2, write short, someone must read? It is illustrated by the Tang and Song poems; the prose should not exceed a thousand words, and the Chinese "Ancient Literature Guanzhi" is used as a model. It's as ridiculous as if you stand in a melon field and think that a 10-pound watermelon is a watermelon, and a 20-pound watermelon is not a watermelon. When you look at the world's literary classics that flash ancient and modern, you find that, for example, the ancient Persian poetry Zhelfer Dosi's poetry collection "The Book of Kings" is 120,000 lines long; the ancient Persian Moravid's poetry collection "Masnavi" is 50,000 lines long; the ancient Greek Homer's "Homeric Epic" is more than 40,000 lines long; and the ancient Roman Lucretius's poetry collection "TheOry of Materiality" is more than 7,000 lines long. In terms of prose, herzen's "Past events and caprice" in Russia is 1.5 million words long; Rousseau's Confessions in France is 280,000 words; Thoreau's "Walden" in the United States is 200,000 words; and the French "Natural History" is 36 volumes long. But who can deny the status and value of these classics, and must be able to conclude that the short one is more classic than the long one? That is to say, the simplicity of literature has nothing to do with the word count, only with ideas; the length of the work is only related to preferences, to prejudices, and not to the classics.
It can be said that the life of a writer is a life of fighting against various prejudices, whether it is someone else's or your own, it will affect your writing to varying degrees, and it is an obstacle on your way to progress, and you must cultivate a soft and hard skill to resist the invasion of prejudice. Prejudice is like setting up its own fences on the vast wilderness, and he ends up encircling himself, not the wilderness. In the highest temple of literature, the unbiased, radical, but numerous: Plato, Zhuangzi, Tao Yuanming, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hemingway, Solzhenitsyn, Kropotkin, Emerson, Thoreau... Radicalism can make a master, but prejudice can destroy a genius.
Style should be in flux all the time
The writer's style refers to his own unique ideological character and writing style that he expresses in his articles. However, the style should always be in flux and enrichment, just like a river is always changing and flowing. When the river no longer flows, the result will be a pool of stagnant water. When the storm does not stop, it will flood. In the "Yi Zhi Zhi Xia", it is said: "Poor is changed, change is general, and general is long". That is to say, when things develop to the extreme, they will change, change will be unimpeded, and unimpeded will remain permanent. If you blindly pursue only one personality or style, this will actually obscure other characteristics.
The style of the few classical writers we see in antiquity takes on only one face, because they are gone, and if they are alive and still writing, their style will always be in flux. For example, after Thoreau wrote "Walden", he also wrote "The Faith of Seeds", the former is very speculative, the latter is more scientific; Tolstoy wrote a long work "War and Peace", the elderly wrote "Wisdom Almanac", "The Road to Life" and other books, the former shows the magnificent history of human war, the latter is like the essence of the Bible, all of which are a concentrated collection of philosophy and dogma. If a writer dies and still writes about the pattern and style of writing he wrote in high school, he will never take a step forward. When a writer's style no longer changes, and the flowers are similar every year, it must be repeating his previous self. Many great writers have been repeating themselves after writing famous works. Repeating yourself is equivalent to putting a rest on your artistic life. Don't always keep a straight face in order to show your serious personality, a serious person, he also has unserious moments; don't always search the article for funny paragraphs in order to show your humor, writers should watch the weather eat cold powder, see what kind of spices are made under the meal. All contrived and pinched styles are suspected of being fraudulent, because it does not mean that the writer is such a person.
So the highest state of style is nature and simplicity. It is the sum of the writer's emotional experience of life, reading and writing, and intellectual thought over the years. As long as this writer is constantly learning and going deep into life, his style will be constantly changing. If we blindly pursue style, we will die on the road of style; if we imitate a writer's style because we love him, we will only bury and lose our own style. Handan toddler, the result is to forget his walking posture; the imitation show imitates it again, and he is not imitated by the imitator himself.
Writing is the best way to live
I saw a micro-novel about writers and money-making topics, which is a scene of a conversation between a husband and wife, saying that it is a dialogue, but it is so simple that there is only one sentence from the hero: "'When I write an article and get rich, I will divorce you.'" He said lightly. After listening, her heart was warm, and she thought, there is no longer a promise that lasts longer and the sea is rotten. "What this novel is about is that writers are not a money-making business. Because they don't make money, many people (including literary predecessors, even friends and parents) teach literary people to "live well." The implication is to make good money, as if not making money is not a good life.
What is the purpose of making money? Living to make money? Let's put aside money, talk about literature, talk about life. Money is only a kind of material for life, and it does not have to be elevated to any height and important position. If you live in the countryside, money is almost useless. And we see that rich people may not be able to reap happiness, to some extent, they are not necessarily happier and freer, more sound and at ease, more healthy and long-lived than a poor person.
What I would say is that for a writer, the love of literature is itself a way of life, and the work is the flesh, mind, and soul of the author himself. Writing constantly corrects, improves, and affects the life of the author himself and the lives of others, and literature is a form of expression of truth, goodness, and beauty. Some people regard the love of literature as just an embellishment and hobby of life, which is not to blame in itself, but when he treats it as an "advanced experience" transmitted to young people who are on the road of literature, this is a big mistake and a mistake. Just as you taught Thoreau not to go to Walden lake alone, but to teach him books and be his pencil dealer, so Thoreau is not a thoreau who wrote the legendary Walden and had a lasting influence around the world, but a pencil merchant and teacher who was only a little famous in Concord. Just as you taught Tolstoy that he should be his manor master and manage his livestock and servants, if so, Tolstoy is just a rich landlord, without War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, without producing any first-rate works of world literature, without being called "Tolstoy" by the whole world. Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Aristotle said, "The ultimate value of life lies in the ability to awaken and think, not just to survive." "Literature guides the life of the author himself, as well as the life of mankind. A man who is engaged in literature has a greater significance than the peasants farming, the workers working, the merchants doing business, they only change the material life of mankind, and the writer changes the human mind and consciousness.
Russell said, "Human beings are great by their thoughts." "If a person does not use his mind to think, not to use his thoughts to guide his life, although he wears gold and silver, and the sun is everywhere, he is still like a blind man touching the road, in the long night and unable to discern the route of life. Literature is the best education, both for the author himself and for the social group. Look at the ignorance, crime, and slavery around us, and you really know the importance of literature. So to teach a person who does not know what life is to live well, then first teach him what he lives and the ultimate purpose of life. In the same way, when you teach a literary writer to live a good life with the style of an elder, you first teach him what he is and what it is ultimately for. You should even passionately convey to him what Tolstoy had said: "Literature is the best cause in the world." ”
Reading should have an open attitude
Reading the sketches of the Ming and Qing dynasties, I realized that these chapters are also part of the magnificence of ancient prose, and they still belong to the category of world-class literature in terms of conciseness and freedom of thought. For example, Feng Menglong's "Book Horse and Dog Affair" says that when Ouyang Xiu was serving in the Hanlin Academy, he often went out to play with the scholars of the same academy, and once saw a galloping horse trampling a dog to death, Ouyang Xiu said: "Let's try to describe this matter. One said: "There was a dog lying on the main road and was trampled to death by a running horse with its hooves. Another said: "There was a horse running on the main road and a lying dog was trampled to death by it. Ouyang Xiu said, "If you were to compile a history book, even ten thousand volumes would not be finished." Everyone said, "Then how do you describe this?" Ouyang Xiu said, "The galloping horse tramples the dead dog on the road." "Everybody admired him. This story shows that whether you speak or write an article, you must be concise and concise, and you don't have to go around without explaining what everyone understands or has nothing to do with the center.
Influenced by the concept, in recent years, I have mainly read Chinese literature in the pre-Qin, Han, Wei and Tang and Song dynasties, and the literature after the Tang and Song dynasties has basically been crossed out in my mind. Undoubtedly, I have confined myself. Therefore, a writer must not be limited by his own cognition and concepts, he must always break through, and only when he breaks through in literature and is always in a state of breakthrough can he take care of his own level and position, so that he can better go to a higher level. Therefore, open reading is an effective way to break down one's own inherent, self-righteous, and progressive levels of knowledge and ideas. The open reading posture I am talking about is not that everything should be read, but in the category of classics, works of different genres and genres must be contacted, which is like when we face such a person, he said that pork is delicious, and he will not eat anything but pork. We admit that he does eat only pork, but we will never say that he is the best, healthiest, most balanced way to eat.
The standard of a good book
What is a good book? The answer is always very difficult and difficult to reconcile. But since it is called a good book, it must have its own standard of measurement that can move your stars and move, and I can't move from thunder.
First, only the classics can be called good books, the premise of the classics is that first of all it has passed the test of time and selection, hundreds or thousands of years, such as the widely circulated "Three Hundred Tang Poems", in fact, there are about 40,000 poems in the whole Tang Dynasty, many of which exist only as a study of this dynasty, and there is almost no ideological and literary content. Moreover, there are so many Tang poems collected in the book, and there are many poems that have been silently lost because of the author's namelessness and the low quality of the works, and I think this number is more numerous than the number selected in the complete collection.
Second, you should not think that the book you like is a good book, it is only in line with your temporary taste. If the book you are reading at the age of twenty can still be read at the age of sixty, it should be a good book, and a good book will not change with age and time. So the true reader rarely shows an attitude of trust or spends time and effort reading the books of his contemporaries in a large pile of malnourished books, but plunges headlong into the ancient texts.
The third book that lacks ideas and styles is basically a mediocre book, a book that is not worth reading, and see which book called the classic is not a book with ideas and style? Thought is the writer's correct understanding of the universe, life, and truth, and thought is definitely the soul of literature, dominating the parts and links that make up a good book such as language skills.
So a great writer is also a great thinker, and if a writer is a fish, his thoughts are an ocean that is countless times deeper than a fish. Only in the ocean of ideas can the writer's tail turn the waves and exert the state of life to a very extreme and saturated state. Instead, the writer forces himself on a path of exhaustion and impoverished expression, building books that quickly become obsolete, which, like himself, are quickly obsolete and never remembered.
Choosing books is more important than reading
When I meet a literary friend, I generally do not rush to read his works, which is my experience, because I have spent a lot of time reading some "tomes", and as a result, I have spent time and patience to read them, but I feel that these authors are often deceiving the world, his level of thought and cognition is surprisingly mediocre, they try to spend our time and energy, just to obtain a veritable fame and fortune, they do not consider the reader. Sharpening the knife does not cut wood, and choosing books is often more important than reading.
In the face of an author, I will first look at what book he is reading, and I can judge the quality of his writing level based on his reading history. It can be seen that the importance of reading for a writer, those who bury their heads in modern and contemporary literature (such authors are many around us), only devote themselves to reading the chicken soup of the soul, and abandon the writers of the golden period of human literature and their works (such as the literature of the ancient Roman Hellenic period and the Chinese pre-Qin, Spring and Autumn Dynasties), which can only prove that their level is low and cannot be said to be the chicken soup for the soul is indeed good, and those who do not read books and bury their heads in writing are basically not promising. Although he would have written a few good poems on his own merits (and there are very few such authors), it was merely a coincidence and encounter between a blind cat and a dead rat, and I am sure that the great deal of writing he wrote was still garbage rather than literature.
If you want to judge the level of an author, you should not read his poetry (because poetry can be written until you can't understand it, and there are two possibilities: one is that your level has not yet reached the same level as that of the author, and the other is that the author himself is writing nonsense, and he deliberately writes that you can't understand it and doesn't understand it, because poetry as a literary subject has this function.) When I was 14 years old, I wrote a few poems: "Li Bai's feet / Spinning / Spinning in the sky", until now I have not understood the meaning of these poems, because I wrote them in nonsense. I don't understand it, and of course you can't understand it, but I can say that this is poetry. But as a lover of poetry, I only have opinions about poetry, and I am full of respect for great poetry), you look at the prose he wrote or you let him write a piece of prose, as long as a few sentences can judge the true degree of his writing, because prose is a loose, free style, is the mother of all styles, the most can see the author's comprehensive skills, the best measure of the author's ideological and emotional level, see the author's thoughts and souls, the author can not hide behind the prose,
So prose is easy to write and hard to work. An author, he can not write prose, but if he can't write an essay, why talk about anything else? It's like running ten meters and being out of breath, people will believe you 100 meters sprint? Poetry nonsense, novels blindly edited, can be confused, only prose, from the beginning is the real knife and real gun hard kung fu. This is true of poetry and other writers who can not write prose, but he cannot say that he cannot write prose, and prose is the basis of a literary author's writing and the basic skill of writing.
Beicheng was formerly known as Wang Xiaoming, a Shenmu person in Shaanxi Province, and a member of the Shaanxi Writers Association. He has published works in journals such as "Chinese Prose", "Poetry Journal", "Yanhe", "Grassland", "Rain Flower", "Shandong Literature" and published the prose collection "Song of Abundance".