Emotion is the best artistry

For long works of literature, I have always thought that a good structure is indispensable to its artistic beauty.

While sorting out the interview recordings, I began to think about the structure of "Rural Dreams". Judging from the overall information at hand, it is difficult to start. In the past five years, the cultural and creative industry process that has occurred in the traditional villages of Pingnan has a huge structure, and the people who have appeared are entangled with each other and the things that have happened are complicated. Since Lin Zhenglu entered Pingnan Yixia Village in March 2015, they have created a number of traditional village cultural and creative industry bases such as Yixia, Shuangxi, Xiadi, Qianyang, Xialong, Longtan, Siping, Qianfenxi, etc., and in various ways, in addition to Lin Zhenglu to carry out "seven days of public welfare art teaching" and introduce new villagers to integrate urban and rural areas, Cheng Meixin's team repairs and protects the ancient village of Xiadi; Fudan University and the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts carry out school-site cooperation, and set up teaching bases in Qianyang Village and Qianfenxi Village Tianjin TEDA Museum of Contemporary Art founded Tangkou Dingshun Culture and Art Center; Qianchengqiao Cultural and Creative Company created Tangkou and Qianfenxi Research and Practice Base; Nanjing Pioneer Bookstore settled in Xiadi Village, and the Paddy Field Bookstore it created became the most beautiful bookstore in The country.

When I was at a loss, I thought of doing subtraction, and the people and things that revitalized the countryside in several other villages could only endure the pain of cutting love, leaving only the main line of Teacher Lin Zhenglu. Even so, it is still tangled and entangled. The phenomenon of Longtan Cultural creation and revitalization of the countryside, many people still do not know its causes and consequences, and there are many people who do not understand and question it. But it really grows out of the dirt, not who pays to build a flower bed and transplant a few famous trees. The reader must be made clear about what is happening here, and I remind myself that structures cannot be structured for the sake of structure.

In order to let the reader see how Lin Zhenglu's cultural and creative concept has been realized step by step in the process of the rejuvenation of the ancient village, the large structure has adopted the direction of the timeline to advance forward, and the three cultural and creative villages and towns have been unfolded one by one, calmly telling the ins and outs of each person and every thing. This structure is like a melon vine, in the process of gradual growth laterally forward, longitudinal branches and long leaves bloom and then bear fruit, and this fruiting process, beyond the time limit, grows from small to mature. After that, he returned to the direction of the timeline and continued to tell the story of the villagers building self-confidence and integrating urban and rural areas. In this way, readers can clearly see the planning routine of Teacher Lin Zhenglu's long-sleeved good dance, and can spread the successful experience of cultural and creative revitalization of the countryside, benefiting more hollow villages and more farmers.

The rural revitalization of Longtan Cultural and Creative Village has been healthyly enriched and grown, just like bursting out of infinite possibilities in a person who originally had no cultural deeds, and its endogenous power makes it not stagnate. The timeline of this structure begins with Teacher Lin Zhenglu going to Pingnan's Yixia Village to carry out "Seven Days of Public Welfare Art Teaching", and the people and events that occurred before were inserted in the appropriate places in flashbacks. As of June and July after the epidemic, the principle of how to activate a remote hollow village through cultural creation has taken shape, and the concept of gray falls on the container. Such villages already belong to active living water, and the formation of rivers is certain.

August straightened out the outline and began to enter the state of writing. At this time, hatred cannot be turned into a book in an instant, and quickly tell the people of the world about this brain-opening matter.

At first, the title of the book was "My Beautiful Countryside", subjectively and emotionally wanted to integrate myself into it, and the stories that happened in the countryside were closely related to me, and I intervened and closed in the first person to make the reader feel brought in. The wedge in front of the main text is what I saw and heard when I first entered Longtan, and I have many questions about the dream-like reality; the epilogue is my last interview at Longtan, and Teacher Lin's new understanding of the Longtan phenomenon after the epidemic. However, the title of the book is too broad and lacks directivity, so it was changed to "Rural Dreams", which clearly explained the place and nature of the incident.

In the process of writing, there is often no fluent thinking during the day, the characters who lie on the bed to write take turns to appear in their minds, the stories they want to write are staged one after another, and from time to time they break in through dreams, making people sleep at night. I can only go with the flow, day and night, day and night, sleepy during the day, can't get up late at night to write is a common thing. During those more than a hundred days, the body suffered a lot, the spirit was a little broken, and finally the insomnia became addicted. With the skin experience of an ordinary person, I feel the extraordinary feelings of those extraordinary characters from the perspective of life, which reminds me of the classic stories of Lu Yao, Chen Zhongzhong and other big names who used their bodies to win literary works.

After writing this book, a person who was originally scattered also became worried.

Those who use the passion of life to seek happiness for one peasant, those who do not expect to be promoted and have no remorse for the revitalization of the countryside, those who take risks in their careers and have the courage to innovate in their work... When writing, they vividly swayed in front of their eyes, moved by what they did, often could not help but feel a sour nose, and their eyes were full of tears, which was still the case when I revised it over and over again, which was a situation that I had never had in my relatively rational writing experience.

A writers' association leader who knew my past writing experience spent an hour in his busy schedule listening to me introduce the contents of this book, perhaps because I paused for a few seconds in my voice and was caught by the careful him, asked some questions for me to answer, and said to me with emotion: "Your work itself is great, you are a good writer, this must be a good work." We are all this age, and enthusiasm is not so easy to be aroused. ”

In hindsight, I always had tears in my eyes again and again, just like the situation of Kailash, who turned to the god mountain for one year. I am not a religious worshipper, but I am touched by the grass-roots cadres who sweat and tear and even bleed, and I have gained greater strength from this.

The experience of writing "Rural Dreams" tells me that the best artistic technique for a good work is to be sincere and full of emotions. (This article is an afterword to "Rural Dreams", which was abridged when published, and was published by Writers Press in December 2021)