Writing is the natural output of reading after accumulating to a certain stage, and reading is an indispensable preparation for writing, which is about the connection between reading and writing that we all know. The road is simple, but specific to each person's reading and writing experience, it will show a wide range of differentiation. Let's take a look at the writer Mo Yan's personal experience on this issue.
This article is excerpted from Mo Yan's speech at beijing eleventh school
Now, when I talk about the relationship between reading and creation, I think the best teacher of creation is reading. If there's any knack for literary creation or fiction, it's reading—and then having the "magic" built on reading.
Just now in the break room, a classmate asked me a question about reading. I think that for young people, for anyone, there should be two ways of reading.
One is intensive reading, just like I read my eldest brother's language textbook, reading it over and over again until I can memorize the main content of it.
The other is extensive browsing. There is a vast sea of reading in the world, and even if a person starts reading when he has the ability to read, until he is white-haired, he can't read one millionth of it, and you can only read a very small part. In this case, it's very important to divide reading into intensive reading and extensive browsing, and you can't always read a book very seriously from beginning to end.
Classic books should be read carefully and intensively; for general reading, especially many things that appear on the Internet now, browse at a glance and ten lines, understand the general style, know what is said, and you can do it.
With the foundation of intensive reading and extensive browsing, if you want to engage in literary creation, you should start by imitation.
Of course, imitation is a disgraceful word for a mature writer.
If someone still asks, "Mo Yan, whose novels have you imitated in your recent work?" "I think it's a great shame on me, and people will sneer at me and look down on me — they've been writing novels for over 20 years, and the new ones are still imitating others!" I think this is the biggest shame of a writer, showing that you don't have any creative process, you have been surviving by imitation.
But for a beginner, imitation is not a shame, but a shortcut, or a trick.
When I was lecturing to college students in school, I also said repeatedly that everyone should not think that imitation is a shameful thing, when I first started writing, everyone was imitating, including Lu Xun, his early works also have traces of imitation, "Diary of a Madman" is an imitation of Gogol's novel of the same name.
Many of Lu Xun's works, researchers can find out the original works of imitation, but this does not prevent Lu Xun from becoming a great literary artist, because he soon surpassed the stage of imitation, slowly formed his own style, and formed a unique Lu Xun style.
The reason why I repeatedly emphasize that I should imitate at the beginning is that I think imitation is the most important way to cultivate the sense of language.
We also often criticize some writers, saying, "How come you are so old, how can you still have a student tone?" "Student tone" means that a person has not yet formed his own language style.
A person's language style is actually inseparable from a person's sensitivity to language. When Principal Li Xigui was the principal of Gaomi County No. 1 Middle School in Shandong Province, we discussed this issue and believed that the junior high school stage is crucial to cultivating a person's sense of language throughout their lives. If you don't develop a sense of language in junior high school, your future efforts are likely to be half the effort.
If we master a good sense of language in junior high school, it is like a person who works in music has a good sense of music - cultivating an ear that understands music will lay the most solid foundation for your future music work.
If we have developed a very keen sense of language in elementary school and junior high school, it will be very useful for you in the future, whether you are engaged in writing or not.
The most important way to cultivate a sense of language, I think, is to imitate on the basis of repeated reading.
Let's take a simple example.
If we let students read 10 of Lu Xun's famous essays in a row, and then let the students write an essay on a similar topic, we will find that almost every child's essay has a Lu Xun tone, a Lu Xun tone. That is to say, Lu Xun's writing style subtly affected the writing style of each student.
This imitation is actually unconscious, and is based on careful and heavy reading of the works of the same writer.
If we continuously read the works of 10 chinese and foreign writers in ancient and modern times, and then consciously imitate these 10 writers, then in the process, your own things will slowly come out.
Just like a person who aspires to learn calligraphy, he copied Yan Zhenqing, Wang Xizhi, and Liu Gongquan, he copied many inscriptions, but the work he finally wrote was still slightly different from his previous works.
Writing is indeed a bit similar to calligraphy, and the more you imitate, the more you will slowly determine your style. More precisely, it is you who get a sense of language. Getting a sense of language is very important for literary creation.
If I were to write about a person who is very miserable in his heart, who is very miserable in his heart, who walks up to Chang'an Avenue, looks at the things around him with his eyes, and feels Chang'an Avenue with his various senses—his sense of smell, his vision, his hearing. Because of his inner pain, the words he wrote at this time, or the words written by writers, must have a painful, low tone.
Conversely, if the man is elated, he is still walking down this street, because the writer now wants to try to express a man's state of elation, and all his feelings are devoted to expressing this emotion. With this sense of language, the written text naturally carries a sense of elation, and I think this is the sense of language.
The music is similar.
When we lived in the countryside, many rural erhu players did not understand the simple score, let alone the stave, they were illiterate, they did not know a word, but they could still pick up the piano and play a very gentle and beautiful piece of music. That is to say, they have created a feeling between their ears, fingers and instruments during the long process of imitation.
I've experienced this feeling firsthand. When I was a teenager, my father said that I had no ability, "Look at the blind man on the street, playing the piano can go to beg for food, you can ask for a lot of food, we have an erhu hanging in our house, you practice!" "At that time, I would only pull some very simple revolutionary songs, like "Dongfang Hong" and "Sailing the Sea by the Helmsman", and at the beginning I was blindly pulling with my eyes closed.
Just two pulls, my mother said: "Don't pull, tomorrow's millet is enough to drink!" "There is a kind of stone mill in the countryside, when pushing the mill to grind rice, the mill will make a squeaking sound, so my mother satirized me for pulling the erhu sound like pushing the stone mill in a circle to grind rice.
"Mill millet" is probably "milled" for two or three months, and I can pull out "Oriental Red". At that time, I had been thinking about the melody of "Dongfang Hong" in my head, and at the same time, my hand was touching the string, and after touching it for two or three months, a connection was established between my hand and ear and the melody of "Dongfang Hong". That is, my hands already have a sense of music.
Later, I heard what tune, just remember the melody, you can pull out. Therefore, I understand why our folk musician can not read a word, do not understand any music, and can also pull out the melody in his heart.
There are many talented folk musicians, people like Ah Bing, he is blind and illiterate, why can he create such a classic national music as "Erquan Yingyue"?
Because he has moved beyond the stage of imitating other people's melodies. The great pain in his heart could not be expressed, and in his heart naturally generated a tragic melody, expressed in his hands and strings, which became a classic piece of music.
I think that the process of literary creation, the language and sense of language in the process of literary creation, and the musicality of musicians and musicians in the process of creation and performance are the same truth, that is, based on this kind of reading and imitation writing.
I wanted to go into detail about my creation, but I didn't have much time left, so I'll just talk about it briefly. My creation is also divided into several stages.
In the late 1970s, I began to learn to create when I was in the army. This period was mostly imitation, and the imitation was very poor.
By the early 1980s, I was publishing, and this stage was still in the stage of imitation.
The "Spring Night Rain And Lightning" mentioned by a classmate just now is a parody of Zweig's "Letter from a Strange Woman". Later, I also wrote a novel called "The Avenue for Selling Cotton," which mimicked argentine writer Cortázar's Southern Highway. There is also a novel called "Folk Music", which imitates the work of McCullers, an American female writer, "The Song of the Sad Cafe".
At that stage, I was still imitating, and many editors could see it at a glance, asking, "Whose novel is this book imitating?" "I said, yes, but they decided to publish it anyway, because there was already something of my own here.
First, it shows the content of China; second, the language has its own characteristics, there are many high-density vernacular languages, and it is well integrated.
Of course, traces of imitation still exist. I really came out of the stage of imitation and gradually formed my own style of writing in 1984, after I went to the People's Liberation Army Academy of Arts for further study.
My famous novel should be Transparent Carrot. What this novel describes has a lot to do with my personal experience. I used to work as a small worker for a master blacksmith on a bridge site, so I was very familiar with the life of striking iron.
I describe the middle of the night, in the autumn breeze of the bridge hole, a blacksmith, a child wearing only a pair of shorts on his bare body, pulling the bellows, watching the burning fire... That kind of imagination, that wonderful feeling, is inseparable from my personal experience.
At that time, my novels were not only Chinese in content, but also personalized in the language used in the novels. Therefore, I think the most important sign of a writer's maturity is the formation of his own style, which can be seen at a glance.
Just like when we read Lu Xun's articles, even if Lu Xun's name is covered, we can still read it, which is Lu Xun's language style. Zhang Ailing's novels also have their own unique language style. Shen Congwen's novels also have their own unique language style.
That is to say, only when a writer has formed his own style of language, when his language has contributed to the enrichment of works, can we think that he has transcended the stage of a novelist or novelist, and he can be said to be a literary artist.
Therefore, there is a difference between writers and novelists, novelists are in groups, and there are very few literary scholars. Therefore, in the ranks of modern and contemporary novelists, there are only a few people who can be called literary artists, such as Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, and Zhang Ailing.
Until now, Mo Yan was still a novelist, just a storyteller. Maybe after another 20 years of struggle, it will be difficult for me to rise to the stage of a literary scholar in my lifetime. Although the future is uncertain, I still have to work hard!
The child's growth process,
It's like the growth process of a tree,
The most honest, the most explicit,
What is watered, what grows.
Declaration of ingenuity
"I'm fully engaged in teaching my kids because I know,
In these short years, I will have a lifelong impact on my children.
I don't waste a minute or a second, I treat them like my own children,
And see yourself as a teacher and a parent, not just a teacher! ”