WeChat, special article, creation talk| Luo Rixin: Meet a better self

Luo Rixin

●Born in 1963, a member of the Chinese Writers Association, he worked in the Daye Steel Factory in his youth, wrote and published many novels, and began to write a novel "The City of Steel" in 2008, the first and second parts were published in October Novels, No. 5, 2019, and No. 1, 2022. Won the 11th Qu Yuan Literary and Art Award of Hubei Province.

Meet a better version of yourself

In August 2008, the US subprime mortgage crisis broke out, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch broke out one after another, and the financial tsunami swept in. I was in Houston, and on that sweltering summer, I couldn't sleep every night, on the one hand, worried about the prospects of China's steel industry, and on the other hand, looking back, my mind was full of the scenes when I was young and working at the Daye Steel Plant. My steel smelting, my steel smelting co-workers, those past years, from the fiery years of steel companies, to the successive layoffs, hardships and joys suddenly surged into my heart, and I could not calm down for a long time. The desire to write after many years of sleep has quietly revived, and I think I should write a book for our generation and for the children of the steel mill.

I'm a typical Steel Cityer.

My father, who was the editor-in-chief of Yegang Bao; my mother, was a teacher at the school for the children of smelting steel; and I was born in the Daye Steel Factory, from kindergarten to junior high school, I studied in the school for the children of smelting steel, majored in metallurgical machinery at university, and returned to the Daye Steel Factory after graduation. But at the time my dream was to be a writer. I write notes every day, write down the moments of my life, and write novels whenever I have free time. My father, who worked in writing, was adamantly opposed to my writing. He is a person who has come over, and he knows that writing is not easy, not only to have talent, but also to have the determination to sit on the bench for ten years.

My father hoped that I would start from the grassroots level and become the leader of smelting steel in the future.

When I became a grassroots cadre, the most difficult thing in my work was to divide the house, increase the salary, evaluate the advanced, divide the gas tank, and even the health care indicators were the most difficult problems for the grassroots cadres when they were distributed, so I also mingled with the grassroots workers. Many years later, when I look back in Houston, my mind comes to mind what they once were, and they are in front of my eyes. But in my memory, the biggest impact on our generation, or on steel mill workers, was the reform of state-owned enterprises that began in 1994, and the general manager was responsible for reducing the number of employees and increasing efficiency under the system.

I typed the title of the novel "Laid-off" on my computer.

After writing tens of thousands of words, it was renamed "Big Waves and Sands".

I called my father to tell me what I thought, and I didn't expect my father to be very supportive, "You wrote when you were young, and I was firmly opposed. At that time, you had no life experience, and you couldn't write a good novel in a vacuum. Now Dad supports you in writing novels, you not only have to write about your own experience for so many years, but also write about me and your mother, write about the workers on the open stove, write about the dilemma of state-owned enterprise reform, and the difficulty of killing a blood road, you should write! ”

I began to shift my focus from doing business to writing. As soon as I have time, I am writing. The more I write, the more I open my mind, the more I write what I want to say, and the characters I write, their fate, begin to have their own development trajectory. What I want to write is no longer just "laid-off", nor is it just "big waves and sand", my writing ambitions are getting bigger and bigger, I want to make a biography for my steel city, for the steel industry of the republic. From the predecessor of daye steel mill, the hanyeping company founded by governor Zhang Zidong, to the shares of daye new factory issued by Sheng Xuanhuai in 1913 to the current products exported abroad. In order to write, I went back to China, back to Huangshi, back to daye steel mills, back to the source of all this. One day, when I was tired of writing, leaning on the window and looking at the night outside the window, the three words "city of steel" suddenly collided with my heart.

The city of steel!

With these three words, my writing ideas are clearer.

I'm probably the dumbest writer in the world. In the past 40 years, I have experienced many things in the steel mill, I have written them into stories, there are many stories, but I don't know how to connect them better. So I adopted an original writing method, writing in various ways, repeatedly revising and comparing. Just the beginning, I wrote no less than five versions. In this way of writing, that is, only the upper part of more than 200,000 words, I actually wrote down, may not be less than 600,000 or 700,000 words. Write repeatedly, delete repeatedly. In this way, from 2008 to 2018, I spent a full decade writing the first part of "The City of Steel", and the second draft was also half written.

Li Xiuwen, chairman of the Hubei Provincial Writers Association, heard that I was writing a big book and encouraged me, "Your story is very good, and writing down the things you have personally experienced is a long novel that is small and big." In October 2019, the novel "The City of Steel" (part 1) was published in October magazine. On October 17, the Hubei Writers Association and October Magazine jointly held a seminar on "The City of Steel" (Part I) at the China Museum of Modern Literature. More than 20 critics and writers, including Qiu Huadong, secretary of the Secretariat of the China Writers Association, Bai Ye, president of the Chinese Novel Society, and Liang Hongying, editor-in-chief of The Literary and Art Daily, attended the seminar. They affirmed my rich life accumulation, affirmed the special value of such a book in the present, and gave me valuable advice.

Thanks to these teachers, these comments are important. I thought that after completing the second part, I would be patient and polished to solve the problems they mentioned one by one.

I firmly believe that good articles are changed.

When I write, I often write what I want to write in one breath without pause, take it out after a while, read it repeatedly, read it out loud, revise it word by word, and after a period of time, I will take it out and modify it. Repeat this many times until it is more comfortable to read. At the same time, I made up for reading, although I loved literature when I was young and read a lot of books, but I really wanted to create, I still felt that I read too few books. I have no tricks or shortcuts to writing novels, only to keep writing, revising, writing, and revising.

At the end of the upper part, I also wrote five versions, and at the end of the lower part, I wrote four versions. Sometimes, a plot change breaks the bone, causing several chapters to be torn down and rewritten. Fortunately, after the publication of the first part of "The City of Steel", it caused a sensation in Huangshi, especially the affirmation of past workers, which gave me great confidence. From 2019 to 2021, these three years, because of the epidemic, I focused my main energy on writing "The City of Steel", and I did not go out for more than thirty days for the longest time, and my eyes were also black. In mid-2021, I handed over the second part of "City of Steel" to October magazine and the whole book to the People's Literature Publishing House, and it was a great honor for them to accept it.

On August 10, 2021, the People's Literature Publishing House held a re-drafting meeting of "The City of Steel" in Beijing, and I said to my responsible editor, Ms. Fu Ruchu, that this is a book that I have worked hard with my life's experience and thirteen years of painstaking efforts, and I do not want to leave regrets, but only want to do the best within my ability. I don't need to listen to praise at the revision meeting, I just want to hear practical and useful revision suggestions. Wu Yiqin, vice chairman of the China Writers Association, Zhou Daxin, winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, and more than a dozen other experts and teachers put forward sincere suggestions for the revision of "The City of Steel", and I wrote down these revision suggestions one by one, read them repeatedly, and repeatedly pondered and understood them. Vice Chairman Wu Yiqin encouraged me to change it well, saying that if this book is changed well, it will be an epic of industrial themes. It took me half a year to revise the manuscript without leaving my house, until I couldn't really change it, and then I handed it to them again.

"The City of Steel" is written about the group portraits of the characters, and in the novel, there are as many as 60 characters who have appeared successively. Steelworkers have the same commonalities, but each person has a different personality, different tones of speech and gestures, different experiences of steelmakers of all ages, and different ways of dealing with the world. The workshop director is very important in the steelmaking plant, from top to bottom, the squad leader is the head of the army in the factory, they think about the problem a little more than the workers, the workshop director looks at the problem compared to the factory director standing in a higher position, there is still a difference. When writing, I try my best to make characters from all walks of life have their own language characteristics, so that the characters stand up vividly in the text. For example, Zhu Dachang's mantra is: "Make a little progress every day", and Yu Gang often says a sentence: "It is better to move than to act". "The City of Steel" made me return to the Daye Steel Factory, according to the old memory, into the West Gate to the right, along the factory road across the railway for two or three minutes, to the smoke and dust, the vehicles are endless, the sound of steel stirred up a noisy open hearth branch, that is a scene I am familiar with. There are three 90-ton Martin-style open hearths in a steelmaking, and the insulation refractory bricks and cooling system are replaced every quarter. I repair the furnace once a month, and the cadres take the shift to my night shift. In the dispatch room in front of the furnace, I read the "Smelting Steel Newspaper" with the workers, which had articles written by my father Luo Baoshan. At the end of the road in front of the open hearth factory is the four gates in "The City of Steel", where the smelting newspaper is located. There are stories of fathers, stories of brothers and sisters in steel mills, which come together into an ups and downs industrial epic.

The city is made up of small homes.

"The City of Steel" writes the fate of Zhu Dachang, Yu Gang, Wu Huizhi, Fu Jiagang, Yi Guoxing and other families, witnessing the development of the city and the epitome of China's steel industry.

I am a more rational person, in my bones, more is the hardness of steel, it is this book, my heart, into a soft finger.

In January 2022, "The City of Steel" (the first part) won the "Qu Yuan Literature Award", the highest award in Hubei Literature, and the second part was also published in October magazine, and the single book will be published by the People's Literature Publishing House. How to evaluate this book, it is up to the reader and the time. But for me, writing The City of Steel was a long journey for my soul. I pushed my limits and met a better version of myself, and the rest were unexpected rewards.

February 27, 2022

WeChat, special article, creation talk| Luo Rixin: Meet a better self

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