Chen Yingsong launched his latest novel, "Tianlu Bay", which is an alternative in all my writing

Jimu news reporter Xu Ying

Correspondent Fu Lin

Hubei writer and Lu Xun Literature Prize winner Chen Yingsong's latest novel "Tianlu Bay" was published by Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House. This is a book written by Chen Yingsong in His first hometown, Gong'an County, Jingzhou City. Chen Yingsong, who was familiar to everyone in the past, was based on writing about his second hometown Shennongjia in the literary world. Chen Yingsong's Shennongjia series of novels has his own unique style, full of mystery, magic and magic. This one is different, he said, "this book is indeed an alternative to all my writing, an outlier." It is created in a pure, unconventional realist approach. ”

Chen Yingsong

On March 16, Chen Yingsong was invited by the Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House to accept a national media interview.

The novel is inspired by the hometown of "Jiangnan Grape First County" Jingzhou City Gong'an County

Reporter: You said in the "Afterword" of the book "Tianlu Bay" that this book is an attempt to write about your hometown. How did the inspiration for the novel come about? What was this book meant to convey?

Chen Yingsong: The inspiration for this novel comes from my hometown and also from life, so I would like to thank my hometown and life, especially rural life. Because my hometown, Gong'an County, Jingzhou City, Hubei Province, is the first county in Jiangnan Grape Awarded by the state, with more than 100,000 mu of grapes and 50 or 60 varieties. The police did not have a history of growing grapes in the past, but in the late 1980s, a few farmers tried to grow grapes, breaking the assertion that "grapes are not suitable for growing grapes south of the Yangtze River", rewriting the textbook, and becoming a miracle and myth of fields and land, which touched and felt very touching and feeling. Every summer, the fields are full of fruit, purple and red, and the grape greenhouses are boundless, which is fascinating and moving.

I also began to wonder what farmers really mean to this day and age. In the past, it was said that the peasants were ignorant and backward, but in my hometown, the grapes have become a huge agricultural industry, which shows that today's farmers are not only not ignorant and backward in this era, but also smarter and more advanced than we think. The times are like this, progressing at a speed we didn't expect at all.

"This book is indeed an alternative, an outlier, of all my writing"

Reporter: Judging from "Tianlu Bay", the countryside in this novel is very different from the countryside you wrote about in the past. Why is there such a difference?

Chen Yingsong: This book is indeed an alternative to all my writing, an outlier.

In the past, I wrote the Shennongjia series of novels to gain a foothold in the literary world. Second, my past novels were heavier, more or less characterized by critical realism. Third, my past novels are familiar to readers with mysterious magic and magic. But the novel "Tianlu Bay" was written with reverence and gratitude to the peasants in my hometown, without those mysterious magics, and was created in a pure, non-unusual realist way. Fourth, in the past, I used to write about the poor life in the alpine mountains, and now I write about the rich plain water town life, and the color and tone of the novel are completely different from the past. Fifth, I have never written a novel spanning thirty or forty years in the past, which requires a certain degree of mastery. Sixth, this is a novel that truly writes positively about the image of peasants and rural reform. Seventh, in terms of writing, it is completely colloquial, life-oriented, and regionalized, and it is necessary to guard against intellectuals and novel translations. Eighth, focus on portraying characters, there are dozens of characters in this novel, I strive to make them each have their own personality, vivid.

"I'm impressed by these farmers, they can even plate grapes into art"

Reporter: What are your impressive stories or feelings during fieldwork or material preparation?

Chen Yingsong: The grape itself is just a kind of berries, a kind of seasonal fruit, but for Jiangnan, its cultivation contains unique meaning and connotation. Because the grape is not an item produced in this place since ancient times, it can be said to be a foreign object, and its introduction, planting, processing, and output all have the special meaning and connotation given to it by the times.

I am a person who prefers to walk in the fields and in life. I once said that man is a walking plant. To say that the story that impressed me the most was that these farmers made us look at them with admiration.

There is a lot of agricultural high-tech included in viticulture, but our farmers master it. China's peasants are no longer the people of the agricultural era, they personally ended the agricultural era and opened the door to agricultural modernization. For example, some Portuguese farmers treat grapes as a kind of field art, and the branches of grapes are very beautiful, like works of art. The tree type, the spike type, and the fruit type are almost exactly the same, like coming out of a mold, which is amazing. They said that agriculture is the art of the earth, and the fact that farming can be planted in such a state shows how admirable the peasants in the Jianghan Plain in Hubei Province are.

The writer's inner motivation to write is the emotion in life

Reporter: "Tianlu Bay" can be described as a conscious echo of "enthusiastically depicting the magnificent weather of the new journey of the new era" and "writing an endless people's epic". In the process of creation, how do you deal with the relationship between theme publishing and literary creation?

Chen Yingsong: Theme publishing may add some labels and symbols to a certain work, which is a strategy and means of publishing, but for writers, it is still honest to write in accordance with the laws of creation, and not to be limited and bound by the so-called theme publishing. Writing cannot be preconceived, the theme cannot be first, ideas cannot be greater than the image, slogans cannot be shouted, and cannot be piled up and coaxed. In order to complete the publication of a certain theme, we cannot pander to, fiction, illustrate, fabricate, or exaggerate a certain theme. Publishers have their requirements and tasks, and sometimes they need to highlight the importance and timeliness of a certain kind of writing, a certain subject, but the writer is always in life, in the real touch. If you bump into a certain theme publication, it only proves that you bumped into it, not a propositional essay, a work of the scene. The writer's inner motivation to write is the emotion in life.

Writing over a large time span must never go against the logic of history

Reporter: What is your current creative status? Listen to what you have said before, there was a time when you wrote in Shennongjia Mountain?

Chen Yingsong: Yes, I mainly live and write in Shennongjia Mountain. Because the air is exceptionally good, exceptionally fresh and quiet. "Tianlu Bay" is the theme of my first hometown. Shennongjia is my second hometown. I will alternate between the works of the first and second hometowns, and I now feel that my writing state is very good, and after I finished "Forest Silence", another novel about Shennongjia has also begun to write.

Reporter: This novel spans a relatively long time span, how do you grasp the change of the fate of the protagonist spanning 40 years?

Chen Yingsong: The question of how to write on a certain span, especially in the span of decades, is actually to have a control technique. To write according to the context of history, you have to write your protagonist, who must have his own fate trajectory, or fate logic. If you want to write such a character, you have to design it well, but you must not go against the logic of history, which is not OK, because the times are always progressing.