In addition to winning, kickers aspire to score at least one earth-shattering world wave in their careers and thus enter the centenary "goal jackpot". The same goes for writers, "The ultimate ambition of a short story writer is to have one or two works that make it into the best anthologies." In this way, his work can last forever and have a long-lasting, generation-long readership" (Hajin). As a result, the short story writer can only tirelessly shoot again and again, even if he fires an anti-aircraft gun, hits the goal frame, or barely hits a goal with his nose.
Fingers crossed, I have been focusing on short stories for nearly 20 years. I always feel that time passes too quickly because I am not doing a good job, and I have to waste some time on sophistry, to comfort myself, but also for short stories. But after each sophistry, I soon wondered if I was idle...
I have a soft spot for short stories because they are so well written. Didn't I give up other things and choose literary creation for a "cool" word? Short story writing is a lightning bolt from your own inner wind and thunder, straight to the depths of the fog. If you hit the target accurately, it will ignite a firework that makes me "feel comfortable"; if the difference is even a thousand miles, illuminating a pile of language garbage, it will make me depressed, depressed, and disgusting. But the moment when lightning crosses the night sky, mysterious, dreamy, fleeting, always fascinating, exciting, and always makes the inner waves crash.
The short stories are fireworks in the daytime, lightning in the night; a dewdrop on a fresh lotus leaf in the morning, a whisper of a tired bird in the dusk; a cloud in Wushan, a bunch of snow in Emei; life, death, and out-of-body experience. The short story is a spirit, a kind of faith, and the affection of the tip of the tongue for the blade. Short stories can soar into the clouds, can go deep, and are fascinating like dark matter that can never be captured. No matter how much they praise and promote short stories, no one dares to openly oppose them, because there are too many great short stories that block the mouths of opponents. There is no need for long and short stories to "fight each other", each has its own "powerful", and Cao Xueqin "smashes" pu Songling. I've always tried to pay tribute to great short stories by constantly writing. Every time I say to myself, let go of distractions, have a noble mind, hold my breath, and sit in a precarious position, because the time has begun, I am going to write a short story. It was my most "cool" moment, sacred and undisturbable. Every time you complete a short story, if you feel that you can get by, you can at least "cool" for three or five days. So, time passed. Twenty years have passed, leaving a bunch of crooked dates, but they enjoy themselves, their tongues are full of joy, and they still write upside down.
However, as I wrote it, I realized that something was wrong. It's not that I bumped into the sand when chewing sesame candy, or that the coffee in the cup suddenly lost the smell of cat, or that it was more and more difficult to write short stories, but that I wrote and wrote, and when I looked up, I found that there were fewer and fewer companions around me who had written together. I don't know when it started, but my novels can often occupy the headlines of the column. If you rely on strength alone, won't you? Is it to take care of "old comrades"? Sure enough, it was the latter. It turned out that I was old, and almost all the young people next to me were scrambling, and I felt embarrassed. What about the contemporaries who had sworn to carry the short story to the end together? Where have you been? "Crossing the hill, only to find that there was no one waiting", a man ran back and forth on the inaccessible path, like a donkey pulling off the blindfolded black cloth to find that the mill had already been "donkey to the room". It turned out that many of them had already changed their ways, climbed mountains, took big jobs, and wrote long novels. Even if they occasionally make one or two short stories, it's just to deal with a stalking editor, or because they find that the long discarded scraps can make a few small benches. Being abandoned by my friends on the way makes me feel lonely and uneasy, and sometimes I doubt myself, nearly half a hundred years old, and I am still stupidly focusing on short stories, is it impossible to see the "reality"? During this period, many friends and readers kindly reminded me: it is time to write a long story, do not exhaust the limited talent on short stories. The short story is a small hill, a ripple in a pond, a dwarf tree in the forest, and a long novel is a majestic mountain and a sea of stars. Sometimes, I think the same way. After writing a short story, you have to start again, and the cycle starts again, like a hundred meters of running training, each time sprinting with full force, each time the results are almost meaningful, the gap is so specific and hateful, visible to the naked eye but like a chasm. Frustrated, I really want to run a marathon, painful, happy, and full of energy, even if I die of exhaustion on the road, I know how I died. On the football field, long-distance goals are always more exciting than scoring goals in front of goal.
I feel like I can write long stories, and the ideas, stories, and characters in short stories can be pulled into long stories. And I actually used a sum of money that I had saved to buy a house to buy cabbage every day. What could have been a long story, the plot was split, dismembered, and shattered, turning into a bunch of collapsed short stories, without a single "world wave", not even a decent shot. When walking past the school football pitch in the evening, it is common to see one or two children practicing shooting, each time the ball is scored, because the distance is close and there is no one to defend. I thought to myself, if only I could write a short story as simple as that.
To be honest, for a while, I wrote short stories with enthusiasm and excitement that fell off a cliff, both loving and hating, and replacing the motto "Long live the short story" with "Die, short story." Again and again underground determination: from tomorrow, be the right person, face the sea, and start writing long stories.
However, the next day, I continued to write a short story in a gray face: let's finish the few I thought about first.
Isn't the short story boring? It seems that there is none. It was still like a dagger, like a shotgun, like lightning. There are still readers who love it, praise it, and reward it. There are a thousand good short stories, and there are ten thousand reasons for existence. But it does have problems, and it has to really solve the problem of how to face "reality".
What is reality? For novelists, reality is always a huge mystery, unspeakable, unclear, can only face, peel off the cocoon, reach the truth, play with eyesight and technical work. Let's not talk about technology, because on technology alone, the short story will never lose to the long story. But in dealing with real problems, long stories have an advantage over short stories. The long story is a tsunami, a mudslide, a flood during the spring tide, an infrastructure maniac excavator, a nuclear explosion, a sea of mountains and seas, and the destruction of decay. The slap in the face of a short story in the face of "reality" is not as powerful and loud as a long story. This is the consensus of short story writers. However, is reality so complex and mottled that the short story cannot be described or interpreted? Readers are eager for a panoramic view of the grand life and are not interested in fragmentary revelation? Or is short video replacing short stories and long stories can't be replaced for the time being? Aren't short stories real-life commandos, hussars, and snipers? For novelists, do they all touch the ceiling of the short story and must turn to the long story with great prospects? These questions are both doubts and secrets.
The "reality" I also know is that short story collections are far less popular than long stories. So far, when talking about the publication contract of the short story collection, I have never dared or endured to bargain with the publisher, because I know that for every inch I gain, they lose an extra foot. The chances of long novels selling film and television adaptation rights are much higher than short stories, so many short stories writers work hard to draw cats and dogs, because they need to rely on them to earn some broken silver to support their families. When people talk about a writer, they always talk first about what he or she wrote. If the long story can't stand to be talked about, it is only a matter of second thought: he or she wrote some good short stories in his or her early years. They say that the novel is a writer's ballast stone, and no matter how much the short story is written, their ship is still in the wind and rain, even if it is lucky enough to get through the river, but it will certainly not go out of the sea. The writer Alice Monroe once laughed at herself: "The writer of the short story is like wandering outside the door of the temple of literature, not allowed to enter." She also quoted Catherine Mansfield as saying, "Oh, I wish I had written a novel myself, I don't want to be left with only fragments after I die." She herself thinks that even if people praise you as Chekhov, she still feels that way: she's just creating bits and pieces of stories. Short stories are piecemeal, east and west.
But what they say is not all reality. Fortunately, reality is much richer and more objective than they are talking about. If lightning listens to thunder, it cannot understand where it is going, let alone arrive in the world before thunder. Monroe, for example, is not like her self-deprecating. Her short stories are shining like diamonds, like crystals, like blades, like dark fires in the depths of the night sky, which condense life, cut away the superfluous and frivolous parts, leaving behind a hard and incomparable nucleus, with spikes towering and shining together, becoming a universe of its own, revealing reality completely and accurately from different angles, reaching a fascinating realm.
When I discovered the real secret, I felt a lot more at ease. No longer because of writing short stories, I look around and suffer from gains and losses. I still feel that short stories are like religion, and only the pious can discover the truth. In the face of complex and confusing reality, the short story is like a sharp short knife straight into the key point, tearing open the bloody abscess, scraping the bones to heal the poison, between the whiskers, roaring, patting the horse, and quickly taking revenge. This kind of "coolness" is given by short stories, and although it is short every time, it can be repeated frequently. Short story writers are the most narrative efficient, and they are always desperate and eager to dig out the best and most essential parts of "reality" and sell them to readers. No path in the world is absolutely correct, because everyone walks on different legs, but the most important thing is to arrive and not die on the way. The biggest feature of short stories is that they are short. Short skirts don't have to look good, they depend on who they wear. The reality is too fat, the short skirt seems to be stretched, you may wish to wrap yourself in a sheet and stand in front of the mirror to see. In the face of long stories, there is no need to be arrogant. I have read some long stories, and there is nothing outstanding except for the long ones, and the pleasure of reading is not as good as reading a short story or even a line of poetry. Some things are predestined and cannot be changed through effort. The vast majority of writers have only witnessed reality and participated in reality, and they are not present in the "Goal Collection". Perhaps, all efforts are in vain, and long and short writing is incomparable.
When we talk about the "long" and "short" of the novel, are we really satisfied with just talking about "long" and "short"? It should be much more than that, unless you forget the essence of literature. Even if it is only about "long" and "short", it is not in a hurry, time and reality are vast and harsh, and any opportunistic writing is too sloppy and superficial. As a writer of short stories, we must always look back on the spirit of writing short stories: we must have the ambition to compare beauty with poetry, and we must also have the pride of standing side by side with long stories.
Of course, I also understood that as a short story writer something had to change: short and good, long and short. Long and short stories are not enemies of each other. Long and short are the way to reach "reality", as long as there is enough talent and physical strength, as long as you can bring happiness to yourself, you can "long pavilion shorter pavilion".
So, still struggling with what, write is.
(The author is a Guangxi novelist)