When editing the manuscript of "Who Knocks on the Door", it was the first year of the epidemic, and the editor Liang Wenchun did not expect that the second year of the book's publication won numerous awards, which can be called a big slaughterhouse.
What kind of book is it that brings editors to tears? What details are hidden in the book that evoke the deepest sorrow in the editor's memory and evoke the most core emotions of human beings?
Today's "Editor's Talk" invited Liang Wenchun, the editor of "Who's Knocking", to talk about her acquaintance with "Who's Knocking" and share the days and nights behind everything from a manuscript to a work of utter sincerity.
A book that accompanied me through the trough
01
Hello everyone, I'm Liang Wenchun. As an editor, when you immerse yourself in making a book, you enjoy the joy of making a book, but at the same time there is a kind of anxiety that accompanies you, which is the fear that a good book will not be seen by more people. When I edited the novel "Who Knocks on the Door", this anxiety has always been there, and it has become the driving force for my continuous exploration on the way to the book.
When I got the manuscript of Luo Weizhang's "Who Knocks on the Door", I was like a treasure, and I was full of love and expectation for it like a newborn. This is a novel that has a deep emotional connection to me in my not very long career. Because of love, I unconsciously put in a lot of enthusiasm and energy.
At the beginning of this year, "Who Knocks on the Door" swept all kinds of blockbuster literary lists in the 2021 annual list, including the annual five best works of "Contemporary" long stories, the "Long Novel Selection" gold list and leading works, the annual top ten good novels of "Asia Weekly", the annual good novels of the Chinese Novel Society, the top 3 of the annual list of "Yangtze River Literary Review", the annual top ten literary good books of China Publishing media business daily, the top 100 annual good books of Shenzhen Reading Month, the annual top ten good books of the Hall of Fame Humanities List, the top ten novels of the Harvest Literature List, and so on. It wasn't until this moment that the anxiety I had been tensing all over my body for more than a year eased.
This manuscript has been edited since the beginning of 2020. At that time, the outbreak of the epidemic in Wuhan had just begun, and the entire Spring Festival was quarantined at home, and in March, it was still flexible to work and work from home. Looking back at that time, not only me, but perhaps the most difficult period for the people of the whole country, watching various small videos of the fight against the epidemic, often tearful. At such a low point in my mood, I began editing Who's Knocking at Home.
This novel not only has many characters, but also the relationship between the characters is intricate, in the process of editing, I can't help but be attracted by the fate of the characters in the novel, and began to immerse myself in the novel, breathing with the characters in the novel, as if with Xu Chunming's perspective, I also became a member of the Xu family, breathing the air of Qingxi River and Huilong Town. During that special period, this novel gave me a very important spiritual nourishment and supported me through that period of lows.
The core part of the whole novel is to describe the funeral of our father, which can make us re-understand the concept of life and death of Chinese. Perhaps, as Teacher Huang Dehai said, the traditional Chinese funeral ceremony has in a sense played a protective role in protecting the spirit of the relatives of the deceased. The links of "circling the coffin" and "weeping and mourning" are, first, to prevent relatives from fainting due to excessive grief, and second, to express the deep grief in their hearts, which to some extent protects the spiritual world of relatives from the harm of reality. What impressed me most was that when I locked in the room and made up the manuscript, I couldn't help but burst into tears when I saw the section in chapter 4 where the eldest sister cried for her father. It evokes the deepest sorrow in my memory, which is common to human beings and is the most central emotion, that is, the mourning and remembrance of the deceased loved ones.
Therefore, I wrote a paragraph as a copy of the back cover: "Born to be a human being, it is inevitable that at a certain point in life, the death of a parent, the death of a loved one, often brings insurmountable sadness." In the face of the parting of life and death that everyone must face, perhaps we must not only learn to recognize and accept this sadness, but more importantly, how to correctly understand death and truly learn to "let go.".
This novel touched on the softest part of my heart, and I also deeply experienced the author's good intentions, we always need to learn to cherish the softest part of the heart, that part will become the most ideal soil, nourishing our spiritual world. Therefore, I cherish the fate of "meeting and knowing" with this book even more, and hope that this book will be "seen" by more people, only in this way can I live up to the author's trust in me.
From the cover, there are endless stories to tell
02
When it comes to cover design, the designer offers three scenarios.
The first scheme uses a leaf-like image to form a "home" character, and the inner seal is two falling leaves, indicating that with the death of the "father", the family also began to "fall and scatter".
(Scheme 1 Left seal, right inner seal)
The second scheme is also green. The sun, leaves, dogs, insects and other metaphors for the hometown and the countryside.
(Scheme 2 Left seal, right inner seal)
In the third scheme, the red cover is crisscrossed with rough lines like knife marks, and the symbol in the middle looks like both a bird and a scar, and these black lines actually allude to different door frames superimposed on top of each other, while the black symbol in the middle is the keyhole. At the same time, black symbols can also be seen as people, metaphorically referring to people being bound to various intricate interpersonal relationships. In addition, it can also be seen as a lantern from a bird's-eye view, and the "lantern" itself is a very important image in the novel, or "prop", which symbolizes the dignity of the eldest sister to live. There is no doubt that this cover has a richer meaning, more room for interpretation, and from the visual effect, it is also more impactful. The author was also satisfied, so he chose this cover at that time. On the inner envelope, the designer chose the green color that symbolizes the land, and another alternative is gray-brown. However, considering that green is more in line with the temperament of Qingxi River, hometown and land, green also represents vitality and hope, and the visual effect tension is greater, so green is chosen.
(Scheme 3 Left seal, right inner seal)
In terms of the paper and process of the book, the technical editor considered the printing process very carefully and provided very professional advice and guidance. Before determining the paper, the technical editor let the paper procurement specialist purchase a single paper sample in advance, and let the digital fast printing shop play a fake sample on the machine to see the actual effect of the paper through color difference, thickness and texture. For example, the inner seal paper weight is too large will not be easy to appear creases, different specifications of the paper will not appear after the indentation of the machine, the effect of printing white ink on the red earth paper is good, and the spine examination does not consider the process of doing the lock line, and so on.
The efforts of the team are only for the perfect presentation
03
"Who Knocks on the Door" has a very high artistic value, but how to convey the core value of a pure literary book to the reader and resonate with the reader is often a difficult point in the process of making a book. After racking your brains and revising the copy over and over again, the next step is how to let more readers see the book. After full communication and consultation with the marketing editor and the teachers in the marketing department, we decided to adopt the "trial book" method to let more readers understand the book through the trial reading method.
In order to allow readers to draw valid information from the trial version, we tried two different versions, version 1.0 and 2.0, and put the 1.0 and 2.0 versions in the readership for comments. The comments provided by readers are invaluable, and both versions have their own pros and cons, so version 3.0 is based on these two versions. After the launch of this trial book, it interacted with readers through online activities and was loved and praised by readers.
A good book is never made by one person, it is made by a team, and every link has people behind the scenes silently participating and paying. It is the concerted efforts between the fans that this book finally allows more people to "see". I hope that it can be seen by more and more people, and the light and heat in it will be dispersed.
Crying, I couldn't grab the ice pier, and I got the editors' private hands!
Trapped in England for 420 days, he wrote a good book reluctant to give me 丨 editor said 013