The Paper's reporter Gao Dan
"Eight years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mo Yan finally published a new novel, The Late Maturing Man."
"Yu Hua launched a new work "Wencheng" after eight years."
"Sun Ganlu's long-rumored novel 'A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains' in the literary circle came out."
"Wang Shuo's new work , The Beginning chronicle , which has been immersed in fifteen years , is about to be published."
"Liu Sola's new book "Liu Sola and Friends: The Sound of the Waves" was launched."
……
Hot search, fast news and short videos together to build a kind of "life and death" of the network world, we are accustomed to the sleepy eyes on the commute road quickly from the public number, platform for a day to chew on the new information, from which to learn wonders, experience, emotions, talk, and quickly forget everything when the evening is tired. Ten minutes, in the short video platform can brush dozens or even hundreds of short videos, quickly understand dozens of lives, time has become fast, we seem to have difficulty imagining, more than ten years always have to worry about, tell a story is what is the experience.
"Ten years after a fierce child in a story, and then looking up is ten years", what kind of difficult crossings and struggles have the writers experienced in writing, and have they reached the other side of the ideal? Has writing novels become harder? Why did it take so long for writers to write books? Let's take the novel as an example, and refer to the creative stories shared by different writers to try to answer the above questions.
The Difficulty of Long Story: Decades of hunger, mistakes, setbacks, and self-torture
In China, it seems that all writers of the "Eight Classics of Zheng'er" must write a heavy long story.
Take some of the most successful authors:
In April 1986, Chen Zhongzhong, the author of "White Deer Plain", waded across the cold Bahe River and took a bus to Lantian County to collect materials, and after two years of conception and material preparation, he began the writing of "White Deer Plain" in April 1988. In January 1989, Chen Zhongzhong completed the first draft, which took two years to revise and finalized in March 1992.
After writing it, Chen Zhongzhong desperately handed over the 500,000-word "White Deer Plain" to the editor of the Humanities Society, and left a harsh word: if the achievement is accomplished, if it is not successful, go home and raise chickens, and never write again.
Chen Zhongzhong in the collection of wind Image source: Humanities Society
Lu Yao, the author of "The Ordinary World", almost gritted his teeth in "The Loneliness and Endeavor of an Idealist": "I have been struggling for decades in the long process of hunger, error, frustration and self-torture, struggling to find a goal, and any limited success is crucial to me. I feel the warmth of life for some kind of reward for my cattle and horses' labor. ”
Since 1975, the creation of "Ordinary World" lasted six years, and Lu Yao, a desperate sanlang, spent three years consulting materials, even pamphlets such as fish farming, beekeeping, and soil transformation; He mechanically flipped through the various newspapers of the decade involved in the age of writing, his fingers grinding until they molted and bleeding. In addition, Lu Yao also almost greedily possessed life, recording in detail all the crops and wild plants to be written about, when one plant bloomed, what state the other plants were in, and so on.
In addition, the whole writing process requires more religious will, and by the time "Ordinary World" was written by the end of the second part, Lu Yao was already tired and vomiting blood. Eventually, due to too hard writing, Lu Yao, who was only 42 years old, died in Xi'an due to ineffective treatment of cirrhosis of the liver and ascites.
Former residence of Lu Yao in Liangjiahe Village
The writers of Chen Zhongzhong and Lu Yao's generation, using youth and life as collateral, are determined to present the lives and ideals of people of an era in a panoramic way. Whether it is in their era when it is particularly difficult to collect writing materials, or in today's era when with the development of the Internet, the proliferation of various databases makes material collection simple, but also because of the complexity and mud and sand, writing a long story that covers the fate of several generations and connects hundreds of years or even hundreds of years of history will not be an easy task.
Liang Xiaosheng, a contemporary of Lu Yao and Chen Zhongzhong, continues to create. In 2017, Liang Xiaosheng was 68 years old when he completed "The World of Man", and if it were not for the recent adaptation of the film and television drama, "The World of Man" might just be one of Liang Xiaosheng's long list of works, and would not have reached so many audiences and won so many praises for it. In the short video, it is always edited that Liang Xiaosheng watches "The World of Man" and wipes his tears with his hands, and the tears he pulls are for the actor's interpretation, but also for his own years of hard work.
"The World of Man" film and television drama
Liang Xiaosheng said to himself, he once cut a whole barrel of pencils to start writing for five years, in the middle of which there was a serious cervical spondylosis, nail distortion and loss, serious problems in the body, 1.15 million words fell on the paper In the long process of hardship, it is really difficult to be with outsiders.
The Visual China Infographic of "The World of Man" placed in the bookstore
Vernacular: The enduring theme of the novel
Emotionally and simply from the perspective of creation, we can understand the difficulty of long-form writing, and we can also rationally and macroscopically understand how the creation of long novels has undergone in the past two decades.
The literature of the twenty years since the 20th century has been named "New Century Literature", which is not a concept of time, but a way of naming or describing current literary forms. The critic Meng Fanhua reviewed this whole process in detail in "Twenty Years of Literature in the New Century: The Basic Appearance of the Novel", arguing that:
The changes in literature in the 1980s were still confined to a single category of serious literary writing, or they were pondered in spiritual spaces or at the technical level such as value, meaning, and form. But after 1993, the environment for literary production or practice underwent profound changes, and market culture rose and became accepted by the general public. In the intellectual world, there are many people who like romance and martial arts works. In the 1990s, Peking University opened a special course on Jin Yong's novels, which were very popular, and soft novels were the main means of profit for publishing houses. "New Century Literature" began in 1993 and has the characteristics of "carnivalization".
Meng Fanhua divided the creation of novels of "New Century Literature" into ten years before and after, and the representative works of the first ten years were "Can Not Remember Hollyhocks", "Zhang Juzheng", "Great Qin Empire", "Caoyun Wharf", "Wolf Totem", "Ingris", "Peach Blossoms", "Qin Cavity", "Dark Calculation", "Right Bank of the Erguna River", "Life and Death Fatigue", "Lake and Mountain Color", "Frog", "Ten Thousand Sentences in a Sentence", "Tuina", etc. "How to inherit tradition, or what exactly is our culture and literary tradition, has always been a problem that has plagued us and is unresolved." In the creation of novels in the new century, the revival of cultural traditions has become a remarkable phenomenon, which is embodied in the folk culture, literati tastes, and rural world style and ethics embodied in the creation of novels in the new century. Meng Fanhua thought.
In the second decade of the new century, Ge Fei's "Jiangnan Trilogy", Wang Meng's "Scenery here", Li Peifu's "Book of Life", Jin Yucheng's "Flowers", Su Tong's "Yellow Bird Chronicle", Liang Xiaosheng's "The World of Man", Xu Huaizhong's "Drawing the Wind", Xu Zechen's "Going North", Chen Yan's "Protagonist", and Li Er's "Brother Ying Wu" won the 9th and 10th Mao Dun Literature Awards successively; In addition, there are many works such as anti-war novels, new world love novels, and historical novels.
Documentary "Hometown of Literature" that follows the writer back to his hometown
Throughout these two decades, the most influential novels, the most honored and eye-catching in the literary world, are still mainly novels with rural themes. Writers write about the nostalgia of the warm pulse, about the beauty of the countryside, and about the wandering when the city is approaching and rural life is disintegrated. Writing about rural writers has been classified as rural literary writers, and in recent years, in order to be more interesting, writers will be strongly related to the regions in which he writes, such as Mo Yan's Shandong Gaomi, Liu Zhenyun's Henan, Alai's Tibetan area, Chi Zijian's northeast, Bi Feiyu's Northern Jiangsu, Zhang Wei's Shandong, and so on.
Liu Zhenyun in his hometown, from the documentary "The Hometown of Literature"
Under the continued influence of this literary tradition, in the discussion of various long-form new works, it is always necessary to write keywords such as "countryside", "nostalgia", and "clash of civilizations" on the agenda of the discussion. Vernacular themes have become a training ground for writers to compete fiercely, and writers should, without exception, consider how to get rid of the "anxiety of influence" of their predecessors and write tricks on the same subject, and this process of thinking is bound to be long.
Shock from the outside of literature
As mentioned above, we already know clearly that vernacularity is the most important theme for writing novels, so the competition is fierce. In recent years, from some important events in literary history, we have also seen that the challenges faced by writers are not only from their peers, or from within literature.
The first phenomenon we need to pay attention to is that in recent years, anthropology and sociology have been blazing, and they have given people a sufficiently accurate, true, concise and shocking impression with their down-to-earth fieldwork and writing, such as Fei Xiaotong's "Native China", He Xuefeng's "Village Governance Model", "Last Kilometer Village", the views put forward by scholars have super generalization, but also too conclusive, readers will quickly grasp the concise history, basic pattern and human survival picture of Chinese countryside, while silently turning these theories into common sense. Form an inherent impression and, as a result, lose patience, curiosity and imagination in the countryside.
At the same time, non-fiction writing with facts and personal experiences as the background of writing has emerged, and good stories have emerged with various non-fiction writings, and each time there is a tendency to destroy and decay.
Taking Liang Hong, one of the leaders, as an example, in 2008, Liang Hong returned to his hometown for a long time to write "China in Liangzhuang", went from house to house every day to find the veins of Liangzhuang people, placed one character after another in front, and began to write the living methods of Liangzhuang people. These two books have won many awards, which has aroused widespread concern about the living conditions of migrant workers from all walks of life, and Liangzhuang has become a famous sample of Rural Studies in China.
English version of China in Liangzhuang
Liang Hong believes that the fate of individuals is brought together to form the so-called "spirit of the times", she insists on the oral history of individuals as the center, and believes that personal narration leads to multiple directions, and is more critical, which is the dissolution of a "general spirit" and "prosperity and prosperity".
Another successful non-fiction writer, Yuan Ling, proves the power of true stories with continuous non-fiction writing, arguing that non-fiction breaks a literary "seamless" illusion and provides everyone with an interactive, communicative, and interreliative way of expression.
Yuan Ling places very literary metaphors and symbolic imagery in non-fiction stories, and in "The Chameleon by the Roadside", Yuan Ling writes: "All the way to see the densely arranged rental houses on both sides, people's lives seem to be spread out at hand, there is nothing to hide. It was in that alley that I saw a chameleon in an incubator. "The living environment and precarious fate of the chameleon being spread out hints at the fate of the tin shack dwellers in this alley. In addition, there are legendary and dramatic conflicts that seem to exist in the novel, such as "The Cargo Lang in the Wangjing Ward", the experience of Uncle Yuan working in Beijing and the career of crossing the mountains and mountains as a cargo man selling cloth thirty years ago are interrelated, one is the reality of blood and water on the operating table of the hospital to clean up the garbage, and the other is the vast drift like a wandering river. Reading Yuan Ling's nonfiction works can even make one feel that literary techniques are appropriately used in non-fiction writing than to be annihilated in lengthy, ingenious long stories.
Critic Meng Fanhua lamented that "the lack of successful literary characters is the biggest problem of novels in the past decade." We can remember many novels, many writers, but we rarely remember the characters in the works, and the novel is to shape the literary characters. ”
It's a curse.
The stories and characters that the authors painstakingly built are sometimes far less memorable than the real people in a non-fiction story, Liu Xiaoyi, who always wants to rebel and run away in "Nala on the Plains", a migrant worker who has been working in Dongguan for seventeen years, but has twelve years to go to the library to study day after day, "genius translator" Jin Xiaoyu... Good enough characters and stories, complex enough, deep enough, just tell us the truth, almost without any embellishment.
Liu Sample
Wu Guichun reading at Dongguan Library
In addition, readers who are full of curiosity in non-fiction stories can easily feel bored with ordinary stories.
Translation Publishing House grandly launched the "Translation Documentary" series, with "Female Poverty", "Bankruptcy after Old Age", "Unrelated Society", "Unequal Corpse", a heavy hammer smashed to the reader, damaged, absurd society in all kinds of unfortunate lives were spread out in great detail, Watanabe Junichi proposed in "Blunt Sense", it seems to be a kind of self-preservation to maintain a sluggishness to everything that wears out people's will and emotions in life, and it can also be seen that the public seems to be moving towards the "era of bluntness" from the increasingly "dark system" of published works. We need more and more flavorful stories, and the mundane stories of the novels that are chewed up slowly and swallowed will be discarded.
It's harder to write a novel that's not just on the shelf.
Writing has become harder
In the self-prologue of a phenomenal personal history work "Autumn Garden", published in 2020, author Yang Benfen writes:
The kitchen is about four square meters, and the sink, stove and refrigerator take up most of the space, and there is no longer a table. I sat on a low stool, using another slightly taller stool as a table, and began to write the story of our family on a stack of checkered manuscript paper. That year, my mother, Qiu Yuan in the book, whose real name is Liang Qiufang, died. I was overwhelmed by a huge sadness, and it was almost impossible for me to recover physically and mentally. I realized that if no one wrote down something, Mom's traces in this world would be quickly erased.
……
Ever since the idea of writing came to mind, I couldn't hold on any longer. The washed greens were hung in baskets, the stove was stewed with meat, and in between waiting for the soup to boil, amid the roar of the range hood, I sat down at any time and let the pen in my hand move quickly on the manuscript paper. Before I finished this book, I always felt that there was something that was not finished, and I was afraid that it was too late to do it.
The author Yang Benfen was driven by a strong emotional impulse, wrote down the mother's ups and downs, displaced life, for the author, life is here, only writing can resist forgetting, can "warm the sadness of the depths of the heart", piled up eight pounds of manuscript paper, is the author's heavy memory, "as long as the pen is lifted, the past days will rush to the tip of the pen, rushing to be told." It was as if I had rushed with a pen and re-walked through a long life. ”
It's an enviable fountain of literary thought. Yang Benfen hardly had to fight anything, but was driven by emotion and the determination to record, and the words could flow like water on the tip of the pen.
And as we said at the beginning, for writers who want to construct their own world and write about the life of an era and a large group of people, their limited memory and experience are obviously not enough, and they always have to search for the yellow spring and search for it again and again.
For example, when Sun Ganlu wrote "A Map of a Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", he referred to the real materials such as city maps, newspaper news, archives, and customs at that time, hoping to get close to the historical truth, reproduce the social environment, customs and life of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Nanjing in the 1930s, and restore the daily life of Shanghai's buildings, streets, food, customs, cultural entertainment and entertainment at that time. A road, a coat, a play, a symphony, a dish or a way out of the streets in the novel are the bones of a novel, and these most basic skeletons are unstable, and the spiritual and plump stories cannot grow at all, and with the high learning of contemporary readers and the convenience of retrieving materials, these can be called small flaws compared to the whole novel, and once pointed out, the whole work may be ruined.
In the recently published novel "At the Beginning" by Wang Shuo, Wang Shuo recounts the life of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty for more than 50 years from his pro-government to his death in 1.4 million words, and all the people who are active in this era must be woven into the story, while there are real historical facts pulling, on the other hand, they must be able to reflect the personal style and the fiction and imagination of the novel.
Writing is also becoming more complicated, all writers involuntarily involved in large and small circles, systems, sometimes half-pushed and half-accept some grand propositional compositions, although this kind of major theme writing in the name of caring for the present will be rewarded in a certain evaluation system in the short term, so that writers have a sense of merit.
Writing is also becoming dangerous. There is a view that modern people receive more information in a day than the ancients obtained in their lifetime. We are just like the obscure, unknown spring and autumn of the fungus and cockroaches, floating in the ocean of information in a daze, the long-term chaos has made us unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood, value, justice, anything written by the pen may be quickly subverted, dissolved, and even when one day you are opposed, the words left behind will become your testimony to be criticized.
On a July morning in 2015, Jia Pingwa gave himself 150,000 words of "Polar Flower" to a long end, the thickest rain of the whole summer is falling, Jia Pingwo is in a comfortable mood, there are only two poems in his mind: "How to break the vein of the sea, Zhu Ya has since broken the sky." "Happy to talk to the relevant birds, and the raw incense continues to cross the flowers." In "Polar Flower", Jia Pingwa tells the story of the protagonist Hu Die, who was abducted and sold in the first person narrative, and then returned to the buyer's home to live after being rescued by public security personnel.
What Jia Pingwa did not expect was that this novel was because of the plot of the abducted woman who actually fell in love with the rapist and the interview that "if the rural people do not buy a daughter-in-law, they will never have a daughter-in-law, and if the village never buys a daughter-in-law, the village will die." And other remarks were violently condemned.
"Everything that is solid is gone", the writer who lifts the pen faces the same dilemma as us - there is no longer any unbreakable truth, any kind of judgment is dangerous, everything is breaking the reconstruction, all kinds of views are violently colliding until they are completely disintegrated and broken, and the ghosts are also gathering into a fierce atmosphere, and well-known writers are standing in the whirlpool of public opinion, feeling the pursuit, and also have to bear the pressure.
When Wang Shuo came out of the mountains again in 2007 for 5 years, he launched "My Chitose Cold", which was called "completely in the clouds and fog, and did not know what to do"; In March 2006, the first half of Yu Hua's "Brothers" came out, the first printing reached 300,000 copies, the book was ambitious, but it was called "play off" by netizens, in 2020, Yu Hua launched "Wencheng", many readers did not buy it, calling it "old-fashioned". When the storm struck, China's top novelist, Yu Hua, stood in the field of public opinion, and was finally remembered as a scribble-handed.
Yu Hua Visual China Infographic
Writing is really getting harder.
Editor-in-Charge: Liang Jia Photo Editor: Chen Feiyan
Proofreader: Yan Zhang