When I first saw Shuang Xuetao, his leg injury was just right. "Kicking the ball, anterior cruciate ligament injury. ”
He said that he wakes up late every day, and that regular daily exercise, playing football and boxing, can release stress. If you drink alcohol the day before, exercise can also disperse the wine.
A relaxed, energetic middle-aged writer, very thin, and the image in the hearts of many netizens is not the same.
Some people think that he is the same age as Yu Hua, but in fact, he is more than 20 years younger than Yu Hua. In fact, he is the same age as Guo Jingming.
Writers of this age are at a "good age", they can write serious literature at the top, be compatible with hot stalks and jokes, have the energy to express their opinions on the Internet, and take online classes from time to time.
But Shuangxuetao just writes and makes content wholeheartedly. He said that he couldn't be an Internet celebrity or a big V, and influence the world online.
Over the years, he has published eight novels, collections of novels and essays, and "Moses on the Plains" and "Assassination of a Novelist" have all been brought to the screen and received good ratings. As a sincere novelist, he is determined to spend decades of his life working on novels, hoping to happen to write one or two and send his soul into some inaccessible temple.
In this interview, Visual Journals chatted with him about the creative process of his new book and the worries that a middle-aged writer has about the world.
Shuangxuetao, who was born in 83, is probably the last generation of "rebellious youth". The family is ordinary, and his parents are both workers. He saw the hard work of his parents, understood his situation, studied hard since he was a child, and planned to get into college and find a good job.
He said that in those days, everyone believed that "knowledge can change destiny" and improve class.
Sensitivity to words is innate. When he got his first red notebook in the first grade of elementary school, he wrote down a sentence every day. He loves to read, he has read "Water Margin" many times, he always goes to the book city on weekends, and in junior high school, he writes small compositions that shake the whole class.
But the teacher did not hesitate to scold him, saying that he didn't know who to learn from, he didn't know what to do, and he would definitely fail the high school entrance examination if he wrote it like this, and his classmates thought he copied it, and this article must be ambushed in a certain essay selection.
The disheartened teenager has since reined in his pen, devoted himself to doing exam-taking essays, and entered high school mediocrely.
Fortunately, the high school Chinese teacher is very talented in literature. Shuang Xuetao wrote the essay "Life and Death", with a full score of 60, and she gave a score of 64. The mediocre students were inspired to try to write better. He always remembered that after graduating from high school, he went back to school to visit his teacher, and the teacher looked up at him with a look of anticipation but nothing.
But life will eventually go from the avenue, even if there are more Zhang Ailing, Chen Yinke, and Huang Renyu in his stomach, he still relied on exam-taking essays to be admitted to Jilin University and played for four years.
In fact, he wanted to become Wang Xiaobo, but he just thought that he didn't have enough literary talent, so he went with the flow. After graduation, he returned to his hometown and became an employee of the Liaoning branch of the China Development Bank with dignity.
The offspring of the working class was served a bank iron rice bowl, which was a magnificent class leap, and he repaid the expectations of his parents.
The days were not comfortable. Wake up early every day, put on a shirt, deal with interpersonal relationships, complete customer needs, and accompany others to eat and drink. He is most afraid of being regulated, but he is subject to regulation every day. In five years, the tight-knit power structure has suffocated young people with personality.
In 2024, what should I do if the workers go crazy, the post-90s choose to go home, the post-00s choose to do self-media, and 14 years ago, Shuangxuetao, who was in his twenties, chose to write.
At first, it was just a slash and submitted to the Chinese novel competition run by Taiwan Province. He scribbled a ballpoint pen on the paper, scribbling unrelated words. When he wrote the word "name", an extremely proud beginning appeared in his mind: "My name is Mo, and this name was bought from Xiao Lang." ”
This is how the debut novel, The Winged Ghost, is born, and the story tells the story of a winged prisoner, born lowly, longing for freedom and distance. Readers on Douban said that this is Shuangxuetao's original novel, the original world, light, warm, and clear. The novel won an award in one fell swoop and earned a pot of gold, which gave the author an incentive.
However, in three or four years, Shuang Xuetao won two Taiwanese literary awards and published a novella in a single book, which he didn't expect. Although he writes seriously, his mentality is still playful, and he never thinks of himself as a literary youth, but he embarks on the road of writing. This, he thinks, is called "strange fate".
At the age of 29, Shuang Xuetao, a bank clerk in Northeast China, decided to become a full-time writer. He submitted his resignation to the company, becoming the first voluntary resignation of the bank in more than 20 years.
Breaking away from the system, he was finally able to live more freely, writing novels is high-intensity mental work, he followed Haruki Murakami's ethics, set himself a plan for decades, and spent half his life to complete the trek of the spiritual world.
In this increasingly tense society, he lives unhurriedly, going to bed late and waking up late, and his work rhythm slows down with age. Regular daily exercise, kicking a ball, boxing, balancing the amount of work of the body and brain.
When more and more people question the meaning and benefits of serious literature, when more and more netizens give up reading and are keen to read pictures and watch short videos, he only looks at the world coldly, guards what he likes and is good at, and casts his inner turmoil on paper, regardless of traffic, does not chase hot spots, does not buy online courses, does not pay attention to evaluation, and is only responsible for his own words.
This is the loneliness that belongs only to writers, and it is also the happiness of writers' lives.
After 14 years of writing, Shuangxuetao's most common evaluation is that "it makes people look at the Northeast from a new aesthetic perspective". This was something that the first wave of "Winged Ghost" readers would never have imagined.
"Winged Ghost" is a fantasy style, which is a work that people who have not written formally for more than 20 years are inspired and scribbled out, but with the continuous output of words, Shuangxuetao has been writing stories related to real life for a long time.
He is a native of Shenyang in Northeast China, who has experienced great social changes and has seen too many nameless people struggling and joyful in the wind and waves. There is a Yanfan Street where he lives, so he placed many characters in the novel in the Northeast Plain, and many plots took place in Yanfan Street.
He is inspired by real life, and some of his characters also have the shadow of those around him. In his short story "My Friend Andrei", he portrayed the image of an upright, uninhibited and intelligent teenager whose life ended in tragedy, and in one of his speeches, he mentioned that his best friend in middle school was just such a person.
Yanfen Street in the 90s Source: Internet
Shuangxuetao's Northeast Plain, hiding countless little people are not enough for outsiders to hide, by the reform and opening up, laid-off tide of continuous washing, his novel "Moses on the Plains" was later adapted into a suspense drama, Haiqing played a high intellectual, depressed, and uneducated Dong Baobao formed a discordant family.
When the wave of layoffs hits, the character played by Dong Baobao in the play becomes a businessman and becomes a smart nouveau riche, but the accumulation of wealth cannot solve the knots that intellectuals are twisted out by the environment; the life of the honest neighbor next door is completely crushed, and on a cold winter night, he gets involved in a murder case that will never get the truth.
In the past, people always associated "Northeast" with "Zhao Benshan", which was a land full of joy, and the people were brave and happy, running trains with their mouths full.
With the emergence of the works of Shuangxuetao, Zheng Zhi and Ban Yu, everyone slowly has a specific and accurate imagination of the "small city in the Northeast in the last century", understands the impact of every grain of sand on civilians in the great era, and reverses the stereotype that "there are only Zhao Benshan and the two people in the Northeast".
When people thought that Yanfen Street was Shuangxuetao's comfort zone, and they were accustomed to enjoying the scenery of the Northeast through his pen, he turned his pen and left the plain in the past two years.
Recently, he published a collection of short stories, The Man Who Doesn't Stop, seven short stories, each of which surprises readers.
At the beginning, he writes about the AI turning over, eager to occupy the body of the maker, the scientist longing for the speed of a computer, and later, the scientist dies.
In the second part, the mass idol is sought after by countless fans, who knows that he met a perverted fan and wanted to kill him.
In the third part, the young model of Beipiao is engaged in prostitution, and is targeted by the killer, and his life hangs by a thread; in the fourth part, the mathematician breaks into a mysterious villa alone, relies on theory to complete a fraud, and finally blood is splashed on the spot......
A collection of seven short stories that is thrilling to watch, and the new books are full of violent crimes and a high density of deaths.
The first batch of readers reported that they were not adaptable, because his story was far away from the Northeast Plains, so that readers living in other regions lost an opportunity to have a romantic and expansive imagination of the Northeast again.
But his story is more gripping than before, the writing is simple and exquisite, the atmosphere is less retro filter, and it is closer to the present. The pandemic has given him a new perspective and mentality, and the development of technology has excited and frightened a person who is keen to observe the world.
In the words of Douban netizens, this book makes people see 100% reality, so detailed that it seems to be 24-hour uninterrupted monitoring, and also sees 100% fiction, which is the degree of one-foot bouncing off the earth.
Old book lovers were worried at first that the novel would lose its soul when the story left the familiar geography. But after reading it, I happily sighed, this familiar suspense, this deep coolness, the taste is right. Shuangxuetao is still so interesting.
Sure enough, a true master will never disappoint, and this time is no different.
Although the new book has received a good response, some people on the Internet still say that in fact, it is easier to please readers and sell better to write content related to Northeast China, and perhaps it will be easier to create, so why bother stepping out of your comfort zone.
Some people also asked, in this era when everyone is less and less fond of reading, how much market is there for writers like Shuangxuetao? If books can't be sold, what are they still insisting on?
A similar question was also asked in the interview: As a practitioner, what is it that you are guarding and defending?
Shuangxuetao's answer is that he only wants to advocate - to advocate freedom of expression. In the face of environmental influences and the power of capital, freedom of expression becomes more and more important. Because without freedom there is no expression.
As a writer, whatever you write, you do so in order to strive for as much freedom and unique expression as possible, rather than following the guidance of algorithms to copy what already exists and can bring benefits.
The reason why the new book is written about artificial intelligence, intensive homicides, confused young people and frustrated northrunners is to express a pessimistic concern and reminder about capital, the Internet, and artificial intelligence.
His most memorable news lately is about SORA, where a video is surprisingly realistic and automatically generated by a computer as you type text. This will mean the unemployment of countless people working in the film and television industry, and it will happen in the near future. He wasn't sure how powerful the AI was, but he was worried.
So the first story at the beginning of the new book is about artificial intelligence. The machine continues to evolve and is finally reborn with a physical body. They imitate human behavior and commit crimes against human beings. While robots are trying their best to have the core of a human, humans have no regrets about having the computing speed of a machine.
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"I think it's scary that AI makes decisions and produces solutions in a different way than humans," he said, "what happens when AI can write a novel on its own, create a movie on its own, and even give advice to politicians? ”
"I think it's very dangerous when humans are very willing to listen to AI judgments. But we are already at a stage where we are moving forward at a rapid pace. ”
The potential crisis of artificial intelligence may be much in the future, and for now, he is even more worried about the online environment in which people live.
When Shuang Xuetao wrote his new book, it was just in time for the spread of the epidemic, and there was more and more news about "death" around the world. In the face of the new crown, human life seems to have lost its weight, someone in India has died of strange complications, and some residents in the United States have died without treatment, and the Internet has fully demonstrated to people that there are a million ways to die.
People are anxious, lonely, fearful, and cyberbullying incidents occur from time to time, and some people are abused and insulted just because they gave the delivery man 200 yuan as a thank you fee, and they fall down the building unjustly.
He said that when the online world becomes more and more colorful, and the online gods become more and more confusing, netizens with a slightly less discerning ability will be easily deceived and go to extremes.
A still from "Assassination of a Novelist".
The network assumes the function of education and guidance, but it is not responsible for the educated, and capital will condone and guide people's emotions and ignore the truth for the sake of profit. Information gives people enough access to the world, but it also restricts people's freedom in another way, leaving them with nowhere to hide.
People are indeed very smart, but when their education level and IQ increase, they are prone to mistake theory for reality and fail to understand people's hearts.
Shuang Xuetao doesn't want to say that anyone has a problem, he just wants to look for the problem, worrying about people who are misled by online information.
When he was a child, the neighbors were very close, and the children played with their peers from an early age, and established good interpersonal relationships in the simplest way.
The media spends many days guarding the truth of a piece of news, and people watch TV and newspapers in a hurry, but they have limited access to information, and they do not receive a large amount of homogeneous information every day. Poverty is real, but there is no need to be anxious.
A still from "Moses on the Plains".
There may be conflicts between acquaintances, and no one casually scolds an ordinary person they have never met.
People still believe that knowledge changes destiny, and children study hard to advance their ranks or achieve their ideals. No one shouts to be an Internet celebrity, no one wants to make money by scolding, and no one sees work as moving bricks.
And now, he has to admit that the environment is very different from before. He wrote several stories, including high school students who were ignored by their parents and plotted to commit crimes, literary and artistic young women who were obsessed with idols and did not hesitate to kill people to change the world, high-IQ mathematicians who thought that crime had zero cost, and ordinary migrant workers who had an empty heart and pinned their energy and emotions on sports and sex.
These ordinary people have been disguised for a long time in the story, and suddenly commit crimes.
In this way, the writer expresses his concern for the world.
A still from "Moses on the Plains".
In 2019, Shuang Xuetao gave a lecture at the University of Lagonada, Spain, where he said that wealth creates cities, the virtual flesh of people creates mediocre spirits, and art and serious writing are becoming more personal and tiny.
But he firmly believes that beauty and poetry do not fail easily. No matter where humanity has traveled and where cities have evolved, writers should be present.
This is the persistence of the rebellious middle-aged people born in the 80s, full of faith. Nowadays, it is rare.