【Editor's Note】East China Normal University-Focus Media "Future Writer" Award was announced in Shanghai today, and Zhang Yiwei and Squid who loves diving won the awards for "Family Experiment" and "Lord of Mystery". Sun Ganlu, convener of the judging committee and president of the China Academy of Creative Writing, said that the award attempts to observe, select and launch outstanding young writers in a wider range of fields, introduce high-quality literary resources into the scene of literary education, provide young students with the vision and model of writing, and promote the development of domestic youth literary creation, and show the judgment and voice of the college to the literary world.
In order to carry forward the literary creation characteristics of the Department of Chinese of East China Normal University and celebrate the 70th anniversary of the department, the China Creative Writing Institute of East China Normal University set up the "Future Writers" award in June this year, and in the "long list" previously announced, Wang Zhanhei, Sun Pin, Zhang Yiwei, Chen Qifan, Wu Daochang is not alone, Zheng Zhi, Zhou Kai, squid who loves diving, Di An, durian afraid of water and other young writers are on the list, of which nearly half of the "post-90s" are on the list.
Gu Hongliang, vice president of East China Normal University, expects that the "Future Writer" award will help break the boundary between online literature and pure literature, select outstanding literary works facing the times and the future, and set an example for young students to set an example for young writers.
The following are the testimonials of the award-winning authors as authorized:
Focus Media Executive Director Ji Hairong, and East China Normal University International Chinese Culture College Dean Zhu Guohua presented awards to squid who love diving
The pursuit beyond "coolness"
Text/Squid who loves to dive
I am very excited and honored to receive this award, and thank you for the affirmation of all the teachers. As the creator of web novels, I have always positioned myself as a storyteller. In this industry, most of the authors are because I have a good idea, a good idea, a good bridge, want to share it with more people, and then step by step on the road of creation, which is the most original and purest desire for expression. So do I.
Pure expression, we do it every day, talk to different people, dialogue in various ways, complete the transmission of self-meaning, which translates into the text of the novel, it seems that it is not too difficult. I started with this idea, but when I really started, I found that the threshold was inside.
At first, I felt that my description was dry and could not impress others, so I tried to experience, to feel, to find out what was the most suitable word to put in such a paragraph, what was the most appropriate and spiritual permutation, and sometimes, just simply to adjust the two words to a position, I would have a feeling of cheerfulness. Later, I found that the small stories I thought were full of feelings could not impress the readers, could not make them resonate, had to retrace the source of my original touch, and find a way to figure out where the emotional changes at that time came from, how to progress, after experiencing it again and again, I knew how to lay the groundwork, understood restraint, and understood the piercing after layers of weaving.
Later, after the length of the novel grew, I felt that the story became loose, the theme was no longer clear, and there was no sense of legal rigor, so I had to re-examine, learn again, learn from the experience of my predecessors, and slowly feel the beauty of the skeleton structure. When the novel goes deeper, I hope that when I pass on my thoughts, my own views, and my own ideas to the readers, the feeling of inadequacy is always with me, and the most difficult thing between people is the resonance of the heart and the resonance of thoughts.
In order to do better in this regard, I constantly observe reality, extract elements, look for the beauty that can infiltrate the soul, move it to my own pen, and try to restore it. I'm a storyteller and I always want to be able to excel and do better. There is no end to the road, but I want to go further and see more scenery.
I don't think there is any difference in the essence of online literature and pure literary fiction, no matter how to go to the end, I hope to express something, hope to have spiritual resonance with the reader, spiritual communication, which is the degree that any form of writing will inevitably reach in the end. As teacher Zhu Guohua said, online novels have just begun to start from the stage of grass and recklessness, and more pursuit is a sense of coolness, hoping to stimulate the reader's senses. But after more than 20 years of development of online literature, the whole context has changed. Taking the crossing novel as an example, it is now more the collision and resonance of the thoughts, feelings, and civilizations of modern people represented by the protagonist and the civilization represented by the generation representing the world in which they are located.
Li Er, deputy director and writer of the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, and writer Sun Ganlu presented awards to Zhang Yiwei
"Don't give up writing"
Text/Zhang Yiwei
In fact, I was very surprised to receive this literary award. The last time I won a literary prize was many years ago. For me as a student, a literature prize was a bonus, rent and tuition. Later, I spent a long time hoping to quit similar path dependence, but in fact, I also wanted to avoid gain and loss, to have more time to devote to writing, and to learn more survival skills to live well.
Many of the teachers here are the predecessors who helped me, and many teachers even watched me grow up, watched me complete my studies, participated in work, and was the guide I met on the literary road that I was very smooth. Family Experiment is the result of my first ten years of writing fiction. I was surprised that it won an award. If I hadn't written literature, I would have been a very ordinary person, an ordinary family, an ordinary IQ, doing ordinary work. It was literature that gave me the opportunity to record the people, streets, communities I have seen, a lifetime of sorrow and sorrow. By writing stories, I actually gave my originally bleak life a little more shining light. Many people have seen me, especially through the Internet age, and even let many readers who do not know me interact and chat with our common literary memories. Through the study and creation of literature, I build my own economic life, social life and, of course, more importantly, spiritual life. I'm doing a lot better than the characters in my novels because I've received a lot of help from literature, and now I'm trying to give back the kindness I've gained to younger writers. It is literature that gives another life, a better life, and I hope they will also appreciate it.
The name of the "Future Writers" award is very dazzling. It reminds me of the 2017 Harvard University edition of The New History of Modern Chinese Literature, a new literary history that spans from 1635 to 2066. It tries to solve the dilemma of time in our modern and contemporary literary history writing, that is, modern literature is only thirty years old, even if the time is pulled to the late Qing Dynasty "Tales of Flowers on the Sea", it still cannot solve the problem that contemporary literary history is getting longer and longer, and every day is expanding, running to the sky for a long time. Professor Wang Dewei proposed a plan, that is, to start modern literature in the late Ming Dynasty and run to the virtual scene of Han Song's science fiction novel "Journey to the West in 2066", that is, when we write the history of literature, the "future" is already included in the history of literature.
The future is the present, and the future can even be a reality that the more distant future goes backwards. Because Han Song's novel is told by the protagonist in 2126 through flashbacks, the narration is sixty years ago- 2066 years of the past. "Future writers" is also a riddle similar to time, in the name of the future, to give me, such an old-fashioned person who does not write about the virtual world and metacosm created by supercomputers, a little bit like salvaged artifacts. So we have to write a little more, so that we can have enough material world corpus to communicate with future people. "I am a writer", which means "past tense", means "the rich and complex spiritual life of the past", and means the love, hope and civilization that human beings once recorded together.
Like Dean Huang Ping and Dean Xiang Jing, I still have a job as a writing educator. I was very fortunate to catch up with the good times when the discipline of "creative writing" was in full swing. When a writing teacher has many opportunities to see younger students using literature as a way to construct connections with the world, some successfully and some unsuccessfully. They went to various places to work and live in a hard way. I remembered that we once had a student who, after graduation, broke off contact with all my classmates. Recently I heard that she was finally found, she was alone with a child, and she was a single mother. We don't even know what she went through, but we can imagine her toil. Professor Wang Anyi heard about this incident, and she asked us to find a way to convey it to her, "Don't give up writing."
I couldn't contact her directly, but I was shocked to see that text message. If she will see it recently, then I would like to tell her that Teacher Wang once said to her. In fact, it is also said to us, "Don't give up writing."
Finally, I wish the Creative Writing Institute of China Normal University and a happy birthday to the 70th anniversary of East China Normal University.
(Subtitle added by the editor)
Editor: Xu Yang
Image source: Organizer