You are the april day of the world

Chapter 15 Comments (1)
Selected Topics of Novels in Literature and Art Series

"Ta Kung Pao Literary Supplement" has been published for more than a year, and now I will put forward the short stories that belong to creation in this first year, select a few, and print them as separate volumes for readers to read more conveniently.This work should indeed please the conscientious writer and reader alike.

There are not many articles here, and there are not many people, but it is still solid and full in a small anthology, and it can fill people with joyful hope when they are held in hand.

We are not afraid that after the reader has read it, the hope that has been raised may be dimmed into disappointment.Because this disappointment may be unavoidable. If readers sincerely hold great ideals for the creation world, they will already have extraordinary expectations in their hearts.But as long as it's an honest response from readers, we're not afraid.Because here is a bunch of honest achievements of the author, which together represent a part of the creative world's experiment in a year. No matter what standard is used to measure it, no one has a word to judge its success or failure.

Now let’s take the editor’s impressions of these multiple works as a reference for readers to browse and review this anthology, simply a few comments below.

If we take a bird's-eye view of this small situation, at least one of the most striking phenomena unfolds before our eyes.In these works, there seems to be a very biased tendency in the choice of subject matter: that is, it tends to describe the life of rural or less educated people or laborers.This tendency is not accidental. To put it better, our era has strong sympathy and concern for them—farmers and laborers; to put it worse, it is a phenomenon of blindly following the trend of the times.But it's fairest to say that both of the above reasons have something to do with it.It has become a trend to describe the labor society with a rural color, and it has also achieved some success in the literary and art circles.Beginning writers, or writers with weak personalities, are prone to unconsciously and imitate all kinds of already-established styles in writing.Especially in our era, young writers are very sad that they enjoy material goods and are superior to the general less educated people, so they naturally want to know the poverty of the countryside and become interested in the remote hinterland. Life does not write.Taking a single article as an example, many of them are well written, and some are particularly wonderful.However, judging from the overall experiment in the creative world, this bias indicates weakness and lack of creative power.And writing for the motive of conscience, the artistic content of that work will be questioned.We hope that the anthology can reveal this lack of creativity, or artistic innocence at this point, and stimulate writers themselves to be more individual and more enthusiastic to portray this multi-faceted and intricate life, not sticking to any one angle.

Apart from the bias towards subject matter mentioned above, there is no doubt about the seriousness of creating literature and art.Under the smoke screen of fluent writing in the previous era, novels that satirized individuals to gain popular humor have now been invisible to the door of hard-working creators, and have declined to the point of extinction.This situation is indeed a good phenomenon worthy of our authors and readers to celebrate.

In terms of description, we feel that most of them use the method of writing a story, or centering on one or two characters, or taking the beginning and end of an event in a certain place as the main body, and simply developing and ending.This is also a relatively weak method.This is why we suspect that many authors have misunderstood the limitations of the short story and overestimated its possibilities.Few people try to take a bold section of life, and not many people take it seriously to show the contradictions of personal life.This is also a pity among us.

As for the level of skill in the short stories here; the average level, the editor has to ask the readers to pay attention without avoiding suspicion.Undoubtedly, in terms of structure, description, and distribution of narration and dialogue, most authors have already used it very maturely and naturally.Jerky, childish and lengthy works, which were unashamedly scattered in various printed materials in the early days of the new literature and art, have now completely disappeared.The coherence of the whole text, the economy of words, the arrangement of key points, and the vividness of colors and pictures have become very common standards.We believe that readers will not be unaware of those advantages in each chapter; for those places, the editors have been given a lot of joy and hope.

Finally, if it is not too far away from the topic, we have to talk about our views on the author and his works in detail.The most important part of the work is honesty.The importance of honesty lies in the freshness of the subject matter, the integrity of the structure, and the fluentness of the writing.That is to say, the work must be honest to the life that the author understands objectively and experiences subjectively.Even if the scenes of the novel are entirely fictional, the emotions in the content must rely on reality. Experienced emotions must never use emptiness and falsehood to support the sad "plot"!The so-called honesty does not mean that the author must actually go through the life mentioned in the works, but that all the lives mentioned in the works are indeed what the author understands very clearly intellectually and can experience very emotionally. situation or personality.Many people deliberately choose some special romantic life that they are not familiar with because they feel guilty that their lifestyle is not new, and then use their limited imagination to exaggerate the emotions they do not have, so as to deceive readers. sympathy.This kind of creation is a waste of words to exaggerate hypocritical scenes and sentimentality, and those serious readers who want to enrich their life and understand life from literature and art will naturally feel very impatient and disappointed.

The richness of life does not lie in the variety of ways of living, such as being an apprentice, pulling a rickshaw, going to Gansu and Yunnan, but the sharpness of objective observation and subjective feeling at the same time, can understand in many ways And taste what you see, hear, encounter, all kinds of different situations; you have to understand the relationship and involvement of people in life; the dramatic changes between fixed and accidental; finally, you have to have your own special views and ideas, beliefs or philosophies.

A person with a rich life is not one who sees certain things objectively, but one who can arouse very complex and different emotions subjectively, and can sympathize with many aspects of human nature.

Therefore, an author, in addition to the technical knowledge of using words, must be able to stand on any life, between the subjective and the objective, between the feeling and the understanding, with more than enough advances and retreats in reason, unrestrained in emotion, and intertwined with memory and fantasy. Auxiliary, to the extent that true is false and false is true, his works are full of vitality and sincerity.Only then will his works be full and great, unaffected by subject matter or words, but enduring and universally moving.

Of course, readers understand these truths better than authors, so the evaluation of works is always in the hands of serious readers. This is one of the reasons why this anthology has to be printed and dedicated to its impartial judges.

published in
On December 1936, 3, the 1th weekly special issue of "Ta Kung Pao Literary Supplement"

crispy

Living in these very exciting years, I dare to say with a sigh of relief that I believe that there must be a lot of people who have been observing and hearing all day long, which has touched their nerves and accumulated all kinds of emotions from the beating and blood-wrapped hearts. This kind of emotion rushed straight out of the throat, forcing it into words onto the tongue.This natural and rich accumulation sometimes overflows the lips and tongues of a few people, and then rushes to the tip of the pen, and becomes words galloping on white paper in another form.This kind of writing is a product of our era, and everyone should cherish it!

Now, no matter where, if there is one or more opportunities, we can hand over many of these naturally triggered words to the public at the same time, and thus may arouse more aspects and more complex emotions. And more forms of words are formed from this emotion; it has always created a large piece of rich and powerful creative fields, forests, mountains and rivers... producing solid expressions and articles unique to our era; should we be sincere? Noticing this opportunity or the cause that can be created, everyone donates a little bit of their own efforts to try?
Suppose, there is an opportunity to gather many people here again, in order to introduce many aspects of writing, and further study the qualitative aspects of the article; I dare to believe that under such circumstances, there will be a more serious initiative to encourage writing, which will increase the number of problems in the creative world, perhaps.It is only the addition of problems that contributes to the vitality and health of creation.Literature and art are by no means flourishing weeds.

Can we confess one thing frankly?The encouragement of creation often depends on publications to spread its achievements to the wind, to bask in the sun, and to meet the readers of the times.Being blown cold by the wind and drying out in the sun is a common thing.To be welcomed by readers, to be indifferent, or to be misunderstood, or to be sympathetic, in the final analysis, should be the potion to stimulate creativity!As for the authors who hold their toes high when they first come, and then get discouraged when they come, there are inevitably traces of their ups and downs in every era.

This is only a side issue with the development of the main body of the creative world.Which era of creative prosperity lacks publications that introduce and distribute works, and readers who may sympathize or do not understand?
Creations cannot fail to meet the times, although the author's first and last names are not necessarily.Great works have not met this era, and there are certainly some that are found and cherished by other eras, but they are only accidental exceptions.Greek tragedies are sung in front of tens of thousands of people, and Shakespeare's plays can be seen even by rough people in the streets and alleys.In Europe in the era of publications, not to mention, when a poem comes out, everyone is vying to buy it. Even when China is struggling to print, it is also something that is "recited for a while" or "copied by hand".

The main force of creation is firmly in the bottom of my heart, but it is often the encouragement and efforts of publications that force this emotional language that is only time-sensitive and keep it in space.

(End of this chapter)