Interview with Macao novelist Liang Shuqi

In reality, the novelist would be restless if he was the center of attention. He once said, " I'd rather be an invisible man if I could ."

However, in order to publish a new work: "Indiscriminate Lovers", Liang Shuqi attended the 2021 10th Macao Literary Festival: "Juan Wen Immortal" .

In order to realize the dream of publishing a book, he actively contributed to the Literature Award, and won the Excellence Award of the "Macao Novella Award Essay" three times. The three winning works were all published by "Macao Daily Press", one of the organizers. "The Sunshine Is Brightest" (2014) is Liang Shuqi's current favorite masterpiece.

The recent novel "Indiscriminate Lovers" ( 2021) was published as an e-book by Taiwan's Mirror Literature.

The editor of Jing Literature found Liang Shuqi in Fang Gezi, and expressed interest after reading the outline of "Indiscriminate Lovers", which is her first novel signed to write.

Excuse me, if you want to come up with a physical book after "Indiscriminate Lovers", it must also be published by Mirror Literature? Is the copyright for e-book and physical book publishing the same?

"Indiscriminate Lover" is a work signed with Jingwen Literature. Before the contract expires, the copyright of this work belongs to Jingwen Literature, so during the contract period, the physical book must also be published by Jingwen Literature.

How is your experience working with Jingwen different from the publishing houses you have worked with in the past? Are you still satisfied with the editing, marketing, design, etc. handled by Mirror Literature for you?

The editors of Mirror Literature will revise the manuscript very seriously, and will give a lot of opinions from the text to the content of the story. This is a revision mode that I have not seen before, and there are many benefits from it. For example, in the upcoming "It's All Those Legends", the editor It is required to make major changes. After I made the changes according to the editor's opinion, I found that the effect is really much better than the original content , so I admire the editor's professional vision. Sometimes the author can break through his blind spot and write Better novels.

In terms of marketing and design, Jingwen Literature has a professional team to follow up, and I have never worried about this aspect. For example, before the serialization of "Indiscriminate Lovers", Jingwen Literature specially did an exclusive interview with me: The demise of love's Utopia— - Liang Shuqi talked about "Indiscriminate Lovers" , and made various publicity on the Internet.

Can you tell us about the content of the book "Double Decades Hua" (co-authored with Jiran)? How to work with Jingran?

When the publishing house asked me to cooperate with Jiran to publish a collection of short stories, when we were discussing the content of the novel, we found that that year was the tenth anniversary of our writing, so we decided to use the name "Double Decade", and decided that our respective Write a novel with this title, although the title is the same, but the content is different, it does not matter at all.

"Two Decades of Flowers" is a collection of short stories, and Ji Ran and I each selected four short stories.

Ji Ran's works in this book are "Double Decades", "Women's Generation", "Forget Me Forgot" and "Confessions of a Mask", while my works are "Double Decades", "Double Decades" Circle>, <Meteor>, and <Distance>.

Is there a thematic arrangement? Or just their own collections? Just to commemorate the tenth anniversary of writing?

There is no thematic arrangement. At that time, I hadn't published a book yet, so the publishing house asked Jingran to bring me, and they chose four novels each. Actually, it wasn't to commemorate the tenth anniversary of writing. It just happened to be that we both wrote ten years in that year.

As far as you know, what is the most active literary activity in Macau at present? Are you invited to participate in the Macau Literature Festival?

First of all, I just like literary creation. I will actively write and submit articles, but I rarely participate in literary activities, so my answer is not accurate.

The "Macao Literature Festival" is a large-scale literary event held every year. The organizer is very active in organizing various events, and it is a literary event that combines Portuguese and Chinese, and the scale is also relatively large.

" PEN Macau " also organizes some literary activities from time to time, but I have rarely participated in recent years, so I don't know much about them.

From time to time there are some literary award essay competitions in Macau. I have participated in and won awards in the past, but in the same way, I have not participated in many years, and probably will not participate in the future.

I am a relatively inactive author. I only write and do not participate in activities. The last time I was invited to attend the Macau Literature Festival was purely to promote my new book.

If you have the opportunity to vacation in Taiwan, what kind of itinerary would you like to arrange related to literary and artistic creation? Who are you visiting?

In fact, before the epidemic, I traveled to Taiwan almost every year.

My husband (Jun Ran) basically arranges the Taiwan itinerary. Every time I go to Taiwan, I go to a different bookstore, and I buy a lot of books to go home. And every time I go to Bookstore Street (Chongqing South Road), I also go to " Star Cafe " to eat.

In fact, some cultural and creative itineraries are also arranged every time, such as going to "Huashan Cultural and Creative Zone", "Songshan Cultural and Creative Zone", "Pier-2 Art Special Zone" and so on. After watching "The 36th Story", I even went to "Duoer Cafe" to see it, so what kind of itinerary I will arrange when I come to Taiwan after the epidemic can only be decided according to the situation at that time. Maybe At that time, no matter which book or movie I have read, I want to go to those places.

But next time we go to Taipei, we will want to go to "Taipei Pop Music Center".

Is it convenient for Macau to buy books published in Taiwan? Shipping is expensive?

Macau bookstores sell Taiwanese books (although not all of them are available), otherwise it is very convenient to buy them on blogs. If you buy from blogs, the book price plus shipping is equivalent to buying Taiwanese books in Macau bookstores, so it is a reasonable price Bar.

Your first short story: "Wait", not only won the first prize of the "Macau Literary Award Fiction Category", but was later adapted into a film by Hong Kong director Cheng Sijie (starring Edison Chen and Wang Minyi).

Movie "Open My Sky" :

 (English: Good Take Too), is a Hong Kong film released in 2016, starring Zeng Zhiwei, Fang Haomin, Edison Chen, Wang Minyi, Tian Niu, Xu Tianyou, and Huang Rihua, consisting of four stories by four directors, including Zheng Sijie's "Wait" , Mai Xiyin's "Youth", Tang Jiawei's "Pirates and Guides", Zhong Chuqiao's "Leer".

In the novel "Wait", two seemingly unrelated narrative lines finally meet. Who influenced this narrative mode in the first place? Has this narrative method been deliberately used since "Wait"? Multi-line narrative and multiple perspectives have always been your usual methods? Why?

When I wrote "Wait," I probably hadn't been influenced by anyone. I had just entered college that year, and I read only popular novels in middle school before, and I hadn't officially entered the literary world, so I just wrote it out of intuition.

I don't use multi-line narrative or multiple perspectives in every novel, but I do use this technique very often, probably because I am greedy, there are too many things I want to write into the novel, and I also want to write unpredictable stories. So unconsciously, it tends to develop into a multi-line narrative.

When I read novels, I like to see unexpected endings, so I often hope to write novels that readers don't expect.

A feature of my previous novels is that someone must die, because I am very fascinated by the theme of death , but I have written too much, so I want to gradually get rid of the shadow of death and write something lighter.

After I wrote "Indiscriminate Lovers", when my daughter said she wanted to read this book, I realized that the book was too heavy for her to read, and I was really frustrated because the subject matter was too heavy when I wrote it, so I wanted to write it later. It is a novel that even children can read, so last year I wrote a relatively light novel "It's All Those Legends" , which is also a contracted work of Jingwen Literature, and will be serialized on this website this week.

When did you start writing?

I started writing novels and submitting manuscripts in the third year of junior high school. At first, I only wrote small novels, and I also started writing my first serial novel when I was in middle school.

"Wait" was supposed to be my first short story, and I've written more short stories and serials off and on.

Have you ever given up writing?

When I was a sophomore or junior, because I saw real literary works, I realized that the novels I wrote were too naive, so I lost confidence in writing, so I stopped writing completely for more than a year, and I almost gave up at that time. However, because I really liked writing, I couldn’t help but start writing again and never stopped. Although I was less productive for a while, I started writing more frequently in the past two or three years.

Are you and Jingran each other's first readers? How did silence affect your creative side? A moment of disagreement about the novel?

The novels we have written are not necessarily the first time for the other party to read. I usually ask him to review it and give some opinions when I am very unconfident. The rest of the time, I did not specifically ask the other party to give any opinions.

It's hard to say whether the silence has had a great influence on my creation, because I follow a different route from his creation. He focuses on the narrative, and I focus on the plot. I still follow the path that I like, and I may have listened to him a lot. Occasionally, I will make new attempts, but I can't tell if it is not really influenced by him.

If we have different opinions on writing novels, then we have never had the same opinion, but why pursue the same opinion? There are literally thousands of ways to write a novel. Sometimes after reading my novel, he will think about how he would deal with such a story. Of course, his approach is completely different from mine, but I probably won’t follow him Complete changes, unless it is a very serious problem, or keep your own style as much as possible, and only modify some details.

The five brothers and sisters in "The Sun Is Most Bright" all have supernatural abilities, especially San Chun (the storyteller: me), who can see "pictures of future events" and become the main driving force to promote the plot. There is a similar plot in Different Lovers. May I ask you the opportunity and function of using "surreal elements" in your novels?

Fiction can reflect reality, but only the world of fiction can develop things that are impossible in reality at will. I like to write "surreal elements" in fiction, turning the impossible in reality into the possibility of the world of fiction, in addition to making the world of fiction possible. It becomes more fun, and it also satisfies my creative desire, because the author has the ability to create a world . Even if the world is unreasonable, the author can make the world build and exist.

I myself like to read novels about powers, so naturally I want to create more incredible novels.

The first-person narration in "The Sun is Most Bright" creates a sense of authenticity of the novel, like a family history of "non-fiction", through "me" to family members in "deliberate chat-style interviews", "I" does not. When you turn to the camera to speak to "you", you are emphasizing telling the story to the reader. In order to explain more "omniscient information", the third person is of course often used. Could you please talk about the role and function of these three people in your novel.

"The Sun Is Brightest" involves five siblings, the past, the present, and the future, and it took me a long time to figure out what narrative angle to use to write the story. Of course I could write it all in third person, which is actually easier, but I'm worried that too many narrative lines will confuse the reader, and it's more complicated to have to travel through different timelines. So I thought about it for a long time, and finally decided to use the current method, with "I" as the protagonist, set a "story" in each chapter, tell their stories through the third person, and then set "the future of the future" to describe what may happen in the future to tie the past, present and future together.

From the very beginning of the novel, the second-person pronoun "you" has been used to make the reader immerse in the novel more quickly, so as to get closer to the reader at once, and it also constantly reminds the reader that he is reading the novel, so it appears later. The "God and the Novelist" section is not so abrupt.

San Chun (the storyteller: me), can see the "picture of future events", and then goes on to explain that this kind of foreshadowing picture does not always happen as it is, so readers are warned that there may be "unreliable narrators", What do you think of the "unreliable narrator" narrative mode?

The "unreliable narrator" plays an important role in many novels, that is, to deceive the reader, so that the reader finally finds out that he has been deceived by the trap set by the author, so he is hooked on this big turning point. .

There is no attempt to create an "unreliable narrator" in "The Sun Is Most Bright". The protagonist has been working hard to reverse the future he sees, and he has not set any traps to deceive readers, just to create a sense of suspense.

Both "The Sunshine Is Brightest" and "Undifferentiated Lovers" have a lot of dialogues on "how to truly forgive those who hurt themselves". The former method of reconciliation seems to rely on "superpowers" to break through the frame of obsession, while the latter provides a more Specific practical practices, and the scale of writing has been significantly enlarged, with more (seemingly unrelated but interlinked) family cases, more focused social issues (indiscriminate killing), what are your thoughts on the scale of your writing or self-transcendence? What is the expectation?

Every time I write a novel, I set a different theme. The theme of "The Sunshine Is Brightest" is misfortune. At that time, I was facing the biggest misfortune in my life, and I kept thinking about the meaning of such misfortune in my life. In the end, I found the answer for myself by writing "Sunshine is the Brightest" and accompany myself through the darkest days, so I always thought that this was my best work.

In the saddest days of my life, I still had hope in my heart to write in "The Sun Is Brightest" "We can't escape misfortune, but we must believe that all misfortunes can always be overcome ", I wished I had superpowers at that time , so that I can overcome misfortune in one step, but unfortunately I don't have it, so I can only get myself covered with superpowers through writing.

After writing "The Sunshine Is Brightest", I got out of my misfortune, and my life became more and more beautiful. I have mentioned many times that one of the reasons I write novels is to heal my wounds. After writing this book, all my wounds have been healed. After that, I haven’t written novels for several years because I have already There is no need for this, so later writing "Undifferentiated Lover" is no longer just to heal myself, but to start turning from myself to society, and the scale has become larger.

I know the limitations of my writing, my vision is not grand enough, maybe because I prefer to indulge in my own small world and seldom care about the world, so the scale of the novels I have written before are generally small.

Regarding surpassing myself, in fact, I don’t want to repeat what I have written before in every novel, and I want to make a little bit different every time, but the problem is that my novels don’t have enough features to make people see it. My name can tell what kind of novel I write. I've been thinking about this recently, should I continue to challenge genres I haven't written before, or should I focus on writing a certain genre well.

The narrative of "The Sunshine Is Brightest" is driven like a domino. Towards the end, the novelist appeared and said in a "posthumous tone": "I like novels with perfect ending of the lines, because I believe that there must be a reason for everything." In "No Difference" The multiple narrative lines of "Love" are intertwined and woven towards the intersection. The structure is exquisite, and it has completed the task set by the novelist, so in your novel, refuse to leave suspense at the end? Leave it to the reader's imagination?

I really like novels with perfect ending of fu-sing, so I like Kotaro Isaka's novels very much. His novels always have many fu-sings and they can end perfectly in the end. If I put the suspense but don't answer it, I will feel it is irresponsible, so as long as I ask a question in the novel, I will write the answer well.

Sometimes when I write a novel, I create some questions, and then I try to find the answers. Sometimes it is difficult to set the questions, and it is even more difficult to write the answers, but this is the most interesting process of thinking about the novel.

What was the most interesting phase of writing for you?

I always think the ideation stage is the most interesting. The process of building a world from scratch is the most fun. It starts with deciding on the theme, then begins to conceive the direction of the story, then sets the characters, and then sets each plot. The process continues Add new ideas and constantly overthrow yourself until the entire story structure and details are finally settled. Usually, you will be very excited during the conception process, but you will occasionally feel pain when you are actually writing, because sometimes you may not be able to write the plot conceived in your mind. Or I feel wrong when I write, or find a plot contradiction, or the more I write, the more out of shape I will inevitably get into trouble, but generally I can overcome it in the end, and it will bring a great sense of satisfaction after overcoming it.

I invite you to say a few words of encouragement or advice to Matters writers, especially those who want to publish a book.

I have always felt that the most important thing in writing is persistence. As long as you persist enough, you can complete the work.

Sometimes I don't care whether the writing is good or not, I will finish it first, and then I will revise it slowly after finishing the work. Especially if you are writing a novel or want to publish a book, you need to persevere, because it is not a job that can be completed in a moment, and if you are not determined enough, it is easy to give up halfway.

Persistence is never easy, so those who can persevere to the end are amazing.

There are many people who think that it is necessary to make sure that there is a chance to publish a book before starting to create. They think that if there is no chance after writing, is it a waste of time and energy? But this concept should be changed, and the opportunity to publish a book must be completed first. If you can't come up with a work at all, how can you get a chance?

Maybe the opportunity doesn't come right away, but as long as you keep creating and writing well enough, the opportunity will always come.

Please use good works to speak. If you can't write good works today, you should read more high-quality works, write more and practice more, and you can seize the opportunity when it comes.

❑ Editor-in-chief postscript:

There are two kinds of writing situations. Writing alone , indulging in the state of the client, writing what only the client can write. The other is group writing . Join a guided writing class and a literature club that holds observation and discussion activities to stimulate each other's creative thinking.

After you finish writing, you can submit papers, participate in literary awards, or publish on the writing platform to gain influence.

No matter what kind it is, if there are suitable expert readers and literary editors around to guide the way and guide blind spots, it is a great luck!

Otherwise, I personally think it’s pretty good to write about health care! The limit is also very high!

As for the so-called "Bookstore Street", it generally refers to Eslite. If you only know that Eslite is not fake enough, then I recommend the " Taiwan Independent Bookstore Map ", which is more united if the smaller the crowd. The detailed information is listed according to the administrative region. Let you not miss the specialty bookstore near your home.

"Bookstore: Learning"

Since the establishment of "Tangshan Bookstore" during the martial law period, it has enlightened generations of readers and bookstore operators in Taiwan, and decades of history and social changes in Taiwan have gone up and down in front of each bookstore. Faced with different situations and challenges, young people of all generations are still investing in the bookstore industry one after another, learning about the world from reading, and exploring the cultural texture of the place in the form of running a bookstore. Through interviews, the operators of 16 independent bookstores in Taiwan will explain the origins of opening their stores and their management wisdom in the video, and guide the way for the next generation of bookstores, which is called "Bookstore: Learning" .

Further reading:

The pioneer of independent bookstores, Tangshan Bookstore retains the old days of Taiwan | Feng Shaoen - Foresight Magazine