Be Your Own Ghost: 'Fix' Fixes the Meaning of 'Storytelling'

It is difficult for anyone to resist the beauty of "story", which contains the temptation of tension, the temptation of cause and effect, and the temptation of solution.

In mystery novels or suspense-style films and dramas, there is often a wise detective character, who is looking for clues and discovering flaws in the case-handling process, and finally uncovers the truth. The axe's novel "Fix" has a mysterious netizen "Agui" who secretly assists seven writers in writing the plot of the mystery novel; at the same time, "Fix" itself constitutes the mystery of "Who is Agui?" A complete mystery novel. This kind of novel structure means that anywhere needs to be like a mystery novel, and there is also the possibility of creative sway.

If a detective is the embodiment of intelligence and wisdom, Agui is a reflexive symbol, and a writer is anyone who tells stories, understands stories, conveys stories, and believes stories. The real aura does not necessarily depend on a wise detective, but on an elusive ghost.

At first we feel that writers who write novels easily accept a set of causal relationships with tension; then we find that the need for storytelling is not just for writers, but readers are also attached to puzzles; finally Vigilance, the completion of the story itself has its own force of gravity falling, unless the storyteller consciously "becomes his own ghost", otherwise when the continuous narrative introduces people into it, the overlooked details are enough to make the story go away. The characters bring completely different endings - the real tension of "Fix" is the above-mentioned "plot", which is not only established in the novel.

The protagonists of the seven chapters in the "Fix" novel are all writers, and they are not orthodox mystery novelists at the same time. The identities of the seven characters include senior writers, shadow writers, young bloggers, bank office workers, literary award winners, and romance novelists; this setting seems to have foreshadowed what the seven "major criminal cases" correspond to. It is just the process of deducing the puzzle, and it is also a style type derived from people's original demand for "listening to stories". When the seven writers try to "cross-border" to deduce the suspenseful creation process, they often omit some details of the character's behavior; through Agui's prompts, plus the seven writers' own opportunities, these flaws are sewed up and reconstructed. Various novels with reasoning elements. In the end, writers are often thankful that they have not wronged a character, and even seem to have "saved" a certain character, so that they can enjoy a special kind of fun that belongs to mystery novelists.

The publishing process of these seven writers also naturally brings out the possibility of different creative forms: the books of senior writers have to catch up with major revisions before publication, and rely on supplementary writing skills to print on schedule; shadow writers continue to serialize for dead writers , chewing on the fun of re-creating stories for predecessors, thinking about the possibility of their own creation; blogging and online serialization, enriching the interpretation of plot twists in the interaction of messages, or adding chapters to make the originally ambitious world view The setting can be paid more attention to; the literary award works cannot be modified, but the acceptance speech promises to develop a complete and true story; romance novels can also reverse the ending of the previous work in the continuation of love elements; the rookie editor issued the observation of the characters The precise questioning made the writer pause.

When I read "Fix" for the first time, I was amazed at the clever adaptation of seven cases that actually happened in Taiwan into a smooth and easy-to-read version; when I re-read it, I liked the seven fictional writers and the people around them. "Stories Beyond Stories". Because the seven writer characters have vivid and flexible personalities in "Fix", and the daily life is presented through dialogue, the seven characters and the seven "novels within novels" seem to be equally presented in "Fix", as a real As readers, we can also fairly view the "written writers" and "the characters shaped by the shaped writers" in "Fix" .

Those "characters shaped by the writers who are shaped" in the book are, in reality, the "people" after being reproduced by judicial, media and social situations. It already exists, and it exists in the position of "death penalty" between people and "not being treated as human beings"; "Fix" uses a fictional framework to question the dialogue between the writer's character and "Agui", these "people" It was brought to the readers of "Fix" in a completely different position. Precisely because "Fix" cleverly encapsulates real "people" in the story, it not only conveys the fact that "an unjust case is like a broken mystery novel", but also seems to highlight the relationship between stakeholders inside and outside the story. There is a subtle power relationship. If the vitality of the characters in the novel can guide the writer to make different decisions, the individual initiative of the reader may also reverse the plot of the social script.

Perhaps, Ah Gui is not necessarily a professional worker with an editorial mission or a person in a printing house; the plural identities remind readers of anyone who uses the same set of account numbers/symbols, and also imagines the will of a wronged ghost, instead of People who give up reflexive questioning.

The last sentence in the book says: "To be your own ghost is to use the creator's soul to repair the soul of the story." If the institutions and cultural forces that build the world are also a form of "creation," then we all have the opportunity to be one of them. Social news and major cases should answer the "ghosts" behind them, mend and correct the flaws in the collective world, and make the stories have different possibilities.

This article was first published in: Nonsense Newsletter Issue 150