The Ecological Conditions Behind Non-fiction Writing: Publishing House | Zhuang Ruilin: Quiet Movement—Non-fiction is a worldview competition

This article is a transcript of Zhuang Ruilin, editor-in-chief of Spring Mountain Publishing House, speaking at the press conference of the first season of "Present" non-fiction writing, "A Companion in Time, The Ecological Conditions Behind Non-fiction Writing".

From the very beginning of the topic selection, an author starts to think and writes, then accumulates new materials for writing, conducts interviews and researches, and then can use a reader who is completely out of this context to present understandable ideas. , texts that can be communicated, and then published on influential platforms so that more people can see, be interpreted, and enter public discussions. Every link here needs an ecological support.

This ecology may include different roles such as news media, publishing houses, alliances of independent reporters, foundations like "Presence", etc. These roles must support the network in such an ecology, and finally there will be works and authors. birth.

So this lecture is to discuss the ecological environment. Technically speaking, what ecological conditions are required for the birth of a non-fiction writing and the birth of an author?

Speakers in this lecture: Li Xueli, editor-in-chief of The Reporter, editor-in-chief of Ning Huiduan Media International Group; Zhuang Ruilin, editor-in-chief of Chunshan Publishing House. The record of the whole lecture will be published in three articles: media article , publisher article, on-site discussion, and three articles. This article is a publisher's article, taking the experience of Zhuang Ruilin and Chunshan as an example.

The media article on the ecological conditions behind non-fiction writing: Li Xueli, editor-in-chief of The Reporter & Ning Hui, editor-in-chief of Duan Media International Edition

Quiet Movement - Nonfiction is a Worldview Competition

Publishing is a relatively more traditional link. Publishing is a place to temporarily gather these works, and books are a very important stop, where a topic needs to be organized in a very contextual way. For me, almost every non-fiction work, if it has worldwide influence, has a very distinct world view, and it all corresponds to an important issue in the world. So I say it's a "quiet movement", like a combination of an author or a journalist and the publishing world. In fact, its power can be very close to that of a social movement, and it can last for a very long time. A book can be stored in a library for decades or even a hundred years, and I think we should look at the importance of non-fiction in this way.

Today, because of the "Presence" nonfiction scholarship, I think we should respond to why so many people still want to write and what they want to say in this day and age. What kind of social or market conditions does this desire to write and explore represent? This is what we need to think about when we look at non-fiction works. It can also make everyone who wants to write think about what kind of role you want to play in it. A writer, explorer, interlocutor or protester, I think everyone can think about what their worldview is, and your worldview is a very important basic core of your work. The fact that a phenomenon can arouse your interest does not mean that you can write. You must master the worldview of a phenomenon before it can be turned into a report, or even a work such as a book. So that's why, you have to know that you're doing a worldview competition.

Today will be divided into three parts, the first part is that I think we need to think about what non-fiction is from some definitions, so that if you are a person who is interested in writing such a work, you will know what homework needs to be done. Some people think that non-fiction is derived from the news media in the 1960s, so-called "new news", but some people think that the tradition of non-fiction is longer, maybe Swift and Dickens who wrote "Gulliver's Travels" In this way, the writers of the 19th century were also doing so-called non-fiction. Dickens himself ran a newspaper and wrote a lot of reports and social observations, so from these two perspectives, I hope that everyone will realize that non-fiction is a genre with cross-border ability, and you must have cross-field writing ability. So what does it have to do with fiction? You're going to tell a story, which ones actually happened and which ones are the author's interpretation? There are several ways of saying nonfiction in the United States. One of the more popular ones is "creative writing". The so-called creative writing is also considered to be "creative-nonfiction". Truman Capote, he considers his work a "nonfiction novel", which I find very interesting. In the beginning, there was nonfiction in the United States because those journalists really wanted to compete with literature, and felt that it was not only novelists who were important in this world, but also a group of people who were not writing novels, but who were still writing people. This is for readers or authors to think about whether the book you want to read or write is fiction or non-fiction? What exactly is your interest in nonfiction? Is the book you're looking for a better story than literature or a novel? Or do you have something else to look at? I think these all affect what is considered a good non-fiction work. And in this non-fiction work will involve a lot of ethical issues: where are the boundaries of the story? To what extent can writing be interpreted? Ethical issues are also things that affect you every second of the time almost every author is in the field, in the writing field.

To understand the definition of nonfiction, we must know its historical conditions. You can take a look at the development of non-fiction writing in the United States and Taiwan, which I have compiled one after another. In the US, the Pulitzer Prize began to have non-fiction awards in the 1960s. There have also been cases of journalists being kicked out of fraud because they wanted to write interesting and exciting stories. In the past two years, a book " Fake News " has also been published. It is about a very powerful reporter from the German "Der Spiegel" who has been awarded the best reporter every year. So this is what I just said, many people will fall into the temptation of "a good-looking story", stories will always tempt us, especially when you come across a good subject, a good story, how do you write it ? What can and cannot be written? How much do you want to keep for your client? Which ones do you feel need to be discussed in the public domain? These are all very important in nonfiction writing. Later, American universities also recognized the meaning of non-fiction writing, and there were many creative writing courses. There was also a memoir craze in the 1990s. Now the establishment of non-fiction awards is very detailed. It may be that biographies, history, and reports are very different awards. This is very different from the development of Taiwan. The development of Taiwan is a non-fictional development that has been on and off. It is a cycle every ten years. The first cycle appeared before and after the lifting of the martial law. Around 1987, due to many social transformations, there was the launch of the "Human" magazine, and new A generation has invested in social observation and writing, but it usually doesn't last long, about every decade or so. Since the beginning of the last decade, the Golden Award of the Taiwan Literature Museum has begun to realize the importance of non-fiction, so it has broken the category of literature and put literature and non-literature together in the evaluation criteria, hoping to select non-fiction with literary qualities. A fictional work is a good written work; it has begun to look at non-fictional works in terms of the quality of writing, so Taiwan has entered another wave of thirst and discussion for non-fiction this decade.

About a dozen years ago, Taiwan's publishing market literature was very strong. It was very easy for literature to have large-scale bestsellers, all of which were over a million copies, but it was difficult to see non-fiction works that could reach that intensity; and these few The reading of literature began to weaken in 2019, and the trust in the news media began to decline. There is a group of readers of the type Shirley just talked about. They have something they want to read. I think this situation has led to a new opportunity, and there will be a new kind of text. , New forms of reporting, new social-facing works are needed. Jieping asked me about the current observation of the publishing market for this piece of stuff. I myself feel that although the transformation of society or the weakening of literature and news over the years has led to the need for non-fiction, its market share is not very high. So far, there is no such book with the sales strength of millions of copies, although there are Some sporadic sales are mid-level. For example, the reporter's book is a best-seller, but there is really no way to reach the market coverage of 300,000 copies, 500,000 copies, and 1 million copies like "The Da Vinci Code". Shows that we have a lot of room in this block to work on.

Then there are the non-fiction themes in Taiwan in the past decade, or the non-fiction in the Chinese market and English market in a broad sense. They probably have several characteristics: one is the "re-cleaning" of the past. I also asked my friends from Matters to introduce me to a few non-fiction works that have become popular in mainland China in recent years. I found that most of them are historical cleaning types, such as walking the road of the Southwest Associated University again, and the general works of the journey; the other is also The larger part is the "second narrative", that is, as mentioned above, non-fiction has a lot to do with the presentation of worldviews, and most of these may be hidden social phenomena or suppressed themes, or very marginal themes , these are objects that can easily arouse the desire to write. Therefore, the second narrative is to correspond to the mainstream narrative in publishing, and it is easier to become a source of creativity, because it is necessary to find a unique theme and a unique voice; the last theme is more like preparing for the transformation of many areas of society, For example, "transformation preparation" for social inequality and gender issues. So I think non-fiction works are very important to expose the important values in a society and their possible directions. Some values have been quarreling for two hundred years. For example, the issue of black Americans has not been broken for one or two hundred years, and they are still proposing a "second narrative" to fight against the mainstream narrative, that is, they believe that the origin of American history is not 1620. The landing of the Mayflower in 1619 was the beginning of American history when the first black slave landed. Therefore, some topics have been fought for decades. I think the historical perspective of Taiwan's future aboriginal friends will also be a very important second narrative. When the second narrative emerges, they will have their own Taiwanese history framework. So I think probably these themes are doing transformation and preparation. But a problem in Taiwan now is that the history of development is too short and intermittent, and it is often an interrupted tradition. Therefore, we have no examples of non-fiction evaluation standards or writers to follow. There is a lack of professional construction. Many books of different spectrums are placed in the non-fiction spectrum, and there is no such detailed classification of whether you are biography or history. It seems that as long as it is not a novel, it is all thrown into non-fiction. I think this is quite unprofessional. Even many of our book awards still do it... am I offending a lot of people by saying this? But I really don't think these can be put into the same standard. For example, there is another kind of science writing, and popular science is also a very important non-fiction, but Taiwan's popular science writing is quite weak, and it is not easy to be highlighted when viewed together with other things. And for publishers, who are the sources of non-fiction authors? I think most of them are journalists, scholars and social groups. I will give Chunshan as an example later, one is a reporter and the other is a researcher. I think today, just by the source of the author I mentioned, there is actually a lot of open space. Because many scholars in Taiwan are writing papers, they are rarely willing to write books for the public. status. Of course, I think the younger generation of researchers is changing, and more and more like American researchers, they have to publish their first book before the age of 35, that is, your doctoral dissertation is your first book. I think the same is true of journalists. When more and more journalist friends start to cut into a topic they want to do, they will put the issue of publishing a book in their minds, which means that they will spend a very long time and devote their enthusiasm to their specialties. In the field; this research/report is often more than four or five years. But now also because the source of authors is quite limited, so there is a place where Taiwan can work harder now. Many themes are more like collective works. I think it is actually very hard for one person to complete a book independently, so things like " "Presence" is a good way to subsidize creation. Under such conditions, more and more people can have enough conditions and time to complete a special book, instead of dealing with a common writing method. . So in the future, I think the quality of writing will get closer and closer to the state of "writing".

The next thing I want to talk about is that there will be many problems between many authors and us. Do you know where your scope is? You are interested in something, and you want to write a book about it, so do you have enough information? Have you read enough books? I have always felt that if you want to become a writer, as mentioned above, non-fiction actually requires literary literacy, a person who needs cross-disciplinary ability a lot. If you are very low on writing skills and sensitivity today, don’t think so It's good to start with five too - that is, you need to be able to think of three or five different ways to write an article - at this time, you have to study how others write. You can’t just look at a certain field because you only like a certain thing. You need to have a lot of literary training; secondly, you need to be very self-disciplined, you need to be very clear about what you can and can’t do, and what you can’t do , which are your strengths. Then you have to master your problem awareness - to determine the scope; and then how does your outline appear when you have a problem awareness? This stage is also a very important work for editing. Because a good structure and outline probably determines one-third of the book: that is, whether the work plan is workable or not. If the construction drawing is not in good condition, the author will easily get lost, and the editor who is with him will not know how to help. The establishment of the outline can probably frame the awareness of important issues, and then we will deal with the narrative style one by one: how to write the opening? What should the beginning and end of the book be? And can you write 5,000 for a single article or 15,000 for a single article? I would recommend beginners to practice from two to three thousand to five thousand words. Don't think that you can write 10,000 words at the beginning. This is very scary.

Then there are the problems that writers often have, which are these (PPT pages).

I think the first point is the most important, so I list it at the top. I have seen too many talented people who can’t write a book. A talented person usually has a lot of obstacles, so I think you should cherish your talent, and then Also pay attention to the following questions: I think many people want to write but are not good readers. For example, I often meet young people who want to write, but when I ask them what related books they have read, they read too little . So I think the first is to solve the problem of reading, and the second is to understand that the subject matter is different from the title. The subject matter is sometimes a phenomenon that is easy to see, so when you see a phenomenon, many people may also see it. , then you need to see if it can become a topic with a point of view. So I think the point of view is different from the title; then there is the need for fields, literary awards, and whether to find someone to discuss. I think these are the parts that people who want to participate in "presence" writing should think carefully. Sometimes I think it's good to have this kind of mechanism for literary awards, because you need to complete it within this time, and you will get some scrutiny for it, which may also be a good thing, just like the "good criticism" I said earlier, Your submission may be the way to get criticism; if you have a publishing house in cooperation, then the editor's opinion or criticism is quite important, and you must be willing to go back to the original point. Like what our publishing house is doing, the manuscript will not be revised only once, but will be revised many times, so don’t feel afraid, you haven’t written it yet, you dare not show it, you can show it now, because you may have to change it. Five times, so don't think you're going to spend a lot of time writing a final draft now, but it's not a matter of finalizing it; it may take more than two years to finalize it. So in the end I think one more thing is don't worry about not having a market. Because I just said, even if your topic is on the edge, when its creativity and content are full, its market will appear. There have been too many instances where we thought this topic was very unpopular, but it became our best selling book that year because it was so well written. The example I just mentioned is " Plants to the World ", which is a book on popular science of Taiwan's alpine plants. It is super unpopular and many people have never actually seen those plants in the mountains. The names of plants are difficult to pronounce and need to be checked for phonetics, but the author's The writing method overcomes many difficulties. That is to say, a good non-fiction work today is to bring an unfamiliar world to readers. For example, Zhou Yufei wrote about the Tibetan Mastiff, and I think of my personal favorite author , John. John Vaillant 's story about Siberian tigers is one of the top three works I have read in the past five years, that is, a place in Siberia that no one has heard of, the history and natural history near Vladivostok, why the tigers there Cannibalism has written a story with a very deep historical depth that resembles reasoning, like the layout of a novel. For me, that's a place we'd never go, but he described a very strange thing very well. So I think it is a very important task to bring a strange world and things to the readers, because only you are present and no one else is present. The readers are only present because of your works, so don't worry about the market. Another case I am talking about now is Su Zhiheng, a researcher who studies Taiwanese films. He started to rewrite his master's thesis and worked together for about four years to complete the book; the other book is Liu Zhixin, deputy editor-in-chief of The Reporter. The "Making of Truth", probably started from his first special report on fake news in 2016, and has been accumulating for five years before he could make this book. But this book is not ready to be published by collecting all the published things, but must reorganize his framework, and why it starts from Belgium and ends in Taiwan, what is the logical guidance in the middle, and the opening of each story should be Don't rewrite, and whether these structures can organically make the fake news industry chain link by link for everyone to see. In these processes, we often confirm these things. We don’t know how many times we have discussed with Zhixin whether this book is worth publishing, because the author will constantly doubt himself, so we often have meetings with them as if helping the author to complete himself. dialogue. If the book didn't do a good job of self-talk today, it probably wouldn't have been published; or a work that didn't even satisfy the author himself. The more technical thing in the middle is how we have to discuss, adjust, and revise the manuscript repeatedly. I have to tell you that a manuscript must be revised three to five times from the beginning to the end. It is really a test of all human patience. I think the author does get hit by editors a lot...a previous example, this author is funny because he gets hit by two editors every time, we usually have two editors with one author, he doesn't just open the file to see When he was full of tracking and revisions, he had to face two people’s attacks on him during the meeting. One day he said, “You are all so good at speaking, so you can write” (everyone laughed), so later I talked to him. He said otherwise, you should put it down first, read a few novels first, and then come back to write. So the authors will protest, the revisions in the middle often make them very confused, they will get lost, but they will also get out. Like Su Zhiheng of the Taiwanese film I just mentioned, he later went to see how many foreign historians wrote prefaces, and after researching a structure, he imitated the structure of that preface and wrote a preface for his whole book. We were all terrified when we saw it, because he seemed to know what his structure was, so it was very smooth. I think at that time he mastered the matter of "what he wants to express". But I think the people who published the first book will keep asking the question repeatedly, that is, as Jieping just said, many people will want to give up, and many people want to give up. Therefore, we must continue to discuss and find out the reasons for not giving up, so I also say that all non-fiction finally returns to the core: what is your desire to write and tell, if you can say this thing, When you write it, you are usually more likely to complete the book, otherwise it is too hard to write a book, and you get very little reward. You have to invest a lot of emotional labor and all kinds of time problems in it - so why should it be in your Investing so much time outside of work writing a book? If you don't think about these issues, it's easy to give up.

The second season of the "Present" Scholarship is open to Chinese writers around the world to solicit non-fiction writing projects.

We believe that whether you are a "journalist", a "student", or a practitioner of any profession, you can start your "presence" writing. The "Present" scholarship solicits writing proposals every four to six months, and each time five finalists are selected to receive prizes ranging from $2,500 to $7,000, with full assistance with professional editors.

Registration Entrance (will open on June 11): https://www.mattersonsite.com/

Deadline for registration: July 18, 23:59 East Eighth District