Chapter 80 Remarks on the launch
Chapter 80 Remarks on the launch
Qian Zhongshu said, if you eat an egg and think it tastes good, why do you need to know the hen that laid the egg?
I think so too. But there was no Internet in Qian Zhongshu's time. If there was, he would have been stripped of everything.
There are no secrets in the Internet age. Liu Cixin can curse people on Tieba, and Hideo Kojima will promote his works everywhere on Twitter. When celebrities' life-like behaviors are exposed to the public, they will fall from the altar in the hearts of some people and become ordinary.
If Mark Twain lived in this era, he might be a big troll in the forum; George Bernard Shaw might fight with others over Genshin Impact; Dostoyevsky might have to borrow money from a small loan because of a card draw gone wrong.
It's a very interesting era. I love it.
Among my readers, some got to know me through this book, some got to know me through The Saint of Tea and Group of Beautiful Women, some read all the way through my answer posts, and some read my articles published in magazines and platforms...
I have written so many things and they are so diverse. Readers each have their own fragments of my works, but they find that they cannot be put together like a puzzle with missing pieces. So I am very confused. Many people are asking, what makes an author who writes mediocre articles come to write such a book?
What force turned the author of "Pulling the Female Boss into the Group of Beauty" into the author of "I'm Not a Literary Giant"?
In fact, I don't mind people getting to know me, I don't have any secrets. So here I will briefly introduce how the magic of nature made me grow into this face.
If you are not curious, then please keep it a mystery and skip this section. It is a long story.
……
【Special thanks】
Jingfeng Kite, Damenzrr, It's Not an Intentional Typography, Mud and White Buddha, Wandering Toad, Why Love Is So Deep, A Piece of Snow Cake. Thank you for your recommendations.
(My Superpowers Refreshed Weekly by Yipianxuebing is very good. The link is in the chapter description section at the end. Click to go there.)
【Special thanks】
ptik, Mo Xiaoxuan, the tearful demon in the starry sky, all the people in the mortal world are guests, they are the flowing waves, and the anti-naughty boy fighter.
【Special thanks】
Shadow fairy Qi Tian, Qi Ran qwq, literary op, Ning Baiming, into the dream, Wei Wuzhishi, paper note, a Wuxiang egg comes, drunk sword long song, Damen zrr, Camus's fanboy, a Lord Guang who does not want to reveal his name, Feng Yi, it is the flowing waves, are you at home at night, Yi Xinghe, Daoyuanzhai, group friends wake up naturally, oh ordinary heart, alone shadow group front, Zi Xin and 66, three inches of annual rings, group friend Fenglu, twenty-three years of wind and moon, Jiuli, fallen flowers Mingyue, Qcber, An Ziyu, LC, Wu Mian, anti-bear kid fighter, Wenliang, hes, dry rice century fu sound warrior, Jiangpan, Mo Liyo, Tut Tut, Lord Le who does not want to reveal his name, underwoodtan, Lord Zhe who does not want to reveal his name, Lord Ai who does not want to reveal his name, I am not that kind of person, Shi Huai A, Fengyuntun, difficult book, save the salted fish, storm commander, I am illiterate, Lan.
……
It wasn't until I was about 20 that I finally made up my mind to start writing.
Before that, whenever I showed an inclination toward writing, someone would always advise me not to get too depressed.
They told me that you can take writing as a hobby, but you still have to take a class. This is for your own good. Then they forwarded me a famous quote: "Don't turn your hobby into your career."
When I was in school, my parents encouraged me to read more books, but as I read more and more books, far beyond their most optimistic imagination, they began to fear. They took away everything I could touch and asked me to concentrate on my studies.
Study, what the hell, I'm just watching secretly.
But I am the kind of person who is easily influenced. I can't do what I want to do as freely as Han Han. In fact, I think those who advised me were really doing it for my own good, because I also doubted my own ability and whether I could really make a living by writing.
I was terrified. I didn’t want my favorite writing to become something painful for me, because there weren’t many things I liked. I was so consumed by this internal struggle that I didn’t make up my mind until I was 20 years old. I just wrote casually as a hobby.
At that time, the answer platform had just opened for registration, so I went to register and wrote some answers on it, mostly essays, but also some novels.
This post attracted tens of thousands of followers.
At that time, I wrote things secretly, thinking that no one would find them. Who would have thought that they would be frequently reprinted in magazines or some influential media. Even the professor in my department knew about it. He would still mention me to his juniors several years after I graduated.
I have worked in new media, written a lot of copywriting, and also written scripts for comics. I also met a group of writer friends.
There is always a strange idea in my mind: I think novels are different from other texts. Novels are more valuable and more fascinating to me. I would rather be a novelist than an "opinion writer". Of course, I can have both, but I must write novels.
The inspiration for this novel came during that period. It was probably in 2015. At around or in the evening, I was walking home and making a voice call with my apprentice, telling him the outline of this story: a middle-aged man who was down and out and wanted to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, read all the Nobel Prize-level works, but unexpectedly became very successful in the love industry.
The name of this story is "The King of Love".
At that time, I had not thought about writing online articles, nor did I think about turning this story into an online article. I originally planned to submit it to a pure literary magazine. I kept in touch with the editors of some literary magazines, and I sent them the beginning of this story, which received unanimous praise.
However, I never wrote this story. I was only 30 years old, and it was beyond my ability to write about a -year-old middle-aged man. But I was not in a hurry.
Wang Xiaobo had his "Golden Age", and I also had my "Golden Age". At that time, I felt that I could do anything. As long as I wanted, I could write 10+ or likes at any time. It was like playing table tennis, where an expert could control the landing point and rotation of the ball at will. At that time, I wrote like I was playing. I played with words.
At that time, I never thought that I would become an online writer in the future. I didn’t think much of online writing at that time. When I evaluated online writing, I usually said that it was “masturbating people’s souls.”
Later, I didn’t start writing online articles until 2017. The reason why I started writing online articles was also due to a rather bizarre reason.
I once wrote a short story called "Exploding Bowl Hands", and you can still find it by searching for it now.
This novel topped the list of popular websites that day, and was reprinted by some magazines. It was reprinted without my permission. I didn’t know that my novel was reprinted by print media until a reader sent me a private message.
Only one magazine contacted me and promised to give me 200 yuan in royalties, but to this day, I still haven't received the money.
Including that magazine, a lot of magazines didn't even pay attention to me. Later I heard that print media had been in trouble for a long time and the payment speed was very slow. And the way they selected articles was that a group of editors looked for manuscripts everywhere on the Internet, and then "recommended the manuscripts" to the editorial department, and the magazines would give them "recommendation fees". It sounded very convincing and seemed to be true, but I had no way to verify whether it was true.
In short, this incident left me with a very bad impression, and made me think that it is difficult to make money by writing for print media. Because I also have a side job writing for public accounts, and I have already made a lot of money. In comparison, print media naturally seems to be shabby.
Compared to novels, I am actually better at writing essays and prose. But in my heart, novels are different. I always feel that novels are more "valuable" than expressing opinions. Because images are more important than ideas. I want to be a novelist no matter what.
However, with the pressure of graduation ahead, I have to consider money. So I want to find a platform suitable for me to write novels.
The first choice was naturally a platform with attention. I was somewhere between "little unknown" and "somewhat famous". But there were no other means of monetization at the time, and even writing stories was something that everyone hated.
I don't know where else I can find a job that can accommodate me and make money. The only way to make a living is to take the civil service exam.
Or just write online articles.
Actually, my style is not suitable for writing online articles. I have read very few online articles. I took a quick look at the novels on the list and wrote an online article myself. It was a mess, neither traditional literature nor online articles.
As a result, this post went to Sanjiang.
During the time when I was serializing my first online novel, my parents and all my relatives believed that writing was an unreliable thing and that one should still have a job. They urged me to take the civil service exam.
Deep down, I didn’t want to take the civil service exam, and my focus was still on writing. In order to avoid my parents’ urging, I hid at a friend’s house, writing while preparing for the exam in a perfunctory manner.
As a result, I passed the exam.
I passed the exam, so I couldn't not go, right? I stopped writing and went to work. Not long after, the Qidian supernatural section disappeared, and my book disappeared with it. This is the whole process of my first online writing.
The second time I wrote online was three years later. During these three years, some things happened and I hardly wrote anything. I have already talked about what happened in my last book's introduction, so I won't repeat it like Xianglin Sao.
I really want to use a cool phrase to describe my three years of silence. For example, "That night, the wind and rain were strong, and I experienced my own enlightenment in Longchang." But there was no such night, and there was no such Longchang. There was only an ordinary life day after day, and my glorious deeds seemed to have disappeared overnight. There was only the constant tug-of-war between life and death. I was worn out thoroughly in this tug-of-war.
In short, when I returned to the human world after three years, I found that Sanjiang was not as good as before, and I was not as good at writing as before.
To describe it, it's like being isolated from the world for three years. After three years, I suddenly find that the world has become very strange, as if I had traveled through time.
The platforms suddenly have new writing levels, and there are many Vs that I didn’t know before, speaking words that I couldn’t understand.
There are suddenly a lot of incomprehensible memes on the Internet, and some memes that I have never heard of have even become clichés.
Writing suddenly became unfamiliar to me. Whether it was writing novels, essays, or writing replies, I was unable to do it, just like a patient with myasthenia gravis undergoing rehabilitation.
When I walk on the road, I often feel lost, as if something is missing.
If you have ever experienced a situation where you were very good at something and suddenly became unskilled at it, you should be able to understand how I feel.
I suddenly became very unconfident.
But I won't cry because of the sadness of the passing of time, right?
When I get older, I will tell young people I don’t know that I also had a dream of becoming a writer. I want to do something, I want to write something.
Because I really enjoy writing novels.
So, I picked up this Qidian account that I hadn’t opened for a long time.
I don't think of myself as a big shot who has published articles in print media. I am like Zhang Chi in "Flying Spurs 2", with a clear self-positioning. What level am I at? I am just a small-time online writer.
I will do whatever a small online writer should do.
When a person falls to the bottom, he should climb up instead of looking back at where he fell. Looking back can't help you climb back up.
I started from the beginning to scan the charts and learn how to write online articles.
I used to wonder why those unsophisticated novels could be so popular. I read a lot of unsophisticated novels, such as urban immortality and superb divine doctors. I read them carefully, word by word, and wrote long notes to analyze and deconstruct them.
I was also puzzled. Those books looked simple, so why could they be written so long? The ability to structure a novel was exactly what I lacked. So I learned from them. I broke them apart and studied them.
I was very serious about it. The only thing I was always serious about was novels.
In the process of learning how to write online articles, those online article theories echoed with the books I had read before, and I sometimes found that some writing techniques had something in common. Oh, this is Vargas Llosa's "Structural Realism", and this is "The Third Coming"...
I studied Xiaobaiwen very seriously and gradually discovered their wonders. It is no accident that they became popular.
So I learned it.
I used the theory I summarized to write "Beauty Group". In fact, "Beauty Group" is also a very showy novel. For example, in the first 15 words, the protagonist of the novel did not appear much. Another example is that it has more than a dozen heroines. The more basic skills are how to pull emotions, how to make people angry in an instant, and how to make people feel happy in an instant.
In short, this book is a concentrated display of the skills I learned from reading amateur novels. Of course, no one expects to see any skills from a book called "I pulled my female boss into the group of beauties, and I was exposed." People will only pout after seeing the title of the book and say, what kind of garbage is this? Just like no one expects to see literary quality in online articles.
But I don’t care about that. For me, as long as a book can make money, it is a good book.
In the process of writing "The Beauty Group", my experience gradually increased, my market sense continued to strengthen, my former abilities gradually returned to me during rehabilitation, and I became more and more familiar with online literature.
By the end of writing "The Beauty Group", I had reached the point where, when I came up with the title of a chapter, I could roughly estimate how many subscriptions that chapter would get, whether it would go up or down. I was always very accurate in my estimation.
A novel with bones, flesh and soul.
Bones are the structure of the novel, flesh is the appearance of the novel, and soul is the spiritual core of the novel.
The bones of "Group of Beautiful Women" are Xiao Baiwen's bones, the flesh is Xiao Baiwen's flesh, but the soul is my own soul.
So I was in a bit of pain while writing it, because the spirit and the flesh didn't match.
I think this kind of pain is necessary, because I am just a small failure in online writing, and learning a new skill should usually be painful.
After finishing "The Beauty Group", I plan to write a novel based on my own flesh. This will make me feel better. But I have lost that flesh for a long time.
I started looking through my old drafts and found a long-forgotten beginning, only 6000 words, very short. It had been prepared for publication in a serious literary magazine for many years.
"Wang Zixu's workplace is no more than 800 meters away from his home. It takes him less than 10 minutes to walk home..."
I said to it, I will send you to the starting point, okay?
It shook its body, not good.
I said, what's the point of being suitable or not? I'm just a novice writer, and you're just a novice writer who wrote a crappy beginning before. Why, you don't go to Qidian, but you want to be on "Harvest"?
It shook its body again and said stubbornly, I don't want it. Internet articles are too impetuous, no one can understand me.
I said, I don’t care whether you want to or not, I just want to do it.
What else can I be proud of? In this era, Liu Cixin will swear at people online, so why can't I write "The King of Love" online?
I know that people don't expect to see very profound novels on the Internet, just like people don't expect to find any thoughts or creative techniques in a novel called "Pulling Your Female Boss into the Group of Beautiful Women."
But depth is not really important. My goal is to make this novel inspiring and enjoyable to everyone, from university professors to middle school students.
I sent this beginning to Ziliang (yes, my editor's name is Ziliang), and he was so touched that he kept talking about it. I said, why not write *The King of Love?
He said yes, but the early data would be bleak.
I said, it’s okay, just don’t look at the data for the first 10 words.
Then I started working with great enthusiasm.
As soon as I published the book, someone forwarded the title and introduction of the book to other groups, and was laughed at by many people. People said, "It can be seen that he is indeed not a literary giant."
When I promoted this book on the platform, I was criticized. People said, "Look at the beginning, it feels like a flop. This kind of self-congratulatory article is bound to fail."
People say, "You said the first part of your book didn't do well, do you think the latter part will do well?"
People say, "Readers don't like reading this kind of book at all, you are too arrogant to write it."
My performance improved a little, and I had a lot of follow-up comments. People said that I had connections and that the data for my book was all fake, and that I created a small account to promote it myself.
People say that it is written too greasy and full of the sour and rotten smell of a middle-aged man.
People say that they can't see what's good about the writing style at all, and those of you who praise it have never eaten any fine food.
I think they don’t understand my understanding of online writing. They also can’t tell what techniques were used in writing this book. They don’t understand the readers either.
It was not until this book topped the new book list of Metropolitan Channel and later appeared on Sanjiang that the voices of doubt became less. But I know that there are still many people who cannot understand.
The book will be available at 12 noon today.
The first order of "Beauty Group" was 4000. I would like to set the first order target for this book a little higher, maybe 5000.
I can't lose to my past self, right?
According to the current writing progress, this book has only just written the prologue.
The rest of the book will probably have more than two million words, but I have only written a small part of it so far.
I hope that this book, which has been in the works for a long time, can bring something different to online literature. I hope that I can write well enough for people to see it.
At that time, I can proudly say to people:
do you know?
In fact, the structure of Xiaobaiwen is very clear, which is very suitable for learning writing skills.
They are actually pretty good.
I used to study those books on the list and Sanjiang very seriously. Really seriously. So seriously that I want to cry when I think of myself at that time.
Now, it's your turn to study me.
……
According to common sense, there should be a rule for adding more chapters here.
But, I don’t have any saved articles, how can I add them?!
You guys watch me and type. Seeing your intentions, Liangliang, I will work harder to write~
(End of this chapter)