Introduction to novels of Ming Dynasty

Peng Zihui, poet fanatic, Han nationality, from Hengyang County, Hunan Province, 1966. He likes novels, poems, calligraphy and painting since childhood. At the age of 16, he was obsessed with China traditional culture, had a wide range of interests, and was extremely tired of the college entrance examination course, which led to a complete failure of the college entrance examination. High school education is lifelong. After graduating from high school, Peng Zihui taught himself his favorite poems, calligraphy and painting, and completely gave up his mathematics, physics, politics and other courses that he thought were of no practical value. Since 2003, Peng Zihui has devoted himself to writing the long historical novel Ming Dynasty. After the publication of the first volume of 20 15, I still write in my spare time. It is estimated that the Quanming series will be completed in 12 years.

Peng Zihui's Chinese painting Castle on the Rock won 1 1 Excellent Works Award in Hunan Exhibition Area of National Art Exhibition, and his Chinese painting Autumn Xiangtu won the Silver Award for Landscape Painting in Yan Di Cup International Painting and Calligraphy Exhibition. In 2009, the poem was awarded the 100 Poetry Award for Printing and Exhibition of Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting by Xiling Printing Society. 20 1 1 year, "Dunhuang Fu" won the first prize (signature) and the third prize of the world's "Dunhuang Money Seeking Fu", and this Fu is recited every year in Dunhuang Grape Festival. Ci won the first prize in the fifth Yellow Crane Tower Poetry Competition in Hubei Province. In 20 14, the Chinese painting "Spring Mountain Map" won the Excellence Award of China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. The representative works of traditional Chinese painting include "Ancient Meaning in Eastern Hunan", "Military Trade in Eastern Chu" and "Youxi Map". Many paintings and calligraphy works are collected by collectors at home and abroad. Author of Du Yuxuan's Collection of Poetry and Prose (unpublished).

Peng Zihui has many hobbies, such as poetry, calligraphy, Chinese painting, parallel prose, ci fu, couplets, new poetry, prose, novels and so on. He loves life, like HIFI music, high-definition movies, cycling and walking alone. He is arrogant, unsociable and likes to be alone. His extensive hobbies and interests greatly supported the creation of the long historical novel Ming Dynasty. If you have a big disaster, you will be happy to meet Changlong;

Growing up in Qingjiang, why are you lucky to stay for a long time?

Being free to talk about art makes me miss the past.

Too much greed, so far nothing;

Start with no end, and all the past ideas are in vain.

Mancha unofficial history, making up a fictional book;

Over the official, fill in the gaps in the record.

Nine out of ten people are arrogant and vulgar;

It's no use being ashamed of a scholar's youth. When will the sun and the moon shine again? Wandering in the old country, seeing the vastness, countless heroes are unintentional. The past of Ma Tiejin Pavilion, out of the water, the setting sun. Write the rise and fall, the temples are frosted, and a song of Long song's pathos.

-"Xijiang Moon" Keiko self-titled

Peng Zihui's opening words for the first volume of the historical novel Ming Dynasty are: first, pay tribute to China's classical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms; Second, pursue novel creation with China characteristics and China style, so as to avoid historical novels blindly imitating western novels and losing the unique charm of China traditional culture. The opening text of The Romance of The Three Kingdoms was not written by Luo Guanzhong, but a sentence chosen by Shi Mao and his son, the top scholar of the Ming Dynasty, Yang Shen, who re-edited the novel in the Qing Dynasty, and placed it in front of the first novel. Yang Shen wrote tanci in 2 1 century, and the opening words of Romance of the Three Kingdoms are among the best.

After the author Peng Zihui finished writing this opening poem, he revised it for half a year and got the opinions of several contemporary first-class poets with the help of the Internet. Although written by Peng Zihui, it is a masterpiece. Some readers think that this poem "Xijiang Moon" is the best opening word in the novel after The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, while others say that this opening word surpasses The Romance of the Three Kingdoms in momentum. However, the author Peng Zihui believes that his opening words are not as good as the opening words of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Linjiang Xian. Although the ancients took six months to make it on a whim, the ancient and modern knowledge is different. Poetry is no longer the mainstream of literature, and the traditional cultural environment no longer exists. It is impossible for modern people to surpass the ancients in poetry. In the preface, the author said: "In 2003, I was only 36 years old. Looking back on my surfing youth, I studied poetry and calligraphy, but I never achieved anything. With the infatuation of admiring traditional literature and the dream of returning to classicism, I tried a new classical literary style and decided to finish this series of novels. In the past two years, the first draft of the first volume "The Grass in the World" and the second volume "Wu Hongmeng Zheng" have been written, and the third volume has been written for several chapters. But there is endless loneliness in my heart. I often feel that I am ambitious and talented, but my interest in writing is decreasing. I've been writing for nearly seven or eight years. This is an era of peace. In a blink of an eye, I am forty-five years old, and my life is half strong, but I have no talent that can be passed down from generation to generation, and my repressed ambitions have been reactivated. Thanks to the encouragement and expectation of Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House, I devoted myself to revising the first and second volumes, almost like rewriting, sometimes reaching the point of carving words and sentences, which took two and a half years. Generally speaking, readers read more, and the novel seems to be reborn. "

In 2007, the first draft of the novel was serialized at the starting point, and it was named Legend of the Ming Dynasty for the first time. Because the novel is not the kind of online novel that crosses, jokes and overhead, it has not been adopted and recommended by the starting point. After giving up serialization, the author continued to study the history of Ming Dynasty and devoted himself to writing according to his own ideals. 20 12 was affirmed and encouraged by the president, editor-in-chief and responsible editor of Hubei Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House. Mr. Liu, the president, thinks that "this author has excellent writing style and profound knowledge of ancient Chinese, so don't waste the resources of such a good author" and agrees to sign a contract for publication, but it needs a lot of revision. The editor in charge put forward many specific suggestions for revision, and the author attached great importance to them, full of confidence, almost like rewriting a novel. At the beginning of 20 15, the first volume of the novel Ming dynasty was published. The long historical novel Ming Dynasty is exquisite in writing and full of the beauty of China tradition. It abandons the language of "translation style" in Chinese and is quite poetic. The dialogue between the characters in the novel moderately simulates the oral characteristics of the late Yuan Dynasty and the early Ming Dynasty, basically putting an end to the disadvantages of the ancients speaking modern Chinese, and at the same time avoiding the obstacles that modern readers can't understand oral English in the early Ming Dynasty.

The author draws lessons from the chapter structure of ancient novels such as Water Margin, A Dream of Red Mansions and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, aiming at promoting the traditional narrative spirit, but the core of the novel implies the consciousness of modern people and modern novels. The author wants to imitate the historical texture of the late Yuan Dynasty and the early Ming Dynasty as much as possible. The dialogue language of characters tries to abandon all modern words and try to restore the oral characteristics of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Most people, events and times pay attention to the official historical origin, and novels also pay attention to rationality, seeking a better balance between history and novels, and dare not make up and joke at will, so that readers can read quickly.

The author's pursuit of individuality is extremely rare and valuable among contemporary historical novel writers. However, the author may have to pay two prices: one is to spend a lot of time in-depth understanding and research of oral English in the late Yuan Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty, and the other is to make a new generation of readers who lack traditional cultural literacy feel bored, thus affecting the circulation of the novel.

All tasteful modern novel writers pay attention to the writing of the first sentence of the novel. This is highly consistent with calligraphy theory in the Tang Dynasty. This sentence calligraphy theory means that the smallest brushwork is the style and rules of a word; The style of a word is the standard of the whole style. You can't write a little in regular script, but the whole word is cursive, and the first word can't be cursive, but the whole thing is in regular script. Long historical novels also have this stress.

The first sentence of maximilian Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Many years later, Colonel Aureliano will definitely remember the distant afternoon when his father took him to visit the ice field." It is said that this beginning influenced many China writers after the new period. For example, the first sentence of Yu Hua's "Living" borrowed this writing: "When I was ten years younger than now, I found a leisure job and went to the countryside to collect the wind. All summer that year, I wandered like a sparrow in the fields of cicadas and sunshine. " It's all about recalling the past from the present.

The first sentence of the first volume of the historical novel Ming Dynasty was originally written like this:

From the eleventh year of Dayuan to the beginning of March, there was light rain for several days, and the river was bullish and the stream was replenished. The fields, rivers and mountains in Jianghuai Qingyuan are locked in the drizzle.

This is a fluent and mediocre writing style, which is not commensurate with the author's masterpiece. The author is therefore extremely distressed. When revising the text of the novel, I have been trying to write the first sentence, trying to write more than 20 kinds, and I am not satisfied. At the beginning of 20 14, when the novel was about to be finalized, the inspiration finally came to the author. It's just an epiphany. The author couldn't find the first satisfactory sentence after years of searching. 20 14 during the first month, he finished in one minute:

From the 11th year of Dayuan to the beginning of April, the clouds between Jianghuai crossed the Yellow River and turned into a rainstorm in Hebei. Most of the official roads in Hebei are people who fled from Henan, dressed in quail clothes, looking dull and not talking much all day. From a distance, it looks like a group of ants, humble and mediocre, and I don't know where to throw it.

The first sentence (before the first full stop) contains three meanings: one is to state the beginning time of the novel text; The second is weather rendering; Thirdly, from the astronomical phenomenon "Clouds between Jianghuai", the influence of Bailian religion between Jianghuai was compared, and through "a rainstorm in Hebei", it was suggested that they would do something in Hebei, which led to the chaos at the end of the Yuan Dynasty and indirectly led to the establishment of the Ming Dynasty. The historical novel Ming Dynasty draws lessons from the text structure of classical novels, but it is not completely copied. The author changed the old "Hui" into a new "Zhang". Because classical novels are written with a brush, the length is mostly less than one million words, so the number of words at a time is mostly between 4000 and 6000 words. Ming History is a long historical novel with a long volume and multiple structures. It is computer-aided writing, with more than one million characters. The number of words in a chapter is between 8000- 13000. In order to avoid readers' reading fatigue, the novel is divided into several sections in one chapter, and each section has a concise title, some of which are poetic, which not only makes the novel more vivid, but also reduces readers' reading fatigue.

For example, the form of the first chapter of the first volume is as follows:

The first chapter is Bailuzhuang's stormy little gathering of righteous red scarves and the capture of the city by Zizhou County.

Ying Ying Upper Yue Feng

From the 11th year of Dayuan to the beginning of April, the clouds between Jianghuai crossed the Yellow River and turned into a rainstorm in Hebei. Most of the official roads in Hebei are people who fled from Henan, dressed in quail clothes, looking dull and not talking much all day. From a distance, it looks like a group of ants, humble and mediocre, and I don't know where to throw it.

At the same time, one person's clothes are very different from those of a refugee. He is about twenty-six or seven years old, handsome, wearing a small towel made of purple cloth, a wide-sleeved shirt with a turquoise collar, a pair of straight-stitched leather boots and riding a thin donkey. The extremely handsome boy who accompanied him wore two buns, dressed in Tsing Yi and carrying a bag. Both of them were very arrogant and hurried back to the south. They crossed the rain in Hebei and the water in the Yellow River and arrived outside Yingzhou, which was in the middle of this month.

(Post) The first volume of the long historical novel "Ming Dynasty, Striving for the World" was completed on February 27th, 2003, and signed with Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House in early October 20th12nd, which took two and a half years to revise, and was published in March 20th15th, with a creative time of more than ten years.

On August 20 13, the novel entered the publishing process and was about to go to press. When the author browsed the final version on the computer, he was still dissatisfied and decided to revise it again, which was supported by the editor. I thought I only had to wait another three to five months, and the result was 2065438+May 2004. Hoping for a new atmosphere in the new year, the publishing house decided to go public at the beginning of 20 15. In this way, the novel was revised for more than two years after signing the contract, and it has been published for more than three years.

In addition, there is another reason, that is, the author said in the "introduction": "Now I have eliminated many delusions in my dream of becoming famous, leaving only a minimum expectation for writing a series of novels of Quan Ming. Many years later, I have a set of novels carefully written for myself on my bookshelf. Even if you repeat the next year, you won't have too much shame and regret. " March 20 15, after the novel was published, the publishing house sent some sample books to major domestic media as usual. Perhaps it is the author's spirit of pursuing classical writing and praising classical charm that has won the attention and support of some domestic newspaper cultural editors. From the beginning of 20 15 to May of 20 15, Gusu Evening News, Guiyang Evening News, Yangzi Evening News and Tianjin Evening News, which have the largest circulation in Nanjing and the fourth in China, were serialized one after another.

There are two versions of the novel serializing: one is the original manuscript serializing, so that readers with high appreciation ability can fully feel the elegance of neoclassical novel writing, and the other is the serialized compressed version edited by the publishing house, so that readers can understand the outline of the novel and make their own judgments on the neoclassical long historical novel Daming Dynasty.