Chapter 88 book legend

American literary writer Frank.Stockton wrote a short story in the first person to describe the bitterness and pain in the creative career of a professional fiction writer. After becoming famous overnight, he almost destroyed his writing life and made him The lives of his family and his family have also fallen into a desperate situation.The reason is that the editors of many publications used his fame as the first impression standard, and then returned every novel he wrote. This writer, who unexpectedly gained fame and then suffered repeated rejections, was surprised, and each time he took the rejected manuscripts and read the story again from beginning to end with his wife to see what went wrong.As a result, my wife always thinks that it is no worse than those works that have been adopted before.However, the writer himself is modest and guilty and thinks that there may be shortcomings, so he throws away those rejected manuscripts, and re-conceives and creates endlessly at his desk, but unfortunately, he is repeatedly rejected , Some editors even blamed him for not favoring each other and sending works below the peak level!Such and such encounters finally made the writer discouraged.The husband and wife discussed bitterly that Raphael's masterpiece "The Madonna" is his immortal masterpiece, but how can he be asked to paint another painting with the same impression?

In the long-term situation of no income, his wife and children are facing hunger.Wandering the streets dejectedly, he met another old writer whom he had known earlier, and the other said that he had the same experience, but now the old writer made a living by grinding needles.After listening to it, he realized something. Since then, he has accepted an editor's suggestion to submit and publish his works under a different name. Every time he appears in front of readers as an unknown new author, and not only all of them are adopted, but the family lives The situation also gradually improved to be quite comfortable.But one day he finished a new work, and when his wife discovered it and exclaimed that it was as wonderful as the previous famous masterpiece, it made the writer's heart so cold that he didn't dare to publish it again. , and went to the street to buy a tin box to hold the original manuscript of this novel, and asked the workers to seal it with solder, and then locked it in an iron cabinet, and finally threw the key of the iron cabinet into the sea.He said to his wife in a serious tone: After I die, one day someone may wish to open this iron cabinet and tin box. If they will print this novel, the reputation behind me at that time will never hurt me again. .

This novel by this American writer has been collected in his anthology of short stories. Although the characters are fictitious, the plot is real. Thousands.I was thinking, if Cao Xueqin lived a long life and wrote a second work after "A Dream of Red Mansions", would he be as famous as "Red" in the eyes of the world?After Hemingway and Kawabata Yasunari won the Nobel Prize for Literature, if they could not write better works due to old age and energy decline (or the writing was rejected), would they commit suicide? What about the end?In this regard, it is also very necessary to understand the philosophical thoughts of Lao Zhuang.

When some editors ask authors for manuscripts, if they add a sentence that they want to give me the best work, it can be said that no author can dare to hand in the paper boldly.Not only does the author have no works that he thinks he is most satisfied with, but the standard of good and bad is not a chemical formula, and it cannot be measured by a scale.Different people have different opinions, and each has a subjective sense of value. An old friend, Chen Sijie, translated this novel into Chinese and published it under the title "Legend of Works".I also borrowed this title, which is quite expressive.