Liu Wei Has Written 47 Million Characters. What Kind of Life Does He Live? | 20 Years of Internet Literature, Part 6

After a little over a year writing on Qidian, Liu Wei's annual income passed one million yuan — the first web novelist on the site to get there.

Length is the law of internet literature.

Liu Wei, 38, has written 47 million characters in the 13 years since 2004. By word count, that is 36 copies of War and Peace, or 55 of Dream of the Red Chamber, or 156 of One Hundred Years of Solitude. You would have to add up the complete works of Tolstoy, Lu Xun, Balzac and Dickens to barely match it.

By his own count, Liu Wei once wrote more than 8,600 characters in a single hour, and on his biggest day he posted 90,000. From August 26, 2003 to August 7, 2010, he averaged more than 10,000 characters a day.

That earned him a name among readers: Mad Xuehong — Xuehong, or "Blood Red," being his pen name. One reader who tallied Xuehong's output over the years wrote on the Dragon's Sky forum: "Writing 10,000 characters a day isn't hard. What's hard is averaging 10,000 a day for eight years straight… Why does a bum like Xuehong still have people waving flags for him? Does that need explaining?"

Steady updating has in fact become a virtue in the web-fiction business, close to a law writers must obey. On Dragon's Sky it is easy to find authors saying so themselves: "Persistence and steady updates matter more than anything!" Zhang Wei, another author famous for never missing a day, who writes as Tangjia Sanshao, told China Youth Daily: "Thirteen years, every day. I've been serializing for 13 years… Only if readers see us every day will they keep following."

Very long serialized novels are not unique to the internet — Jin Yong's Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, serialized in Hong Kong's Ming Pao, ran to 1.54 million characters. But the internet has magnified the tendency. Xuehong's breakout book, I Am a Hoodlum (《我就是流氓》), was only a bit over 300,000 characters; now any book of his starts at 3 million. Tangjia Sanshao's early novels ended at just over 1 million characters; now they run toward 4 million.

This follows from the business model. On every site, the first hundred-odd thousand characters of a web novel are free, because that stretch has to pull readers in, teach them the habit of coming back, and build a stable following. When the free stretch gets longer, authors lengthen the rest of the story to match, so their income holds up.

At the same time, once a novel brings in steady money, squeezing more out of it is the easiest choice available — and readers, having followed it this long, keep going because they want to see how it ends. Cutting it off to start a new book is the far riskier move.

The internet also differs from other places serial fiction has lived. It is immediate: readers are satisfied on the spot instead of waiting a week or a month for a newspaper or magazine. Fed by that stream of fast updates, readers ask more of authors. A new chapter every day is now the minimum.

Today all this looks obvious. Almost from the start, with no one to teach him, Liu Wei had hold of this lifeline.

Liu Wei says he does not think much about steady updating. He explains his 10,000 characters a day by saying, "I like writing books, and if I don't write for a day I feel bad." But somewhere he must understand the logic. Asked why he started writing web novels at all, he said: "Everyone was updating a chapter a week, or a chapter every half month. Some good books got one chapter every six months — that slow. And plenty of books, the author would get halfway and then just disappear on you, never finish it." Liu Wei recalled: "The more I read the angrier I got, so I started writing myself."

Every morning Liu Wei reads the news, then starts writing. In a little over two hours he finishes 6,000 to 8,000 characters. In the afternoon he reads for a while, then writes again, finishing another chapter or two. Apart from a seven-day break at Chinese New Year, he posts nearly every day, averaging 10,000 characters and three chapters.

Ask him how he does it and Liu Wei says: "My mind works pretty fast, and I type pretty fast too."

Ask him where the ideas come from and Liu Wei says: "In my head those people are alive anyway… so all I have to do is write down what happens to them. I don't feel like I need to plot anything."

Ask him what writing is for and Liu Wei says: "Readers read our books, and because of what happens to the characters they laugh, they cry, they get angry, they rage — that's where the value is. Traditional literature or internet literature, serious literature or commercial fiction, writing is really an airy thing. You can't judge it by weight, by volume, by length and width and height. So its value is how much readers take to it. Whatever readers take to has value."

Wow.

In 2002, Liu Wei graduated in computer science from Wuhan University and went to work at a software company in Changsha. An engineering type who could not read the office's unwritten rules, he offended someone, was reported for playing games on company time, and had to quit. He is still puzzled by it. "The computer I had then was the worst one in the company — it couldn't even run a game. I have no idea how I offended anyone."

After leaving, Liu Wei moved to Wuhan and shared a place with a classmate. He was in no hurry to find another job and spent his time online following web novels. In the end he could not stand how slowly the authors of the day updated, so he started writing his own.

Writing novels, he found, was not hard for him. On his first book, Link (《林克》), a Western-fantasy story about a knight, he was already doing two or three thousand characters in 20 minutes.

"In my head those people are alive anyway… so what they should say and do in a given situation, and what that does to them and to everything after, is already something like fate. All I have to do is write down what happens to them. I don't feel like I need to plot anything," Liu Wei said.

Link was never finished. On Huanjian Shumeng, the site he was writing for, other authors swarmed him. "They kept coming into my book-review section to curse at me, endless noise, endless complaints," Liu Wei recalled. "Your characters, one line of dialogue, your word choice, your characters, your plot, your world-building — they'd pick at all of it, and it was one of me against that many of them."

"You just want to attack me? Fine, then I'll write something that really makes you uncomfortable." His answer was his breakout book, I Am a Hoodlum.

The hero is a hoodlum. The book opens: "People behind our backs call us 'the mob,' call us 'hoodlums.' I don't care — I still draw a fixed 600-odd yuan a month, better than your average small-timer." The whole novel is how this hoodlum climbs from the bottom of the underworld to the top.

Just as Liu Wei hoped, I Am a Hoodlum caused an even bigger fight. Some readers found the book too dark, too full of spite, its values wrong. Liu Wei defended it: "On values, my readers all thought it was fine." But Huanjian Shumeng took the book down in the end, and Liu Wei moved to Qidian.

The book made him famous anyway. It suited the internet age, where people are readier to vent, behind the cover of a screen, the anger that social rules normally keep down. And as martial-arts fiction feeds a reader's fantasy of robbing the rich for the poor and holding the world's troubles in mind, the plot of I Am a Hoodlum — a nobody stumbles into a chance encounter and becomes a great hero — gave people the satisfaction they could not get from real life.

By today's measure I Am a Hoodlum is a short web novel, wrapped up in a hurry at a bit over 300,000 characters. But Liu Wei soon put out a sequel, I Am a Hoodlum: Storm Returns (《我是流氓之风云再起》), and this one ran to 690,000. Later, I Am a Hoodlum and its sequels Storm Returns, Chronicle of the Flowing Flower Sword (《流花剑录卷》) and Dragon War on the Starry Plain (《龙战星野》) came to be called the Hoodlum Tetralogy. Dragon War on the Starry Plain alone runs to 1.85 million characters.

Liu Wei's reliable updates and dependable quality won him a following fast. In 2004 he began serializing The Way of the Ascending Dragon (《升龙道》), whose hero, Yi Chen, can go anywhere and do anything — exactly what readers of wish-fulfillment fiction want — and it drew a huge audience. At the time it earned a saying of its own: "When the Ascending Dragon appears, no one dares compete."

Liu Wei's income shot up with it. After a little over a year writing on Qidian, his annual income passed one million yuan — the first web novelist on the site to get there. From 2012 to 2014, according to the China Online Writers Rich List, he made more than 10 million yuan a year three years running.

As one of the most successful authors of internet literature's early years, Liu Wei also became a chip in the fight between sites. In 2006 a group of editors left Qidian and founded 17K Novels. "They were editors I got on well with. They were jumping ship, and they said, come over and give us two books," Liu Wei recalled.

He brought 17K a batch of early users as well. That July, the sequel to The Way of the Ascending Dragon, The Way Against the Dragon (《逆龙道》), launched on 17K. On the first day Liu Wei posted a chapter an hour, close to 100,000 characters in all. A large share of the readers who had been following The Way of the Ascending Dragon became 17K users. On the strength of Liu Wei and a few other authors, 17K found its footing in the industry quickly.

"Once I'd paid off those two books," Liu Wei went back to Qidian. After its early burst of noise, 17K never managed to threaten Qidian's lead. According to The 2010 Blue Book of Chinese Internet Literature, Qidian's peak page views topped 300 million; 17K's peak was just over 50 million.

As the money coming in grew, Liu Wei's life settled down.

After writing I Am a Hoodlum he had gone to Zhengzhou for a while to keep working, under pressure from his family. Now he no longer has to handle the office relationships he could never make sense of.

Besides writing, his other hobby is reading. What he reads most is internet literature. "Apart from supernatural stories and gay fiction, which I don't read, I read basically everything. I get through one to two million characters a day."

He prefers the classics, because with those you can't go wrong. Last month he bought a few more books along the lines of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and put them by the bed, reading a few pages a day. "If you buy the classics, at least you won't end up with something that's no use reading."

He takes ideas from what he reads. "Reading other people's books builds up a kind of database," Liu Wei said. "In my own books, you could say I've worked in fragments of a lot of those characters' personalities."

To many readers, Liu Wei's fiction has stopped moving. His heroes all have the same personality; his plots run the same course. Plenty of people call Ode to the Witch (《巫颂》), which he wrote in 2008, his best book, and say nothing since has topped it.

The doubts aimed at Liu Wei are really the doubts aimed at very long serialized web fiction in general, and hardest of all at the dumbed-down "xiaobai" novels that dominate it. In xiaobai fiction the hero's story is grinding monsters to level up, switching maps, then grinding monsters to level up again. It can satisfy a reader's appetite for sensation and nothing more — fast food with no nutrition. Tangjia Sanshao, I Eat Tomatoes, Tian Can Tu Dou, Meng Ru Shenji and Chen Dong are known together as the Five Whites of the Central Plains, which is not a compliment.

As web novels have grown longer, unnecessary dialogue, over-detailed scenery and repeated recaps of the setup have flooded in, and the plots have slowed to a crawl — "watered down," as readers say. On his WeChat official account, Yang Chen, general manager of China Literature, has laid out many of the trade's formulas: how to dress up a villain to raise a book's standing, the basic rules for beating an enemy above your level, the principles behind a "golden finger" power-up, and how to make a book long without watering it down.

In a fast-growing industry, the ground Liu Wei stands on is no longer as simple as when he first made his name. The books themselves have branched into ever more subgenres — supernatural, historical, military, online-gaming and more — rather than the Eastern or Western fantasy of the early years. Authors like Mao Ni, Fenghuo Xizhuhou and Yue Guan, with ornate prose and deeper plots, have won over readers whose tastes keep getting pickier.

Even in what Liu Wei does best — fantasy about an underdog's rise — there are now strong rivals. In the two or three years he spent at 17K, Qidian spared nothing in building up Zhang Wei, better known as Tangjia Sanshao. Both men are famous for never missing an update, but with Qidian pushing hard behind him, Zhang Wei's standing now far outstrips Liu Wei's.

Zhang Wei told GQ: "My core readers have always been the 8-to-22 crowd. The key is holding on to them."

While many authors have set up companies and run their own books as IP franchises, Liu Wei has stayed out of it. He leaves his work to Qidian to manage and signs the occasional licensing contract when the people in charge point him to one.

Skipping the IP business appears to have cost him a good deal of money. The last time Xuehong appeared on the China Online Writers Rich List was 2014. On the 2017 list, the Five Whites of the Central Plains took the top ten places.

Web fiction looks like it has no barrier to entry. There is enough room online that editors never have to kill most of what comes in. Novels pour in by the thousand, good and bad together, all jumbled. So web fiction's reputation, as a whole, is not great.

About the value of his own work, Liu Wei is modest. He thinks every book he has written is much the same, none of them especially good. He says he is grateful to internet literature: "Without it I'd be working nine to five, a proper job. Whether you like that job or not, you have to keep doing it. With internet literature, writing books is the thing I like. I get to do what I like every day."