Bi Feiyu, Ge Fei and Su Tong on the Aesthetics of Fiction, a Writer's Style, and the Value of a Work

What makes a good short story? What decides a writer's style? What role does literature play today, and what fate awaits it?

On December 15, at the awards ceremony of the first Anonymous Writers Project, the organizers livestreamed the deliberations of the three judges — Bi Feiyu, Ge Fei and Su Tong — who went through the strengths and weaknesses of all six shortlisted stories in detail, giving readers a direct look at the judges' standards and taste.

Beyond the judging itself, the three also took up two larger questions along the way — what makes a good short story, and what really decides a writer's style — and had a good deal to say about both.

On the day of the event, QDaily also interviewed Bi Feiyu, Ge Fei and Su Tong separately, on five further topics: the difficulties young writers face now, the role literature plays today, the fate that may await it, and more.

We've put the two parts together — seven topics in all — below, in the hope that you find something in them.

1. What makes a good short story?

Su Tong: When we discuss the short story, we're likely to reach for some model in order to talk about it at all — but without a model it's hard to talk about, impossible even. The unexpected, when it turns up in a story, is always the highest form of creation. By "unexpected" I mean something that runs against the model, against the trap of a set structure, against normal logic. Take Immortal Syndrome (《仙症》) — near the end, out of nowhere, that guy goes off travelling and meets two different kinds of wind on a beach. That's the unexpected: something outside the model, outside the narrative trap, outside logic.

Generally, once you have some hazy idea for a story, what it needs is a runway. Whatever it is that makes up your inspiration, the thing you want to write, has to carry enough energy for you to run down that runway. That's true of a lot of short stories. Why do I love Maupassant? A Maupassant story has a clear runway; run down it and you get the Maupassant style. But there's an ending — where do you draw the finish line? That's different for everyone. Take the business of a necklace being real or fake: that alone sets up the runway. But at the end, Maupassant writes it his way, and that's what makes him Maupassant. Hand it to Hemingway or Carver and it might come out with a different flavor — the degree of sorrow, of joy, of inner conflict they give you can be different.

Whether a story is good or bad doesn't come down to whether it lands one hard punch, one blow of pain. Usually what it has to leave behind is a subtler space, one you can savor. Finishing a story and feeling that it lingers and means something, versus feeling that it simply stops there — those really are two different states. If you want to talk about a story's degree of completeness, I know what you mean: it's finished. But that lingering, meaningful space it leaves behind is of course what we're after when we go for a higher degree of completeness.

So why did the two of you just now win me over? How We Got Here (《我们是怎么走到这一步的》) does have an aftertaste. Even though I kept picking at its prose — I really don't like it, personally — your arguments were all sound, and the bit it offers is pretty good.

Bi Feiyu: What makes a good short story takes a long string of talk to answer, and I don't necessarily know either. What I'd really like to do right now is borrow a piece that's already been eliminated, Divining by Horsetail (《卜马尾》), to talk about how I think about titles.

Why Divining by Horsetail? A horsetail is a horse's tail, and divining is using it to tell fortunes — that's a human act. What if, instead of Divining by Horsetail, we simply called it Horsetail? Don't forget: inside this story's own language, it's only at dusk that a horse's tail can reveal the grassland's secret. In that instant the grassland takes it all back. In the end, the spell the grandmother teaches is this: tie seven knots in seven strands of horsetail, bind them together, and when you burn them you can see the grassland's secret. What is that secret? The author writes it beautifully — burn the strands and history and geography all come pouring out. It's the grassland itself. And where, in the end, is that vast grassland? Where is the secret? Right there inside the horsetail.

I think landing the title on something in nature is far better than landing it on a human act. Insisting on heightening the story's mystery puts a barrier in front of Chinese readers. Because in the story's own telling, the grandmother says a line like this: only Sule knows where Emuge has gone. Sule means "tail." If you had me write this story, I'd just call it Sule, or Horsetail. Even if neither Horsetail nor Sule is a great title, I can say with confidence that Horsetail beats Divining by Horsetail. Divining is the smaller thing. Horsetail already carries that meaning — so why shrink something so vast, so rich in natural meaning, down to a single human act?

Ge Fei: I fully agree with what Su Tong just said: there are as many ways to write a short story as there are short stories. The short story is the form that least allows generalizing. What sort of story counts as a good short story? The next new writer to come along might write something that stuns us completely. In the short story everyone is inventing a new form, and there are all kinds of ways to do it.

If we had to generalize, the two kinds I personally care about are these. One is a single stroke of the knife, very fast, very sharp — you finish reading and you're stunned, completely taken by it. The other is the kind of short story Su Tong writes. I've reread his short fiction in recent years and I like it more each time, because I think there's something gentle and generous in his work. The aftertaste he keeps talking about has real force in it, and it's sharp at the same time.

Because a short story has to be finished within a limited word count and length, it may end up weighted in one direction or another. But those are the two kinds I especially like. I also remember Su Tong wrote an essay about the short story as light cavalry — very light, very fast, giving readers a jolt of surprise, like a flash of light. I admire that kind of work too.

A good short story is one you can read again and again.

Su Tong: However you put it, it's a trap. The reason fiction has survived to this day is precisely that it has no trap. Our words can never catch up with another person's thinking. The same goes for the short story. I believe that in reading, surprise keeps arriving. Short story writing is by nature an infinite space, and that's exactly why we're able to survive.

2. What really decides a writer's style?

Bi Feiyu: Character decides style. Whatever kind of person you are, that's the kind of language that will flow out of you; the root of it is definitely there. You can talk about taste, reading, life experience, thinking, but I believe character is the deciding factor. It's like a person's voice — bound by a thousand threads to their health. If someone has had tuberculosis for ten-odd years, how could their voice sound like the three of ours? It changes. Style is voice.

Ge Fei: Looked at in the abstract, style is really the goal you're trying to reach in your writing. Sometimes that goal is conscious, sometimes not. What Old Bi is describing is the unconscious kind: whatever kind of person you are, broadly speaking, that's the style you'll have.

From the conscious side, if a writer needs to change things up, or go looking for something, then there's a question of experience and technique, and also of luck. Writing has a great deal of luck in it. It isn't that once your understanding and your preparation reach a certain level you're bound to write something good. Not necessarily. It has a lot to do with your state and your luck at the moment of writing. Can you, in the course of writing, suddenly get every thread that ought to connect to connect, and finish what you set out to do? Sometimes even the writer can't know that in advance. What I find most interesting about writing is that it has a mystery in it: you might end up writing something that surprises even you, or you might end up with something quite ordinary.

Bi Feiyu: Whether it's a novel or a short story, an artist will always slip in a bit of sleight of hand. Because logic and thinking can't solve everything, there's always a place you can't reach.

(As for style,) it's mostly innate. Have you noticed that most people writing fiction hit some inexplicable change around 40, the way a face does? When a person reaches middle age, there'll suddenly be a year or two when their looks change. Of course people can still recognize you. That's the moment when someone's innate makeup, their character traits and their taste all react chemically with one another.

Ge Fei: If a person lives to 70 or 80 and one day puts down the pen and never writes again — then, looking back from the last work to the earliest one, you can always find the connection between them. That's what Old Bi was talking about: there's something innate in it, something laid down in advance, and however you look you can see that sameness running through.

But turn it around. If you're 40 or 50 now, or 20 or 30, and you're looking toward the future, then I'd say style is still to be completed. It depends on how you push out your own boundaries. Push them out and style is there. Don't, and it isn't. You can't reason backward and say that your innate nature, your character and the rest are already fixed, so there's no need to push outward. A writer who thinks that way is finished fast.

So I think we should treat style as something still to be completed. You have to try the areas you're not especially good at or not especially familiar with. Even if the final verdict on you still falls within the sameness of your own style, it will still be different. There's a dialectical relationship at work here.

3. Does the language of fiction have an age and a gender?

QDaily: Teacher Bi Feiyu, during the judging you said: "Language has an age, like a tree — the longer time goes on, the more rings inside it. Once you've been writing a long time, whether what you write is good or not, the language is old language. Someone who has just started writing, however talented, is writing new language." Afterward, when the anonymous writers' real names were revealed, we found that language isn't only a matter of age; whether language has a gender is also worth a proper discussion.

Bi Feiyu: The age of language, the gender of language — what we're talking about is logic. That's exactly what makes literature lovable: sometimes it follows logic, sometimes it doesn't. At the same time, writers all have an endlessly rich creativity. Why shouldn't a man be able to experience a woman? Why shouldn't a woman be able to understand a man? Why shouldn't a young person be able to express an old one? Why shouldn't an old person pay attention to the young? You have to allow a writer considerable range in how they perceive and how they express. That, too, is the charm of literature.

QDaily: So you think it can have an age and a gender, and also have neither.

Bi Feiyu: Right.

4. What does a name really mean for creative work?

QDaily: Speaking from your own experience, what kind of relationship do you think there is between a writer's name and their literary work? What does a name really mean for writing and for the work itself?

Ge Fei: A name is a sign. As long as that sign isn't widely known, in a certain sense you have a certain freedom. That is, a young writer is nameless. And in that nameless state he has all sorts of possibilities. Not being known brings anxiety, of course, but looking back now I think namelessness is the freest state there is. So in a sense it's better for a writer to become famous a little later.

Because when he isn't being watched by many people, his work actually has enormous resources to draw on. Once he's gained some fame, by contrast, pressure comes at him from two directions. On one side, readers, critics and the public press on him — deciding, say, that his work is a certain style. That comes back to him as a kind of suggestion. On the other side, in his own expectations of himself, he starts to feel he's a veteran, or that everyone already knows him. In that state all sorts of worries creep into his writing, and sometimes he can't let go.

So being known and being unknown each have their advantages. If a writer stays unknown forever and never gets any recognition, I don't think that's a good thing either, because the point of any writer's or artist's work is, in the end, to communicate. If a writer gets no recognition, he may not even be able to publish — unlikely today, given how wide the online channels are — and a writer needs encouragement too, needs feedback from readers, in order to correct some of his own views of his work.

So it depends on the circumstances of the anonymity. In ancient China, for instance, many writers lived in a state of anonymity. At first we didn't know who wrote Dream of the Red Chamber (《红楼梦》); the same goes for the author of The Plum in the Golden Vase (《金瓶梅》). And that shapes some of the narrative strategies a writer takes up. When you're certain your name will never be known, the stance you take is different.

QDaily: Do you think that analysis holds for you personally as well?

Ge Fei: Of course, of course — because this has troubled me a great deal. As a teacher, for instance, everyone knows you write, and then when you write you inevitably think about your image as a teacher. There are things you'd have to put down that make you hold back, tie your own hands. For a mature writer, of course, you have to get past that occasional timidity. All sorts of situations come up in this.

Or take this: some writers will point out the flaws in your work, decide you're weak in certain areas. That's a suggestion to you too. When you write, you may end up trying to avoid those flaws. But you have to understand that in many cases those flaws are exactly what you should hold on to. So how do you balance that? It's something a writer needs to think about seriously. What should be held on to still has to be held on to.

QDaily: You just said it's better for a writer to become famous a little later — how late counts as late?

Ge Fei: I think it's perfectly normal for a writer to become famous in his 40s. I know a great many writers who became famous right around 40; for a novelist that's normal. Eileen Chang's line that "fame should come early" has its own particular context behind it, of course.

But from my own point of view, I've always treated creative work, writing, as an amateur pursuit; I don't treat it as that important (which isn't to say it isn't important). On that view, becoming famous a bit later may do some good for what you accumulate, and for holding on to your own self-awareness and confidence. There are too many temptations in society now; getting famous too early can cause a lot of trouble.

5. What difficulties does young people's writing face today?

QDaily: Teacher Ge Fei, you've observed that young writers have completely different qualities from your generation. Could you say more specifically what those qualities are?

Ge Fei: First, the sheer volume of information they have — their attention to the world, how far they're folded into contemporary social life — is far greater than ours was. We weren't nearly as immersed in life as they are. Second, when these young writers write — in our era, whether we lived in cities, in small towns or in the countryside, that era was a rural society. In the 1970s and 1980s the whole of China was, in effect, a rural society. China had only one city then, Shanghai; everywhere else had the character of a village. People today are different: young people's command of foreign languages, how much they understand of the world — the moment they emerge as writers, the density of language in their writing is completely different. So I think these qualities lead them to notice certain problems that interest them a great deal, and that in turn gives us something to learn from.

QDaily: Generally speaking, a writer's work is shaped by the mood of the times and by the world outside. I'm curious: starting from the mood of the times and that outside world, do you think there's a big difference between how young people write today and how your generation wrote? And what might those differences lead to?

Ge Fei: Society doesn't act on a person directly. Take a simple example: even inside a family, a person is under all kinds of pressure. Most of your time isn't actually spent in a relationship with "society" — it's spent with friends, with the internet, with your girlfriend. Over 24 hours in a day, most of your time is spent with the people around you. Their words and their ideas influence you heavily. You're forming a dialogue with them. In fact, apart from these people, where is this "objective society"? What sort of thing is "society"? You build a link to it, and you have to go through these people. And going through these people means going, first of all, through their opinions and their ideas.

So today, when it comes to cultural views, it's no longer as it once was, where you have your opinion and I have mine. It's that if you don't agree with my opinion, we're done, we cut ties. There's a coerciveness in that which acts back on everyone's behavior and everyone's way of thinking. I feel the trend is getting more obvious.

Bi Feiyu: The gap is enormous. The key to that gap is the arrival of the internet age. Because the internet age arrived, daily life has changed fundamentally. When daily life changes, literature changes with it — no question about that. Its content and its forms of expression will change accordingly. As computers develop further, as electronic technology develops further, things will keep changing. The rhythm of that change probably won't run on 10-year or 20-year cycles anymore; it may well speed up. That's inevitable.

On the surface the arrival of the internet looks as though it's widening the space for literature. It isn't. Personally I believe the space for literature is not as vast as it was for our generation. That, too, was made by the era. Because whether you look at the education we received or the point when we started writing, it was the early years of Reform and Opening. In those early years, as you know, it was an era of growing outward for all you were worth, expanding in every direction. As someone who writes, I really envy young people today. And at the same time I don't envy them at all. I feel the era we happened to catch had, as far as literature goes, more possibility in it.

6. What role does literature play today?

QDaily: Compared with the past, what state do you think literature is in, in today's era and society? And what role should it play?

Ge Fei: Put broadly, the question can't be answered. There are too many types within literature, and in terms of function they do different jobs. You can't say bestsellers aren't worth reading, and you can't say web fiction isn't worth reading. As for "pure literature," we can't say for certain what sort of work definitely counts as that either.

All we can say is that there's one kind of literature devoted to understanding our real conditions of existence, to understanding the relationship between the self and the things it projects — between mirror images, so to speak. For that kind of fiction, in the situation we're in today, I think the energy is still very great.

Look at the work of young Western writers now, for instance — I've read some things by young French, German and British writers — and relatively speaking their themes, their subjects and the problems they care about are fairly narrow. China is different. China has only just begun its social transformation and is still in the middle of it, so a great deal of kinetic energy shows up. You can't say it's necessarily profound, but the atmosphere it provides is very diverse. So I think literature has room here to make its own moves.

Second, what role does literature play today? That depends on how the work is set up. Are you there to satisfy people's pleasure in reading, or to give them a companion book, or are you out to intervene in other people's lives, even offend them? Those are completely different things. A good work will certainly have that second effect: it will shock you, it won't leave you comfortable. A lot of people have read Keigo Higashino, for instance, and the reader his work is designed for is precisely the middle-class reader. It won't offend you; in a certain sense it protects you, lets you know what marriage and family look like, and inside there'll be some cases, some crimes. On the whole it strikes a balance with you.

But good literature will always hurt you. It offers a different angle from which to look at things. That's what makes it impossible to feel comfortable while you read, and impossible to consume the work completely.

These are in fact two completely different kinds of literature. How do I weigh them? The first is the consumable kind, the Higashino kind. Once you've consumed it there isn't even a bone fragment left; there's no remainder. You finish the last page and the process is over. But real literary works, good ones — you finish them and it's as if you hadn't read them. They're still there. You can't use them up. They leave behind a large remainder.

So how do you weigh literature's function and role in all this? Many readers are passive. They want something palatable, sweet, comforting, that consumable kind of work. But sometimes they also need the shock, need a work that forces them to look at their own lives again. Our lives, for instance, are wrapped in a cultural illusion. We use ten thousand reasons to convince ourselves that we live well, that we have an edge, that we seem to have more money and more culture than you do. That wraps up the most basic, real things in our lives. In a certain sense, one of literature's most important functions is to pull that wrapping off, puncture it, and let you see what's underneath.

Of course, in every era the presentation of truth, of the real self, is different. From the 17th and 18th centuries down to today, literature has kept changing precisely because the relationship between the individual and society, and the tension in it, differs from era to era. For a writer, every era sets new tasks and new questions. Given all that, I think the readers of literature in the serious sense, pure literature, can't be very numerous today, and in a certain sense that readership is slowly shrinking.

But it still has power. That power lies in a paradox: the paradox of an infinite minority. Pure literature is written for an infinite minority. The people it serves are few, but that few is infinite, because it stays open to the future. You can't say a small group of people doesn't matter; in fact it matters enormously — an infinite small group. Consumer literature, by contrast, serves a fixed majority, and after some number of years those people are simply gone. A work of consumerist literature may capture a great many readers in its own era, but once that era passes its importance goes with it. Then there are writers whose readership looks tiny — a writer like Kafka, who might have sold a dozen or so copies, but who still has readers after the year 2000.

7. What fate awaits literature in the future?

QDaily: The latest issue of Li: Time Capsule (《鲤·时间胶囊》) asked 24 writers and cultural figures to predict the future of literature as they see it. I found a lot of it pretty interesting.

[Note: The writer A Yi predicted, for instance: In 2020, AI literature arrives. A Toutiao subsidiary crudely named "Grope Your Balls" runs fine-grained statistical analysis of each individual reader's tendencies — fields of interest, genre, word count — and automatically produces literary works tailored to that reader alone.

The cultural commentator Liang Wendao predicted: Around 2023, whether or not the Nobel Prize in Literature still exists, several literary prizes will appear in China offering more prize money than the Nobel, boasting that they will replace the Nobel Prize in Literature and embody China's voice in the world.

The writer Ban Yu predicted: In 2095, the whole concept of literature will have dissolved, no longer exists, and no one mentions it. Only a small minority form secret societies and keep up this ancient activity called writing, treated as heretics by mainstream society, with an extremely narrow space to live in. They try to resist the writing machines, and are defeated again and again. That same year, in a basement somewhere, a group of writers from the Northeast run into Borges and knock him to the ground. The reason is unknown.]

I'm curious: when it comes to the future of literature, what predictions or imaginings do you have?

Bi Feiyu: None. Because I'm at this age now, and I know life will never unfold according to my predictions or imaginings. Better for us to sit and watch how it goes.

Su Tong: I've never thought about predictions of that sort. However hard things get, however many or few people love literature, literature won't die. It will always be something human society needs.

Ge Fei: I never try to predict the future. Because it's exactly this excess of worry, this excess of anxiety about the future, that wrecks our present existence. In a certain sense we have to make a cut, sever the future to some degree, and only then can the present be revived, only then can the present come into being. And I think the relationship between present and future isn't what we imagine — that if you worry, if you prepare for the rainy day in advance, the trouble goes away. That's very hard to achieve.

So as far as literature goes, I don't much predict what the future ought to look like either. What matters is the work I'm doing right now. If this work has meaning for the future, it will find a life of its own. There's a kind of conviction in that. Before what we now call print media existed, every writer and every poet was writing for the future, because they had no readers at the time. Without printing, how could they have readers? A few might copy your book out by hand, but that readership was tiny. Someone like Du Fu couldn't have said he was writing for the dozen or so people around him. He said, "literary work is a matter for a thousand ages," and that "thousand ages" points to a distant future. He had an imagining, but the imagining rested first of all on his firm belief in the present, his confidence in the work he was doing. Which is why he wrote, "you and your kind will vanish, body and name alike, but the great rivers will keep flowing through ten thousand ages." He didn't care at all about his reputation at the time.

The future is sometimes a kind of imagining, and I call it "awaiting a visit." Creating work is, in a way, waiting for someone else to come and visit it — a record awaiting a visitor. Literature, writing, is a form of awaiting a visit. That's how I see the relationship with the future: I don't approach the question by worrying about future fame or immortality; you root yourself in the present and let the present come into being. You do a piece of serious work, and then I stay open to the future. As for what the future looks like, I don't know. If it still has meaning, it's roughly like this.

Appendix: The three final-round judges of the first Anonymous Writers Project

Bi Feiyu: Born January 1964 in Xinghua, Jiangsu, now a professor at Nanjing University. He began writing fiction in the mid-1980s. His representative works include the short stories The Nursing Mother (《哺乳期的女人》) and Wang Family Village on Earth (《地球上的王家庄》); the novellas The Moon Opera (《青衣》) and Corn (《玉米》); the novels The Plain (《平原》) and Massage (《推拿》); and the lecture collection Lectures on Fiction (《小说课》). The Nursing Mother won the first Lu Xun Literary Prize and Corn the third; Three Sisters, the English edition collecting 《玉米》, 《玉秀》 and 《玉秧》, won the Man Asian Literary Prize; The Plain won the literary prize of the French newspaper Le Monde; and Massage won the eighth Mao Dun Literature Prize. His work has been published abroad in more than 20 languages. Lou Ye adapted Massage into a film of the same name, released in English as Blind Massage, among other adaptations.

Ge Fei: Born 1964 in Dantu, Jiangsu, a prominent contemporary writer and scholar. He graduated from the Chinese department of East China Normal University with a doctorate in literature and is now a professor in the Chinese department at Tsinghua University. His work includes the novellas and short stories The Lost Boat (《迷舟》) and Encounter (《相遇》); the novels Gazing at the Spring Wind (《望春风》), The Banner of Desire (《欲望的旗帜》), Peach Blossom Paradise (《人面桃花》), Mountains and Rivers in a Dream (《山河入梦》) and Spring Ends in Jiangnan (《春尽江南》); and essay and criticism collections including Perspectives on the Art of Fiction (《小说艺术面面观》), Studies in Fictional Narrative (《小说叙事研究》), The Invitation of Literature (《文学的邀约》) and The Face of Borges (《博尔赫斯的面孔》). He has won the Mao Dun Literature Prize and other literary awards.

Su Tong: Born 1963 in Suzhou, Jiangsu. He graduated from the Chinese department of Beijing Normal University, has worked as a teacher and an editor, and is a professional writer with the Jiangsu Writers Association. He began publishing in 1983 and joined the China Writers Association in 1990. His major works include the novels Rice (《米》), My Life as Emperor (《我的帝王生涯》), The Boat to Redemption (《河岸》) and The Tale of the Yellow Sparrow (《黄雀记》), and the novellas Wives and Concubines (《妻妾成群》), Blush (《红粉》), Nineteen Thirty-Four Escapes (《一九三四年的逃亡》) and Three Lamps (《三盏灯》), among others. He has won the Man Asian Literary Prize, the Mao Dun Literature Prize, the Lu Xun Literary Prize and other awards. Zhang Yimou adapted Wives and Concubines into the film Raise the Red Lantern, among other adaptations.

Cover image: a still from the film The End of the Tour (《旅行终点》), via: Douban; banner image: a still from the film Blind Massage (《推拿》), via: Douban.