Monday 30 December 2013

笙歌再现


一部小说的诞生,其实也得依靠自身的生命力。

我写笙歌的时候,每朝起来都会满脑子情节。故事中人昨天的遭遇,由于我要吃晚饭而被暂时冻结。今天他们苏醒之后,究竟会如何反应呢?我变成了“欲知后事如何 必须续写下回” 的心急人。吃罢早餐,连忙打开电脑找答案。我对故事主人翁们的命运的好奇,变成了一种推动力。

整个创作过程中最需要铺排和营造的,是故事的背景。一个不育的人类世界,人口和社会结构究竟会如何演变呢?这方面需要下功夫研究,构想才会合理。至于框架内的详情细节,大多是写作当时的念头幻化而成的现象。但念头这东西一向不受控制,更莫说悉心策划了。从这个角度看,故事的发展并不全由作者刻意安排。情节之间也有因果关系,节节相连;更曲折的布局也得顺理,方能成章。

Writing of Man's Last Song


When working on Man’s Last Song, I discovered that a story has its own life force. 

Most mornings, I would wake with a headful of ideas, wondering how to match them with my fictional characters. I had left them for dinner the night before, temporary frozen in a situation. How would they continue today? After breakfast, I rushed to the computer, anxious to find out. The story, yet incomplete, was spurring me on with the intrigue of its emerging fate.
Designing the global setting — a diminishing human world due to infertility — required research and planning. Once the general framework had been constructed, filling it with details became a day-to-day happenstance that could neither be planned nor controlled any more than real life. My thoughts of the moment — spontaneous and unruly as usual — would shape the vagaries of life faced by the protagonists.