Text no. 1: How to Write a Worstseller
One summer day five years ago, I got a phone call from a city on the coast. The voice on the other end of the line, deep and measured and deliberate, congratulated me on being chosen to take part in a writers’ workshop, and instructed me to leave the very next day for the place it would be held, a small island not far from that coastal city. Room and board would be provided for over the entire two weeks, but I’d have to cover my own travel expenses. The voice hung up before I could reply.
At the time I was at home with my girlfriend in the middle of a fight, desperate to come up with a reply to the last thing she’d said. My first thought was that this was a scam. My second thought was a sudden jolt of inspiration: I found the perfect comeback for the fight. I set down the phone and was about to go on arguing, but my girlfriend turned and asked who’d called. I stopped short, put my comeback on hold, and repeated what I’d just heard. “You’re such an idiot, it’s obviously a scam,” she said.
She had exactly the same thought I did. But now that she’d said it, I couldn’t just agree. I could only counter with: “Not necessarily.”
“What do you mean, not necessarily?”
“Maybe it really is some kind of writing seminar.”
“Then why did they choose you?”
She had a point. Aside from a literary club at university that I briefly got talked into joining, I’d never had a thing to do with literature. Once, carried away by the passion of the club’s president, I drunkenly proclaimed that I too would “one day become a writer.” But I’d never written a single line, and after I got together with my girlfriend, who at the time was the club’s vice-president, I didn’t attend any more of their events. My girlfriend, too, soon quit, and went from aspiring writer to ordinary young bank employee, scrolling through online romance novels on her phone. She’s always been a bit ahead of me in terms of income, though thankfully only a bit. I suppose I did have one writing-related job: after graduation I worked for a text-message marketing company, mostly composing spam texts. In reality, I’d just cut and paste from the ad copy manual. Now I work at a real estate research firm, where my main responsibility is to draft proposals for clients, essentially putting garbage into PowerPoint form.
No, I couldn’t think of a reason I’d be chosen for a writing workshop. Unless it was a scam.
Or maybe—
“Or maybe I really do have some literary talent, it just hasn’t been discovered yet,” I ventured.
“You?” My girlfriend looked at me. “Ha!”
Often our fights would grind to a halt with that laugh of hers, not because I wanted them to grind to a halt, but because I just couldn’t muster a response. I’d sit there like a dud bomb, and she’d act as though nothing had happened. Through a sort of unspoken agreement, we’d both pretend the whole thing had blown over.
There’s nothing enviable about this. Anyone who’s been in a relationship for more than three years has these kinds of unspoken agreements, and my girlfriend and I had been together for six. I can’t say I hadn’t thought about marriage, of course, nor that she hadn’t thought about finding a new boyfriend. During our first three years we must have broken up 800 times, but in the last three years, we both concluded that breaking up wasn’t so different from getting married, and not mentioning the word “breakup” had become one of our unspoken rules. The other unspoken rules included not exposing each other’s lies, not warning each other we were about to make a mistake, not putting our lives on hold for each other, even for a second. Really, aside from a minor fight each week and a major fight each month, we weren’t doing so bad. And the prospect of staying together had its appeal: as time went by, our fights would gradually become less frequent, so that by the day we died, we’d have returned to the honeymoon phase when we could communicate without words. We’d have grown old together.
But this time, I had that comeback to use! Had it not been for that phone call interrupting us, I bet we’d still be hashing out that fight. Who was right and who was wrong had yet to be determined.
That’s why this time I ignored her laugh. “Yes, me. What’s so funny?”
She didn’t expect me to keep going. She gave me a look, then suddenly opened her mouth and reeled off: “The wind is heedless of the slender branch, no dew ignites the cinnamon leaf’s fragrance.”
I didn’t turn around. What did that mean?
Slowly, she asked, “What comes next?”
All at once I understood. That was something I wrote for her in college. After she read it she asked, much to my surprise, what the next two lines were. How should I know what the next two lines were? Those were the only ones I copied out of that volume of Li Shangyin’s selected verse! At the time we were head over heels in love, and naturally this awkward little episode had been quickly swept under the rug. I couldn’t believe she still remembered.
She saw I didn’t respond, and laughed again. “Ha!”
It was that second laugh that made me make up my mind.
The next morning, when I’d packed my bags and was getting ready to leave, my girlfriend, who had just gotten up, groggily asked where I was off to. “The workshop,” I coolly replied. Then I walked out the door and didn’t look back.
作品1号: 不畅销小说写作指南
五年前夏天，我接到一通电话。电话是从一个沿海城市打来的，语音不疾不徐，富有磁性，恭喜我被选入了大师班，隔日就请奔赴指定上课地点，地点在该沿海城市不远的岛屿上，为期半个月，食宿全包，来回路费自理。对方没等我反应过来就挂了电话，当时我正在家里和女朋友吵架，苦苦陷于如何反唇相讥的困局里，第一反应是这是这个诈骗电话，第二反应是忽然一个晴天霹雳，我获得如何回击女友的灵感了！我搁下电话，想再找她理论，她却转而问我电话的事。我一愣，心里把那道灵感暂存在一边，如实回答了她电话的情况。“你傻啊，肯定是诈骗电话。”她和我想得一模一样。
结果她这么一说，我倒无法附和她的意见，只好反击道，“那也不一定。”
“怎么不一定了？”
“没准儿就是真的什么培训班呢。”
“那他们为什么选中了你？”
是啊。这辈子除了在大学时招新被忽悠进了一段时间的文学社，我和“文学”二字从未发生过任何关系。除了配合社长的热情，喝醉后附议过“以后要成为一名作家”的理想外，没干过任何一件写作有关的事。当我和当时还是文学社副社长的女朋友好上之后，就再也没参加过社团的活动。女朋友也很快卸任副社长，从有志于成为一名女作家，变成了如今捧着手机读网络言情小说在银行上班的普通女青年。收入永远走在我前面一点点，还好只是一点点。非要说和“写”这个动作有关的事的话，大学毕业后我在一家短信公司工作，主要内容是撰写垃圾营销短信，实际就是抱着文案书拼贴。如今我在一家房地产研究院上班，主要内容是给各位甲方写方案，本质上是把废话以 PPT 的形式组织起来。
是的。我想不出有什么理由会被一个写作培训班选中。除了这是一场骗局。
也有可能是——
“也有可能是我真的有什么文学天赋，只是还没被发现。”我说。
“你？”女朋友看了我一眼，笑了。
有很多次我们的争吵都是在她这副笑容之后就戛然而止了，不是我想戛然而止，而是我实在想不出用什么来回击她这副笑容。我一哑炮，她也会进入那种一切都没发生过的状态，我们就配合默契地假装一切真的已经烟消云散了。
这没什么可羡慕的，只要你谈恋爱超过三年，都会和伴侣形成这份默契，而我和女朋友，已经在一起六年了。我当然不是没想过结婚，她也不是没想过换个男友，前三年我们分了八百遍手，后三年我们都觉得分手和结婚其实没什么区别，不提分手二字成了我们的默契之一。其余默契还包括不会戳穿对方撒的谎，不会提醒对方即将犯的错，不会为对方暂停一秒自己的生活。除了每周一小吵每月一大吵，我们的日子过得还不赖。这事儿还有奔头可想：随着时间流逝，我们将继续逐年降低吵架的频率，到死的那天，我们将回到恋爱的最开始阶段，无需言语便可沟通。到此，我们也就完成了白头偕老。
但是这一次，我明明已经获得了那道神赐予我的灵感啊！如果不是这个中途插入的电话，我相信这一架我们还有的可吵。真理站在谁的那边还输赢未定呢。
于是我没有像以往那样理会她的笑容，“我怎么了？”
女朋友没想到我会继续，她看了我一眼，突然张口道，“风波不信菱枝弱，月露谁教桂叶香。”
我没转过弯来。这是什么意思？
她缓缓道，“之后呢？”
我立刻明白了。这是当年上学时我写给她的，没想到她看了之后问我下两句是什么，我哪儿知道下两句是什么啊？我从李商隐诗选里就抄了这两句啊！当时我们正在热恋中，这个小小的尴尬自然被草草忽略过去了。没想到她一直记到现在。
她见我没反应，又是一笑。
就是她这第二次的笑容促使我下了决定。
第二天一早，我收拾好了行李，准备出门时女朋友刚起床，她迷迷糊糊地问我是要去哪儿。我甩下一句，“去上大师班。”然后头也不回地走出了大门。
How to Write a Worstseller
by Da Tou Ma
Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House, 2017
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English Translator: Allen Young
