When he first calculated this number, he didn’t quite believe it. He checked it three times before confirming that it was just that much.
Eighteen thousand yuan, five digits, five syllables, read it out with your mouth, it just combines the three nasal vowels of the a sound, and the rhythm is like Li Bai's ancient poetry.
Although Wang Zixu’s goal has always been the Nobel Prize in Literature and the royalties of up to 6 million yuan. But that goal has always been too far away for him, and he has not yet expected to receive this award in the first 30 years.
As for the nearby scenery, the manuscript fee of a few hundred yuan for "Xihe Literature and Art" was the limit of his imagination. Even for the author of a leading literary journal, the fee for a manuscript was only a thousand yuan, and it took a long time to get it.
And Zuo Ziliang’s promise is equivalent to promising him a monthly royalties of 18,000 yuan. Wang Zixu never dreamed of such a good thing.
He hesitated for a long time before asking what he was most worried about: "You won't be able to pay the royalties, right?"
Zuo Ziliang was finally annoyed by him and said: "Go, go, who can't afford your salary? In this way, if you can steadily produce two articles a day, more than 60 articles a month, and a total of more than 120,000 words, I will give you an additional 2,000 yuan as a perfect attendance bonus. , do you think it’s okay?”
Wang Zixu was afraid that he would regret it, so he immediately said: “It’s a deal.”
Despite Zuo Ziliang’s guarantee, Wang Zixu was still worried about the decline in writing quality.
Authors who aim to win the Nobel Prize for Literature must be responsible for every line they write. But how could he not be moved when faced with a royalties of 20,000 yuan? This money can solve almost all the problems in his life. After experiencing the painful battle between heaven and man, he was heartbroken and wanted to go to hell. Anyway, he could make money even if he wrote poorly. I just write.
In order to fully prepare himself mentally before writing, he went to read Dostoyevsky’s biography again. While watching, he smiled happily.
Dosage is one of his most admired writers. He has read "The Brothers Karamazov" many times, and every time he reads it, it is a brand new excitement. Although Dosage did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature, that is obviously a problem for the Nobel Prize Jury, not Dosage, isn't it?
The Nobel Prize review meeting always has some hidden elements. In order to attack ideology, they did not award awards to the most important writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but instead gave them to less important writers such as Bunin and Pasternak. In Wang Zixu's view, Tuo Shi's failure to win the prize does not undermine his glory, but is a shame for the Nobel Prize.
However, even such a great writer sometimes owes money. He went into gambling to pay off his debts, thus racking up more debts. A magnificent masterpiece like "Crime and Punishment" was written while deeply in debt. This shows that economic pressure does not damage a writer's creative power, and accelerating the creation speed does not necessarily mean that the quality of creation will be reduced.
The most important thing is that Zuo Ziliang himself said that it doesn’t matter if the quality drops, so why should he worry about it for his boss?
With this mentality in mind, Wang Zixu began to code more quickly. After writing for about half an hour, he realized that he might have been manipulated by Zuo Ziliang.
With his character, even if he is asked to lower the quality, he simply cannot do it. He will review every line he writes, and it has become his habit to practice the calligraphy repeatedly. If he doesn't practice the calligraphy, he still can't write. He used to write for three hours before going to bed after getting home from get off work. Now he has to spend twice as long to submit the manuscript on time. Not only is the quantity far greater than before, but the quality has not been reduced at all.
However, he went to bed later and later. From going to bed on time before 11 o'clock, he only climbed into bed at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. After waking up his sleeping wife many times, the angry wife kicked him out of the room and asked him to sleep in a small room on the grounds that it would affect her preparations for pregnancy.
After a week of this, Wang Zixu got up at 8 o'clock every morning. His hair was disheveled, his eyes were crooked, his mouth was slanted, and the dark circles under his eyes looked like the bottoms of pots that had been used for ten years. During the meeting, he fell asleep with his head tilted. If he hadn't been woken up by the person next to him, he almost snored loudly in public. His colleagues at the unit were surprised and asked him what he was doing at night, and he could only remain silent.
In all his time outside of work, Wang Zixu spends all his time carving out his scripts. Whenever he was free, he would simulate all kinds of love words in his mind. When the female colleague was talking to him, he blurted out something that he didn't even remember what he said, but the other party was so surprised that his face turned red and he kept saying that he didn't expect you to be a bad person. After get off work, I came specifically to ask him if he wanted to go drinking together in the evening.
Of course Wang Zixu doesn’t have that kind of American time. He has devoted himself wholeheartedly to the cause of writing.
He moved his computer to the balcony of his home, and every night, he lit an LED lamp. Unknown insects tapped their heads on the window glass, and crickets chirped outside the window. These sounds mixed with the roar of his case and the crisp sound of the keyboard, playing a late-night symphony.
This kind of intense writing not only tests his hand speed, but also squeezes his talent. In the first week, he could still rely on his past experience to create many wonderful scripts, but in the second week he entered a slump. He felt like a squeezed sugar cane, with no juice flowing out and only shriveled powder squeezed out.
His creative work is interrupted more and more time. During the break between creation, he must read more books to recharge himself. As the task of writing exploited him, he exploited others.
If in the past, Wang Zixu’s reading was to search for valleys in the mountains, collect carefully, and drink a cup of trickling water, now it is to ignore the rivers and seas, regardless of whether the water is clear or turbid, and the world is full of them. I drink the river floods with big gulps.
Nietzsche said: Those who do not want to die of thirst in the world must learn to drink from all cups. He drinks from any cup as long as it is water.
Several of Watanabe Junichi’s books have been dug out by him. He can no longer squeeze out nutrients from this writer and must turn to others for help. David Herbert Lawrence, Milan Kundera, Zhang Xianliang, Wang Xiaobo... these writers who seemed to be gangsters in the past have now become nutrients for Wang Zixu.
The nutrients in these writers’ words were sucked into his body, processed in his unique way, and flowed out from his fingertips. In the process of processing, something remains permanently.
He feels like a pure word processing machine. Even though he had no idea what he was creating. From Zuo Ziliang's point of view, he should be creating libido.
He felt that his writing skills were improving rapidly. Not an improvement, but a rapid improvement.
He now feels that his writing style in the past was still too immature. For example, the metaphor of "Yangshao people and pottery" that was highly praised by Zuo Ziliang is actually not on the table. He can now write better metaphors, more precise, direct, and powerful.
Wang Zengqi’s rhythm, Zha Liangzheng’s rhythm, Shen Congwen’s meticulous brushwork, Qian Zhongshu’s wonderful metaphors, Lu Xun’s coldness, and Wang Xiaobo’s playfulness... He swallowed them all into his body and turned them into his own pure energy.
At night, the lone lamp shines on the colorful window paper on the balcony, and poetic language flows naturally from the fingers. At this moment, the prince's hunched body is curled up in the abbot, but his soul stands majestically on the earth, forming a new peak.
Neither Zuo Ziliang nor Wang Zixu expected that the verbal promise they made easily would completely detonate the entire APP, causing an uproar in places unknown to them.