Nearly all of us today write on the computer and find that doing this really boosts our productivity. For years now I've composed on the computer screen and have limited the pre-computer writing activity to making some basic notes or a bare outline. Using the computer makes it far easier to correct, cut and paste, and the like.However, Yan is an exception to this rule. Yan said at the Bookworm event that he had spent some five years writing with a computer. But he then quit, feeling that it sapped his creativity (创造力). Thus Yan wrote his latest novel, LIFE AND DEATH ARE WEARING ME OUT, entirely by hand, using brush and ink on traditional Chinese paper.
This novel has some 500,000 Chinese characters, which amounts to around 400 pages of prose after being translated into English. While Yan said he had been thinking about this book for some four decades, he was able to do the actual writing in just 43 days!
Yan added that he had been bird-dogged for many by a computer company who wanted him to endorse their PC brand. These people felt that being able say, “Mo Yan writes using our computer” would make for very good publicity. However, Yan said that when the word got out about the way he wrote LIFE AND DEATH AND WEARING ME OUT, these people quit bothering him.
Just three Chinese words in this post: 小说家 (xiao3shuo1jia1) or novelist, 电脑 (dian4nao3), which literally means “electronic (电) brain (脑), and 创造力 (chuang4zao4li4).
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