Original link: https://onojyun.com/2022/07/25/6410/
△ 206｜Find me before I die
The sentence structure of “Find Me Before I Die” is very similar to one of the rejected titles of the novel “If You Are Free After I Die”, which I will write next. Because it is so straightforward, it seems that one sentence can finish the whole story. It was because of the overly straightforward title of the first edition that I made the “death” of the protagonist an inevitable event in my later planning. At the beginning, the title gave people the feeling that there was a glimmer of hope, at least it was possible. In the plot, redeem him at the moment when he is about to die. So when I was planning the second edition, I wrote him “dead” as soon as I came up.
I love doing this “break the rules from the start” setting with myself. Of course, it will also cause “trouble” to myself. When I was writing an essay when I was a child, I often wrote halfway through it, only to realize that what I wanted to make up was completely opposite to the propositional essay. Because of this, I was often scolded by the language teacher and criticized whether there was a problem with my brain.
From my point of view, it is because the title defines the plot and core of the story from the very beginning, which means that everyone’s writing has the distinction of “right and wrong”. How about subverting the title from the very beginning? The one I remember most clearly is that a classmate finished cleaning the classroom by himself, and it started to rain on the way out of the school. The classmate rushed back to the classroom without hesitation and closed all the open windows. Although there is no “proposition” in this story, its core and interpretation are destined to be something that must be praised and promoted from a positive perspective.
I have also questioned whether this story of looking at pictures and talking can be reversed. When leaving the classroom, the classmate opened all the windows, and it rained heavily on the way. He was punished the next day and had to clean the classroom by himself; The cleaning person “betrayed”, and as a result, he could only do the cleaning silently. On the way home, it rained heavily. He immediately went back to school and opened all the windows, so that the next day the classroom would be punished for watering. A person who cleans all day, at this time, this classmate stood up and told the teacher that he was the only one who finished cleaning yesterday, and used this method to carry out the most severe moral kidnapping and punishment on those “betrayers” – of course, these perspectives I really can’t find a better word to describe myself, probably the most appropriate one is “mentally ill”.
Because it’s storytelling, whether it’s a proposition to write a composition or a picture to talk about, it actually stipulates “how the story should be told” from the very beginning, so there is a difference between “right and wrong”, and no one can allow others to expand on this topic at all. any imagination. At the beginning, I set my novel to “find me before I am dying”, which obviously defined the content of the story and the “most critical line of contradiction”, but when I continued to write along this “proposition composition” , you will find that I also set a “right and wrong” criterion in my heart – the male protagonist must not die, he can be tortured all over the body at the critical point of death, but after all, there is still an expectation in the title , he might be found before he dies – the more I write about this, the more boring I feel, because people guessed the ending from the beginning, and it was nothing more than a happy ending for him to be saved, or a tragic ending. He was never found at the last minute. It’s because storytelling has a “purpose” that I think it loses its original fun – so I simply wrote him “dead” at the very beginning, everyone thought he was still alive, and it was time for him to die. Find him when he’s dead, but he’s dead fucking hard.
The fundamental reason why Chinese people love to tell stories is not because of the plot itself, but what kind of purpose needs to be achieved through this story , just like a kind of “proposition composition”. Incorrect. Of course, there is another key reason, because often those face-to-face rhetoric and education are often inaudible to each other. There are still many such families in China. Children warn their parents about any form of topic. If parents want to maintain their sense of authority, they cannot believe their children’s theories. If the protagonist of the story told them again, they would listen, because the storytellers were no longer children who were “naturally inferior to them”.
That’s why people used to complain to me, saying that what they said to their parents was exactly the same when someone else said the same thing, and they believed it. He also asked me how to solve this kind of thing – to be honest, I grew up like this, so I didn’t bother to talk about my own business, but started to tell other people’s stories. Of course, whether these stories are true or false, whether they are made out of nothing, whether they refer to Sang and scolding Huai, can not be prescribed by me, but let the people who listen to them imagine for themselves. After reaching this kind of contract, they can only learn from the stories I tell. Search for truth and falsehood, because they will find that it seems that every story about someone else is about me, and every story about me is a satire of someone else.
Because a child is a “proposition composition” to Chinese parents, as long as it is based on my story, there will inevitably be some flaws that can be caught by them and gain education and moral capital. Telling the same story, they think that’s an objective perspective on their level, so their stories are all real.
One of the “story” I remember the most is when I was on my way home from my evening self-study and after school, when I was surrounded by four or five local gangsters and robbed. I was stabbed by the other party because of my struggle, but it happened that the knife was stabbed on my phone. I later broke free from the group and ran home out of breath without telling my parents about it, because it was just a “story” and the added worry would have no bearing on the direction of the “story” Change. A few days later, my family found that my mobile phone was broken again. This time, there was a big hole on the edge of the battery of the mobile phone. I took this opportunity to start ranting about my grades, what I did at school, and so on. I said that I was robbed on the way from school. Fortunately, my mobile phone helped me get a knife. Of course they don’t believe this “story”, because all the core is pushed to other more important and more immediate things – such as me against their will.
Later, when they asked about it, maybe they figured out that it wasn’t a “story”, but I didn’t bother to retell that story, admitting that it was a “story” that I made up.
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