Word: fictioneering
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...Although it remains his touchstone, Mo Yan acknowledges that the gritty modern Gaomi is very different from the midcentury, rural township of his fiction - a place where peasants ride stoic donkeys and heavily laden camels walk the dusty streets. Film buffs may know it from Zhang Yimou's 1988 adaptation of Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, set during the Japanese occupation. In fact, much of Mo Yan's fiction - from the 1996 epic he describes as his magnum opus, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, to Frog, published at the end of 2009 - is set in a world seemingly remote...
...Eric Abrahamsen, a Beijing-based translator of modern Chinese fiction, it is clear that Mo Yan engages in the complex calculus of what is and isn't permissible that faces every Chinese writer. There is nothing wrong with that: not every artist has the stomach for strident dissent and, having been banned in the past, Mo Yan has nothing to prove. But these days, says Abrahamsen, Mo Yan "knows exactly where the lines are and doesn't cross them." Discussion about the drawbacks of the one-child policy, and whether it should be rolled back, is now permissible in China...
...Whatever the reason, Mo Yan makes it clear that his fiction will stay rooted in Gaomi - or rather his historical version of it. The novel he is contemplating next, for example, will be centered around a siege of the town during the 1930s, when China was riven with warlord rivalry...
Before writing this character, did you re-immerse yourself in hardboiled fiction...
...very important for me to not read crime fiction, actually. Plots in good crime fiction are so insidious that they get into your head and you don't even know that they're there. I was once writing a book - I forget which one it was, it was one of the Easy Rawlins ones - I was way more than halfway through when I realized, "This is very familiar to me." I'm talking to myself, saying "Well, of course it is, you just wrote it." And then I said, "No, it's familiar for some other reason." And then...