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A Great Opening Chapter—Wolong Sheng’s Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre

It’s true for any genre: when writing a novel you need a strong opening, something that piques the reader’s interest and keeps it and makes them want to read the next chapter. Well you won’t a much better example of such a chapter than Wolong Sheng’s 1965 novel Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre《天劍絕刀》.

Wolong Sheng 臥龍生 was a master at crafty interesting, intricate plots that kept the reader turning pages. There’s a reason he was called the “Mount Tai and Northern Dipper of Taiwan Wuxia” (台灣武俠泰斗) and was one of the “Three Swordsmen” 三劍客 of the Taiwan wuxia literary circle, along with Sima Ling 司馬翎 and Zhuge Qingyun 諸葛青雲. He is criticized for not taking his work seriously enough and allowing other authors to publish their work under his name, but I feel is strong points are too often overlooked in favor of repeating these same criticisms. It’s true his novels tend to suffer from having the “head of a tiger and the tail of a snake”, starting strong but then petering out by the end. But that’s true of many wuxia novels by many different authors, a product in part of the long serialization process (novels typically ran in newspapers for two to four years), and in Wolong Sheng’s case, also because he often wrote multiples novels for different newspapers at once. During his prime years, at one point he was concurrently writing Flying Swallow Startles the Dragon《飛燕驚龍》for Great China Evening News, Jade Hairpin Oath《玉釵盟》for Central Daily News, Red Snow, Black Frost《絳雪玄霜》for Sin Chew Daily, and Heavenly Whirlwind《天香飆》for Public Opinion Daily. Writing daily installments for all of those novels, it’s easy to see why he might have issues with consistancy. Keep in mind too that unlike Jin Yong 金庸, who spent years revising his entire body of work, Wolong Sheng’s novels that we have today still use the original text he published in the newspapers. He (and this is true for almost all wuxia authors) never revised his work.

Despite all that, Wolong Sheng still managed to produce some good work, great at times, and the first chapter of Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre is about a good an opening to a story as one could ask for.

But rather than just vaguely telling you why, I took the liberty of translating the first chapter so you can see for yourself. That chapter follows below. Afterward, I will discuss why I think this chapter is so effective.

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“Wuxia Flavor” — Ximen Ding on What it Takes to Write Wuxia

During the 1980s, wuxia fiction was on the decline, but it still had a large audience in the Hong Kong pulp magazines, particularly《武俠世界》 Wuxia World, and Ximen Ding 西門丁 was one of its most important authors. He was Wuxia World’s in-house author, having signed a contract in 1980 to furnish the magazine a piece of fiction each issue (it was a weekly) totaling 25,000 to 30,000 words. He soon began writing much more, including his own novel series, the best known of which is the《雙鷹神捕》Amazing Twin Hawk Constables series, which spanned 30 novels from 1980 to 1982. Yeah, 30 novels in two years! Plus all the other stories he wrote during that time.

He also wrote Republican era martial arts stories, stoies set during contemporary times, and horror stories. Later, Ximen Ding had a popular assassin series that spanned more than 20 novels. He also wrote under many different pen names; often more than one of his works appeared at the same time in Wuxia World magazine.

Together with Huang Ying and Long Chengfeng, Ximen Ding was known as the Three Swordsmen. These three, along with Wen Rui’an, dominated wuxia fiction in the 1980s. Wen Rui’am had his Four Constable series and was experimenting with new styles and forms of writing, Long Chengfeng had his Snowblade Vagabond series, his style imitating Gu Long, and Huang Ying, after taking over for Gu Long with his horror wuxia series, began his own series featuring assassin-turned-xia Shen Shengyi.

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How to Write Like Gu Long—Long Chengfeng and Snowblade Vagabond

When it comes to wuxia authors, there are two names that are often bandied about: Jin Yong and Gu Long. And with good reason, because it is these two authors who have received the most critical acclaim and the best reader response. Nowadays, wuxia is more or less a dead genre. There are still wuxia novels being published, but they are few and far beween. In the West, of course, it’s even worse. In the rare event you do find an article about wuxia in English, nine times out ten (and that’s a conservative estimate) it’s going to be about Jin Yong. Gu Long might get a namedrop. One article I saw not too long ago on the “history and politics” of wuxia didn’t even mention the Republican period or wuxia in Taiwan at all!1

But Gu Long had quite an influence and impact on the development of wuxia fiction as a genre. More than anyone else, Gu Long strove for change, for “breakthroughs” as he called them, trying to come up with a new way to write an old genre. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes not, but he kept trying to the end. He began writing his own wuxia novels in 1960 with Divine Sky Sword, at first imitating the major writers of his day, such as Jin Yong, Wolong Sheng, Sima Ling, and Zhuge Qingyun.

Gradually his style changed. With Cleansing Flowers, Refining the Sword in 1964, Gu Long was already experimenting with his fight scenes, moving away from the detailed descriptions of moves with flowery names that was (and remained) common in wuxia. By the 1970s, he had already found his own voice. At the same time, more and more of his novels were being adapted to film and TV, bringing him more readers. viewers, and notoriety. The rise of film and TV in Taiwan also led to more and more wuxia authors switching to screenwriting, which Gu Long dabbled in as well. And so wuxia as a genre of literature began to decline.

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Writing Fast and Writing Well

Writing Fast and Writing Well

by Wen Rui’an

Writing is a pleasure. The inverse of that sentence is: if you find writing to be a chore, then please stop writing at once. Forced work will never be a success, and the craft of writing cannot be carried out casually; you have to write your best in order to see results.

I can write 3,500 characters an hour. Among Chinese authors, I’m naturally not the fastest, but I’m already fast enough to be considered a “swift pen”. Some doubt that word count, but actually there’s really no need to:

  1. Writing fast does not mean writing well. If you write fast but slipshod, then fast is not a good thing.
  2. This kind of speed requires focus, plus some practice, and then anyone can do it. When I write I am often unfocused, so much of the time I can’t reach even half of that speed.
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Taiwan Wuxia Fiction Clichés

Taiwan Wuxia Fiction Clichés

by Jin Yong

For the last six months I’ve been reading a lot of wuxia novels. Recently there hasn’t been much wuxia novel output from Hong Kong authors, but on the Taiwan side it’s been surging like a storm, works emerging one after another. I read this kind of fiction exceptionally quickly, reading two books a night, each book between ten and twenty volumes. So the reason i can read these so fast is very simple, it’s because the novels’ plots are all pretty much the same, the stories formulaic, rarely seeing something new when flipping through them.

The following plots can be found in the great majority of Taiwan wuxia novels:

  1. A “dashing” young xia’s parents are killed by an enemy, so he is forced to roam the jianghu and undergo many adventures.
  2. Lots and lots of lady xia love him, among them will definitely be a licentious girl with the nickname of “Peach Blossom Something-or-other”, and there will be a lady xia disguised as a guy. This xia will certainly be drugged with an aphrodisiac and won’t be able to help himself from getting involved with one of the lady xia, “making a serious mistake”.
  3. The backbone of the story will be vying for a secret manual of the martial world or some rare jianghu treasure.
  4. This young xia will definitely obtain a secret martial arts manual left behind by an extraordinary person from a previous generation, and he will train until his martial arts is unmatched under the heavens, and the manual left behind will definitely have the words “left for one who is fated to receive it”.
  5. The young xia will definitely incur the favor of a senior who will help him open up his Conception and Governing vessels, get through a life-or-death training trial that will increase his strength one-, two-, or threefold.
  6. The xia’s antagonist will definitely be a master of a heretical school, some Demon Lord, Divine Lord, Ancestor, or old woman, all written the same, their appearance as grotesque as their martial arts, but with unexceptional personalities.
  7. Masters from prominent schools like Wudang, Shaolin, Kunlun, Kongtong, etc., will, when faced with the young xia, become completely worthless mediocrities.

The plots are mostly the same, and the language used to write them is also clichéd, stuff like “if it’s a blessing it’s not a disaster, if it’s a disaster you can’t avoid it”, “felt like ghosts were everywhere”, “a rare bud of the martial world”, none of them used by Hong Kong wuxia novelists. Wuxia fiction has been all the rage for less than ten years, but on the Taiwan side it seems to be even more popular than in Hong Kong. But in ten years for so many clichés and formulas to have already become so deeply rooted is really astounding.

Ming Pao, April 25, 1963

Posted on by Lone Crane

Jin Yong—On the Critical Standards of Wuxia Fiction

On the Critical Standards of Wuxia Fiction

by Jin Yong

This article by Mr. Jin Yong was published in 1957 in Hong Kong’s New Evening Post and was later lost. In 2015, Jin Yong Jianghu Forum1 poster “Emulating Lei Feng” found and copied the text of the article so that it could once again see the light of day. As everyone knows, although Mr. Jin Yong is a grandmaster of wuxia, he rarely wrote about his theories of wuxia literature. This article may be called a rare find and is extremely precious.

Recently someone published and article in the paper that was critical of wuxia fiction which led to a lot of debate. For the seventh anniversary of The New Evening Post, the editor asked me to write an article about wuxia fiction, so I am going to express my views on the subject.

If you take wuxia fiction as unadulterated entertainment to pass the time, then there is only one standard that has to be met: “does it interest the reader or not?” But clearly, the recent discussions have been treating wuxia fiction as a part of the national literature. For my part, I too hope wuxia fiction can be qualified to be considered “literature” and have been striving to write wuxia with that in mind, though I have not been successful at it so far.

When it comes to critiquing the good and bad of wuxia fiction, I think there are four main standards:

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Gu Long—On Wuxia

“On Wuxia”

by Gu Long

I’ve heard that Ni Kuang is getting ready to write A History of Chinese Wuxia Fiction1, and for a wuxia author this is really something worth being happy and excited about.

Wuxia fiction has been around for a long time, and it is has not been taken seriously for a long time as well. Now that someone is finally coming out to write a systematic account of this kind of fiction, it will have a place in the annals of fiction history. This undertaking is a grand event in the history of wuxia fiction; all authors of wuxia fiction ought to work together for this worthy project.

So I too can’t just stand back and watch the hunt and not join in. It’s just too bad I’m not as daring as Brother Ni Kuang, nor do I have his ability. I’m just offering my humble views on wuxia fiction based on my impressions and the little bit I’ve learned by writing it, but it’s not a formal account or serious criticism.

If it can be of interest to you, Gentle Readers, and can pave the way for Ni Kuang’s work, then I will be quite satisfied.

1

Regarding the origin of wuxia fiction, there are numerous arguments—since the Grand Historian’s Biographies of Wandering Xia, China has had wuxia fiction—of course that’s the most grand one, but not many accept that argument. Because wuxia stories are legends, if you insist on placing them on a par with the Grand Historian’s serious biographies, then you’re rather fooling yourself a bit.

It’s in the fictional records of men of the Tang dynasty that we first get stories closer to wuxia fiction.

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So You Want to Write Wuxia

Whether you want to write a wuxia novel, historical fiction set in premodern China, or a fantasy novel based on traditional China in some way, there’s a lot of stuff you need to know if you want your work to be as authentic as it can be. When it comes to wuxia, unfortunately there’s not a lot of information available in English, but there is some. I have a list of resources to get you started below, and then another list of books that wil come in handy when researching traditional China in general.

This post is the first in a series in which I will discuss different aspects of Chinese history and culture. Some will be of general use such as how did people address each other, what what were city walls like, etc. Other posts will be specific to wuxia, such as a discussion of the jianghu, martial arts schools, a comparison of different authors’ fight scenes, etc. Just topics I think are good to know when writing wuxia or any other Chinese period piece. I will take requests if anyone has a specific question they want answered. I’ll answer it if I can, or try to point you in the right direction if I can’t.

The dearth of wuxia novels translated into English makes it difficult for those who can’t read Chinese to learn more about the genre. I mean, if you’re going to write wuxia novels then you need to read wuxia novels. That’s just common sense. There are some you can read. I have a list of them on my site you can check out. Only a few authors have been translated, though, mainly Jin Yong and Gu Long. Their writing styles were unique, and though they did influence other writers, still the field of wuxia fiction as a whole was a bit different than these two authors might make it seem. I’m talking about the tropes and conventions used, often overused, the recycled plots, and so forth. This series of posts will address some of that stuff that isn’t available in English currently.

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