Ghost of a chance: spooky stories catapult Chinese online-fiction writer to fame
Xu Yunfeng is one of the hottest names in the digital serialisation of fiction – where chapters are posted online under a pay-as-you-read system. And his fans don't like to be kept waiting
After years of writing fiction only for fun while working as an engineer, Xu Yunfeng has finally hit the big time. His latest novel The Great and Most Honourable Master – about warlocks and Taoists throughout Chinese history – is an online sensation, with tens of thousands of people paying to read the latest instalments posted on Ebtang.com. If he gets writer’s block, they get impatient. The pace can be exhausting, but for authors up to the task it's a way to keep demand growing.
It’s an old trick updated for the digital age. Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas famously kept their readers in a state of near-constant suspense by breaking their novels into parts and publishing them serially. So too did several writers in the Qing dynasty.
Xu, who writes under the name She Congge, saw 40 million people “click” on his collection of ghost stories set in his hometown – Strange Happenings in Yichang. It became so popular, a print edition followed, selling 100,000 copies. His novel The Other Sea won the World Chinese Science Fiction Association’s Xingyun (Nebula) Award, while another work, The Tomb Robber, was made into a movie. Xu discusses his fictional characters, whether he believes in ghosts and his relationship with an audience always clamouring for more.
How did you become an online fiction writer?
I studied chemical and materials engineering in university and later became an engineer at a construction site in Pakistan. While there, I started to write ghost stories and publish them online in 2010. There are many supernatural folktales, which are passed down by word of mouth, in my hometown of Yichang in Hubei province. I was in Pakistan for nearly two years and spent nine months writing Strange Happenings.
Are you still an engineer?
I am now a full-time playwright in a film production firm in Beijing. I tried to continue working as an engineer and write only at night, but it proved too difficult. I still publish daily updates online of my novel, The Great and Most Honourable Master.
Has online fame changed your life?
It has been a big turning point in my life. Had it not been for the books, I would still be an engineer at a construction site. Now I can pursue what I want to do – to produce a movie. Of course I still write, but it’s a transition to what I really want to do.
Your novels are full of historical anecdotes, folklore and physics theories. Do you spend a lot of time researching for your novels?
A hero in one of my stories is a college graduate who could not hold on to jobs and worked as a security guard and a milk delivery man. That was my personal experience; I lived that life. In another story, I created a hero who possessed all my bad traits and another with all my good traits. The Great and Most Honourable Master, is about me, too. I don’t have to do research for my novels because I read so much about them when I was young and I also studied physics and chemistry in university.
Had it not been for the books, I would still be an engineer at a construction site
Did you do well in Chinese language in school?
My Chinese studies scores were not high, but I did read a lot, especially works in the ancient Chinese language. European 19th and 20th century literature also had a great influence on me, such as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. They not only trained my way of writing, but also the way I think. I only took up writing when I was in my 30s.
Given Chinese views on ghosts, how did you feel writing supernatural stories?
Although I write a lot about the afterlife, I am a materialist. Chinese culture holds ghosts in awe but I am not scared of them.
Many people pay and wait every night for your novel’s daily updates. Is it lucrative for you?
I don’t write novels to make a living, but I do get around 1,000 yuan (HK$1,215) every day for publishing chapters online. I have a decent salary from the movie production company job.
Do you feel pressure from having so many people wait for your novel’s daily updates?
For about a month, I had writer’s block and tens of thousands of people waiting for my update. They urged me to write faster, but I couldn’t. Even when I did write something, it wasn’t good. I had to polish the chapters when the novel was sent to print later. But after that month, everything went back to normal and it was fine.
Why are your novels so popular?
My characters are never a stereotype; there are many layers to the characters, and you will feel for them. People are under a lot of pressure and they enjoy fantasy novels as a way of escaping reality. Mobile phones have become the medium for online literature and people tend to read in fragments. People now care more about a novel’s entertainment value and classic works are being ignored.
Having benefited from the rise of online reading, what do you think of the trend?
The mobile-reading trend has affected my way of writing. I don’t dedicate much to a detailed description of the environment, the social context or even character’s internal monologue, because readers hate that. They want conflict and climaxes for each chapter, or they get upset.
