The thrills and spills of writing

• Source: Global Times
• [09:25 September 01 2010]
• Comments

By Hu Bei

There were plenty of thrills at the Shanghai Book Fair - and most of them were in demand. Thrillers, mysteries, detective stories and ghost stories were the big sellers and booklovers enjoyed trying out some new local talents.

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code exploded into China in 2004 and since then the market for thrillers has been growing.

Recently in China best-selling books have included Julia Navarro's religious thriller La Hermandad de la Sabana Santa, Robin Cook's medical thriller Mutation, and Joyce Carol Oates' Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, a collection of ghost stories.

Also selling well were works by Agatha Christie and the Sherlock Holmes' mysteries. Many of Agatha Christie's more popular titles, like The Mousetrap and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had been sold out by the second day of the fair.

New thrillers are proving more and more popular throughout China as well as Shanghai, among both readers and authors.

Cai Jun, one of Shanghai's leading thriller writers, has been acclaimed for several years and has made the Chinese Writers' Rich List. His Curse of The Deserted series was made into a film.

Cai wrote his first thriller on the Internet nearly 10 years ago. However, he said it was not until 2005 that local thrillers began to make it into the bestseller lists in China.

"In recent years, the domestic market for thrillers here has been expanding and many publishing houses began to search for local thrillers from the Internet," he said.

"Before that, if you wanted to write a thriller that caught the attention of readers, the fastest way was to write on the Internet."

Cai said that this was the most typical aspect of thriller writing in China. Many local writers, including himself, started writing on the Internet.

"If a work can attract enough attention with discussions and comments, it is quite likely that a publisher will turn it into a book."

Na Duo was another Shanghainese thriller writer who proved a drawcard among readers.

Na Duo also said that, because of the rising popularity of thrillers in China, publishing is becoming easier though publishers are sometimes more concerned with sales than with the quality of the works.

"If the writer cannot be strict with himself, the quality of his work cannot be guaranteed," Na Duo said.

Both he and Cai believed most of the local thrillers written on the Internet were stories without a formal structure and literary worth.

For Na Duo, the creation of thriller has two stages. The first is the idea for the plot, and the second stage involves having the ability to turn a sometimes vacuous and thin story into a proper literary work with structure, rhythm and characters.

Cai thinks characters are the most important thing for a thriller. His favorite thriller writer is Stephen King and he learned a lot about the portrayal of characters from King's novels.

"For most people, a story full of suspense and surprises is the most important element for a thriller and the other elements, including the characters just serve the story. The impact of the characters is not appreciated," Cai said.

"In King's works, especially The Shawshank Redemption in which every character is vivid and impressive, the characters make it credible. However, at present, many of the local thrillers pay more attention to the story and struggle to be convincing and well-written."

Li Yi, who supervises a domestic thriller website, said that at present, the main problems for local thrillers was that many of the writers were very young and lacked knowledge and professional writing skills.

"Some of the thrillers from abroad are well-informed about science, humanity or history. Foreign thrillers have been developing for a long time and have many fans but Chinese thrillers have a long way to go," Li said.

"However, there is one important point - because of the Internet, the creativity of writers is not limited."

Cai Jun said Chinese writers have one outstanding advantage that they can make use of in their work. Chinese characteristics, including traditional Chinese customs and history, are all great subjects for thrillers.

"These subjects are now attracting a lot of interest from foreign publishing companies," Cai said.