Ying Jianling

Chinese writer

　　Actually,every writer is a unique flower. They are of different colours, giving out different scents and displaying different ways of beauty. Our motherland China is broad and vast with a rich and long history, and we all have our own unique growing and living experience, cultural accumulations, territory environments, opinions and accomplishments, and even different ethnic religions and beliefs.

　　Children’s literature from our writing ought to be splendid, enriched and extraordinary. Art can not be called art, if the unique creativeness is missing. Since the puzzles of children literature in early years have already become a kind of common sense (for example, children literature can express all kinds of themes, but it depends on the writers how those themes can be operated with brain and heart), then what we need to do right now is not about establishing our own brand as soon as possible, but about making use of our own advantages, about not following the flow and about less copying. We should allow our inner heart to calm down, to try our best to stay away from desire and the temptation of vanity, so that our own comprehensive cultivation and state of mind (which is infinite) can be enhanced, and so that we can understand the uniqueness of ourselves as an extraordinary flower, one that can bloom in such an elegant way that no one else is able to imitate.

　　Of course, what we need more is to“head towards child’s innocence”. Chinese children literature has already been walking with firm steps on the road of art. Some of our children books with reality theme (especially teen novels) are absolutely no less excellent than those by foreign writers. But we do need to admit that our imagination still isn’t able to be considered as really wonderful, and in our works, the fun of children also somehow lacks a natural taste of original flavour. That happened probably because of Chinese writers’ thinking methods, educational environment and cultural habits and other factors that are all influential in some way.

　　We do need to help children literature head towards the innocence of children, and we do need to accurately and finely understand the fun of children and express this complicated life through the perspective of children in a more subtly way. We do call for great children literature works that are truly extraordinary and full of amazing imagination, such as the Witches by Roald Dahl and Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lingren.

　　Such excellent works are based upon gifted inspiration and creation, which is probably something from birth, rather than something from cultivation. However, even a man as dull as me is trying to stay close to the very realness when it comes to children book writing in the future, so that I can bloom as a flower that gives out wonderful scent among hundreds of flowers in a garden, a flower that no one else is able to imitate.