There is no God in the world, and naturally there is no literary creation with the help of divine power. Inspiration is considered as "spirit" because it has the characteristics of suddenness, contingency and transience, and it is difficult for people to grasp it. In fact, inspiration, a complex spiritual phenomenon, seems to come and go without a trace at first glance, but it is actually traceable. From the perspective of reflection theory, the emergence of inspiration is a leap in the author's understanding; Psychologically, inspiration comes from the sudden communication of specific nerve connections. Therefore, although inspiration appears in the form of accident, it embodies the inevitable content and law and is the dialectical unity of accident and necessity.
It is true that the arrival of inspiration can't be arranged in a planned way, because it is sudden and accidental, but it is scientifically proved that: ① Inspiration is an objective creative concept, and learning and practice are the premise and foundation for obtaining inspiration. ② Inspiration has a brewing process in the subconscious. (3) Inspiration may suddenly appear in the process of brewing, inspired by related things. (4) When the mind is highly concentrated and the mood is high, the inspiration is easy to show. So inspiration can be cultivated. And according to years of practical experience, I think it is most important to cultivate inspirational thinking, and there are some effective methods.
One is passionate thinking. "Climb high and look far, the sea is wide and the sky is wide" (Liu Xie's Wen Xin Diao Shen Long Si). Only by observing the world with strong feelings can the world be poetic. Cicero, an ancient Roman historian, also wrote: "I once heard that a person can't be a good poet without the slightest mind and almost fanatical temperament." This shows that poetry, like all literary creations, should be related to the writer's feelings. My feeling is: love is like the sea, poetry is like the tide, and only the ocean of feelings can set off the waves of poetry. The truer, deeper and more excited you are about the world, the stronger your perception of the world and the more inspiration you will have. For example, Li Bai was exiled to Yelang by Tang Suzong for attending the Wang Yong shogunate, and was pardoned on the way, so he was very excited. Therefore, his poetry once again prospered and his poetry creation reached a climax again. The famous "Early Release of Baidicheng" was written with great passion. The same is true of Du Fu's The Yellow River was recaptured by the Imperial Army. Du Fu was in the same mood as Li Bai at that time, with tears streaming down his face and full of emotion. Li Bai thought of "returning to Jiangling a thousand miles a day", and Du Fu thought of returning to his hometown a thousand miles: "Come back from this mountain, pass another mountain, come up from the south, and then go north-to my own town! "We all have our own experiences of writing proud works with excitement and passion. I remember1June 1993, when I went to Daqing, I stopped by Anda to see Mr. Zhong Shizhong. During the dinner, I said I wouldn't drink too much, but more than a dozen people could recite my poems to persuade me to drink. For example, "I still see poetry as close as wine, and I often smell poetry as drunk." ("Self-mockery") "I just want to get drunk today and propose a toast to persuade me to drink a poem." This not only exposed the bottom of my wine, but also made me extremely excited and excited, and also inspired the poem, so I raised my glass and said, "The glass is full of true feelings, and I have known each other several times in life." Mobilizing inspiration depends on wine, pawning the spring breeze and buying poems. " ("Xie Anda poets raise glasses to persuade them to drink") gulp down the wine. A poem came out like this. I still remember the writing process of this poem. If I hadn't been so emotional at that time, I'm afraid there wouldn't be this poem. Passion is very important, and another thing that impressed me deeply is that I wrote the poem Xi An Nostalgia. At first, when I was in a military school, I settled in Xi for two years. I'd still like to see places of interest. It should be said that I have seen all the good places in Xi 'an, but I had not written poetry at that time. After writing a poem, I always want to recall the scene at that time to make up for this deficiency. However, I can't write it. What is the reason? Just no passion, no feeling. Later, in 2000, I went to Xi 'an again, stayed only for two nights, and wrote Xi 'an Nostalgia: "How many Jin is left after I heard the music of Tang Dynasty in the past and present?" Wei water dries up into the well, and the beacon smoke condenses into the emperor's grave. A Fang burns the stars to divide the fire, and the Wild Goose Pagoda robs Yu Yun and holds the dust. If you want to find something old in Chengtou, someone will blow it alone at night. "Why don't you write for ten years and write it in two days? That's what I said, emotion is the ocean, and poetry is the spray. If the ocean of emotion does not stir, the waves of poetry will not appear. So try to make yourself excited and emotional.
The second is reverse thinking. Reverse thinking, also known as divergent thinking, is a way of thinking about common things or opinions that seem to have become conclusive. Dare to "do the opposite", let thinking develop in the opposite direction, conduct in-depth exploration from the opposite side of the problem, generate new ideas and shape new images. For example, one of my poems, Dragon Tree in Confucius Temple, is the result of reverse thinking. 1999 When I went to Confucius Temple, I saw a big cypress tree named "Dragon Tree" in the yard. There is a dragon-shaped pattern with a big bowl on the trunk, which looks a bit like a dragon, so it is also very strange. However, the tour guide explained; This tree grows like this because Emperor Qianlong leaned against it. Although this statement is incredible, it caused my reverse thinking, so I wrote: "The temple is quaint, and the birds are singing in spring. The article is correct, and the old tree turns into a dragon. " In this poem, I attribute the reason why cypress trees become dragons to "listening to classics". In fact, we can also make a solution, that is, "the old dragon is attached to the tree to listen to the scriptures." However, these two explanations are the result of "thinking in the opposite direction". Another time, I went to Mount Tai to watch the sunrise, climbed the mountain at night, and waited for the sun to come out at the top of the mountain. Before the sun came out, many people had gathered on the top of the mountain, and people were scrambling to stand and get favorable terrain so as to see the beautiful sunrise on Mount Tai for the first time. At this time, I suddenly had a "rebellious" idea: "Why don't I sit down and let the sun see me?" As soon as this idea came out, there was a prototype of a poem. When I came back, I compiled a poem: "Walking on Mount Tai and Wu Hao at night, the waning moon is full of moss." The empty mountain road hits the ape, and the morning cliff turns over. At the beginning of the fog in the Jade Emperor's Golden Dome, the peaks and valleys were arranged under his knees. Sit tight and lean on the stone case and meet me in the red sun. "("Climb Mount Tai at night and wait for the sunrise "uses Wang Boteng's poetic style) From watching the sunrise at the beginning to" sitting on a stone case to relax and look at me against the red sun ",the whole idea has made a 180 degree turn. This idea is interesting and poetry naturally comes into being.
Reverse thinking is not mysterious. We often say that it is a kind of reverse thinking. 20 1 1 year, I went to the Great Northern Wilderness with the China Poetry Research Institute and arrived at Heixiazi Island. Naturally, I had the idea of being prepared for danger in times of peace: "It is easy to lose your land and return to this trip, but it is difficult to celebrate the East Pole Tower." The border defense is as thin as paper, don't say peace to the country. "(Feelings of Climbing the Tower of the First East Pole Whistle on Heixiazi Island) Originally, Sino-Russian relations were the best in history, and Heixiazi Island was also half-owned, and the border seemed calmer and safer than ever. However, there is no forever peaceful border, and "the border is as thin as paper". Maybe someone will break it with their fingers one day. These are all inspired by reverse thinking. In addition, reverse thinking is the basis of the writing of overturned poems in ancient and modern times. Therefore, we poets should try to master it.
The third is coherent thinking. When you think about something for a while, you will find that inspiration is easy to appear. Why? Because thinking is coherent. The consistency of thinking lies in your high sensitivity to the problem you are thinking about, while waiting for you to think carefully. It is also a natural law to think of inspiration from constant thinking to epiphany on this issue. Lu Shiyi once said in the Qing Dynasty, "since the enlightenment is in human nature, and we must make continuous efforts to realize since the enlightenment. If there is fire in the stone, it will be knocked and the fire will appear. " It can be seen that "continuous efforts" and "continuous beating" are indeed the key. I remember that in the autumn of 2003, the poetry friends of Changchun "True Society" wanted to give me a seminar on my works. A month before the meeting, I was thinking: what should I say when everyone studies my work? I can't figure it out. However, during this month, I really "kept working" and "kept knocking at the door" and kept thinking about this problem. The night before the meeting, I told myself that I couldn't put it off any longer and I must write an outline of my speech tonight. In fact, I have been engaged in military political work for many years, so it is not difficult to write a speech outline. However, I want to "sort out a clue" about my poem, that is, what is my poem? What should I do in the future? The question has been pushed until ten o'clock in the evening, and I haven't decided yet. So, I decided to go to bed first and stay until after midnight. At one o'clock in the middle of the night, when I woke up and thought about this question again, four words popped up in my mind: "Old-school new poetry." I was very excited when these four words jumped out, because "old-style new poetry" is not only the best orientation for my poetry, but also the direction of my future efforts. Moreover, two sentences immediately appeared: "Create new poems in the form of old poems; Manage old-style poetry with the concept of new poetry. " That is to say, the old style-not leaving metrical poetry, inherits all the advantages of metrical poetry; New Poetry-Write the events of the times with the feelings of modern people and the language of the times. The next day, I told you this idea, and everyone agreed with my point of view and orientation. With everyone's encouragement, I quickly wrote an article on my' old-fashioned new poetry'. Since then, my poetry creation has a clear direction and goal. It can be proved from this incident that it is particularly important to maintain the continuity of thinking. Don't give up your ideas easily because you can't figure it out for a while and there is no result.
However, to maintain the coherence of thinking, we must first put forward clear thinking content, as Hegel said on inspiration: "To arouse real inspiration, we must first have clear content, that is, the content captured by imagination and expressed in an artistic way. Inspiration is the situation itself that actively constructs the image. " For example, after I transferred to the workbench in Jilin City in 2004, I always wanted to write a poem with the theme of "Rime", because Rime in Jilin is a great wonder in China, and it can be seen almost every day by the river in winter. It is really beautiful, so Jilin City is also called "Rime City". However, rime is extremely difficult to write. Without this idiom, many people can't write rime. Innovation is the biggest difficulty in writing rime. To be honest, I don't know if I can innovate on this issue. But one thing, I have been thinking about this rime and I have never given up. About half a year passed, and one morning I went to the river to watch the rime. Suddenly I had a brainwave and wrote "Jilin rime": "Yushu dances to reflect the colorful bridge, and the frost and snow are high." There is still spring tide in the severe winter, and the river is wicker all night. "It can be said that this poem takes a different approach and makes a fuss about the causes of rime. Just imagine, this beautiful tree can bloom in the severe winter. It must be a raging spring tide. The sound of this surging spring tide hangs quietly on the wicker and sticks to the branches at night. So this poem is widely praised on the Internet. This is the result of coherent thinking. However, maintaining the consistency of thinking is by no means continuous thinking. I don't mean thinking about one thing all the time and not doing anything else. But no matter what you are doing, no matter how busy you are, you should keep calm and be highly sensitive to the objects you care about in the subconscious (as mentioned above: inspiration has a brewing process in the subconscious). Sometimes we all have the experience that the busier the work, the faster the inspiration comes, and when we relax, there is no inspiration to go. Why? Sometimes, although I am not busy with my work, I can't get rid of other ideas and achieve "single-minded poetry". And because of leisure, the mentality is too relaxed, it is difficult to be highly sensitive. Therefore, leisure is not necessarily a good thing for poets, but peace of mind is very important.
The fourth is associative thinking. Psychologists Gorovans and Starlinz in the former Soviet Union once proved through experiments that any two words can be linked through four or five steps. For example, wood and football are two unrelated concepts, but associative thinking can connect them: wood-forest-field-football field-football. According to this law, we can understand the ancient poem "Step on flowers and return to horseshoe fragrance". Once upon a time, a student was asked to draw a picture according to this ancient poem. A student drew some butterflies chasing horseshoes and got full marks. This student uses associative thinking, and his associative circuit diagram is: horseshoe-grassland-flower fragrance-butterfly. This kind of reasoning and association is mostly from this to that, from near to far.
Some people divide association into short-distance association and long-distance association. According to the practice of poetry creation, in order to facilitate the operation, I once divided Lenovo into six kinds, and here are four explanations:
(1) are related by similarity. When passing Daban in Turpan, Xinjiang, I heard a story: an old man living in Turpan went to Urumqi for the first time in his 70 s and found it much cooler than Turpan. When I came back and passed Daban, I found that the blades of all the fans were facing Urumqi, so I suddenly realized, "No wonder our place is hot and Urumqi is cold, so there are so many fans blowing at them!" Although this is a joke, the association of the elderly is produced through modeling. Another example is: "When I was young, I didn't know the moon, so I called it a white jade plate. I also suspect that Yao Taijing is flying on the other side of Qingyun Mountain. " (Li Bai's "Gulangyue") is based on the full moon like a jade plate and a mirror. The full moon is similar to these two objects in shape. Another example: The Big Dipper is shaped like a big spoon, which I think. I once wrote a poem: "Arranged in a poem array, it sings the sky and the past and the present. I am not satisfied with nine, Beidou scooped up the nebula. " ("Congratulations on the Establishment of Kanto Poetry Array")
(2) Associating with spirit. Most of them are long-distance relationships. If beans and people are not the same, it seems difficult to compare, but Cao Zhi did it: "Boil beans and burn beans, and beans cry in the kettle." This is the same root, and it is too urgent to speculate with each other. "Without this association of" born from the same root ",it is impossible for Cao Zhi to write this poem ("Seven Steps Poetry ") so quickly. I have been to Tibet twice, read dozens of essays and poems describing Tibet, and concentrated on writing more than 100 poems describing Tibet, some of which are very similar. For example, "Snow-capped mountains are scattered in the distance, and Yuan Ye is high in June. Wearing colorful headscarves, three or five yaks licked the sunset. "The last two sentences of this poem (highland pasture) regard the pasture as a colorful headscarf, and' three or five yaks gnawing at the sunset' as the pattern in this colorful headscarf, which is also a poem that is closely related to the spirit.
(3) Develop associations with place names, things names and names. About 1990, I went to visit Mr. Yuzhou in Tieling, Liaoning Province. He happened to be out at that time. I am the only mountain in Youlong. I wrote: "The dragon is looking at the clouds, but I can't see you until I reach the mountain." I want to talk about my thoughts, but I am worried that the fallen leaves will come back to people. "In addition, in 2002, I went to Zhangjiajie to write," Standing in the evening breeze with a golden whip, I gave the order to move mountains. "Now I am the son of heaven, ruling the Million Peaks in Hunan." ("Zhangjiajie Tian Zi") is also related to place names. For another example, you can also write poems according to people's names. The name "Qingquan" once inspired my poetry: "It is not only the name of poetry and wine, but also the strength of character. The water in the world is turbid by it, and my heart is clear. "
(4) All-round association. All-round association is not limited to a certain association mode, but to mobilize all possible association modes for association. For example, "The Stone Wall of Changbai Mountain": "The wind is born on the top wall of the wilderness, and the flowing water surges in the valley. Clouds tents scatter Chen Hong rain and dew, and spring nests fly in summer, autumn and winter. " This poem was first born in the name of Changbai Mountain, formerly known as "Great Barren Mountain"; Then think of Songhua River, Tumen River and Yalu River running down from Tianchi; Then think of rain from clouds, rainbow and dew from rain; Finally, the birds flying out of the nest in the mountains are associated with the "big barren hills", and the four "big birds" fly out in spring, summer, autumn and winter. It can be said that this poem is from near to far, from the earth to the sky, from reality to illusion. Some people say it is a stroke of genius, but I know it is the result of using association.
The fifth is life thinking. In short, "life thinking" means respecting nature and everything, and establishing an equal and cordial relationship between man and nature. Its manifestation has three aspects:
Give life to things. That is, all living and inanimate objects are considered to be alive, emotional, soulful and even thoughtful. Such as "sitting on a bounty lotus in the middle of the pond, suddenly flowers sleep in the blue clouds." But I pity the canoe in the pool and shake up a boat full of budding dreams. " Water lily is also a kind of lotus, which is alive in itself. It was anthropomorphic when it was called "water lily". But in people's minds, she is just "sleeping" and "life thinking" is not simply anthropomorphic. Based on the assumption that the water lily will "sleep", this poem further imagines that she will "dream" and her dream will be "shaken up" by the boat in the pool. So the author pitied her, pitying her that she was awakened by a small canoe before her good dream was finished. This beautiful budding dream is enough to hold a boat!
Realize yourself. Is to treat people as a part of nature, things and I are together, and heaven and earth are together. Things can be animated and life can be materialized. For example, a poet can imagine himself as a tree, a mountain, a drop of dew and so on. And get rid of things in this way. For example, "Crossing the Xiaozhao Temple in the Early Morning": "The mulberry leaves around the hall are smoky, and the monks in the main hall are too busy. I am sitting at the door of the stone room with a Buddha in my chest. " Here, I imagine myself as a stone lion. I think a lion should also have a heart, and then I thought of the common language of Buddhism, "Heart is Buddha". It implies that even the "Buddha" in the lion's chest at the temple gate has not "opened the light", not to mention that I am a passerby. This poem "materialized" itself, and then gave the stone lion soul and life. This materialized self is another interpretation of life thinking.
Regard the intangible as tangible. That is to say, the intangible, silent and ignorant things are regarded as tangible, audible and sensible. For example, "Baicheng Bora Wen is enjoying apricot blossoms": "The world of mortals and purple strangers enter the heart, and slowly put poetry into the heart. There are birds lying on the mountain road above their heads, and there are a bunch of apricot flowers in their hands. Sit in the forest until sunset and watch apricot flowers at dusk. " One common feature of these two poems is that they regard the intangible as tangible. Birds are invisible, how can they "pillow"? The wind is invisible, how can you hold the "stack"? Dusk is invisible, how can we "lift"? However, in the author's "life thinking" state, all this has become a "reasonable imagination": 1. Birds are everywhere and have a high density in the 10,000-mu apricot blossom forest. In such an environment, lying on the mountain road, it seems that the head is full of "birds", and of course it can also be said to be "birds on the head"; Secondly, in the apricot blossom forest, there are many flowers, colorful, flowers in the wind and wind in the flowers. In extreme excitement, the author feels that the wind in his hand is also a piece, which can be folded like a petal and taken to his nose to smell its fragrance. Third, the enthusiasm for flower viewing did not decline as the day approached dusk, but the "night" of dusk slowly fell. Dusk is invisible, but "night" seems to be "felt". So the author "lifted the dusk" in his imagination, and he didn't want to let the "night" come down. He could take a look at the apricot flowers in his dream.
Sixth, environmental protection thinking. Environmental thinking means that people's thinking has different styles of works under different environmental influences. As the saying goes, "the autumn wind of the iron horse is in the north, and the spring rain of apricot flowers is in the south of the Yangtze River". There are two main ways to acquire environmental thinking, namely, direct acquisition and indirect acquisition.
Directly gained environmental protection thinking. It is the poet's inspiration to the environment he wants to express, or to reproduce his past life experience, to appreciate and feel the environmental atmosphere. Maybe everyone has this experience. Sometimes I want to write a poem about an outing, but I can't write it at home for a few days, but once I leave home and go to the countryside or the deep mountains and wild forests, the poem will naturally exist. In July 2003, I went to Tibet. Due to severe altitude sickness, I moved to Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan. As soon as I stepped into Jiuzhaigou's paradise on earth, I suddenly felt as if I had come to earth for the first time: "Water plays the piano and falls on the cliff, and wild flowers bloom." I am a foreigner in the global village, and the mountain bed dreams of moss. "(Visit Jiuzhaigou) This poem is as natural as the spring water flowing out of the valley because it has entered the environment here wholeheartedly. This shows that writing poetry needs to be immersive. With this "environment", there will be "environmental thinking". After writing poems for more than 20 years, I have a feeling that whenever I write military poems, the realm will naturally appear. What impressed me most was that I worked in the county armed forces department for many years, and there were tens of thousands of guns in the arsenal, but I didn't think it was very important. When I went back to my hometown to defend the border and saw a sentry with a steel gun on the border, I felt the weight of the gun in the hands of soldiers. It was quickly written: "Hualin sentry post is at dusk, his eyes are white, and his country is abroad. Three-foot steel gun closed to the country, honor and disgrace Gan Kun. " (Journey to the Home Border II)
Indirect environmental thinking. The main way is reading. When I wrote "One Hundred Poems of Tibet" recently, I found that none of my 500 scattered poems was useful. Later, I finally understood that the original prose poems were all produced in an environment outside Tibet, which naturally did not conform to the special environment in Tibet. So, I decided to go back to Tibet's natural environment, living environment and language environment to find Tibetan poems. In this way, I not only went to Tibet for the second time to feel the environment there, but also spent eight months in my spare time reading more than 20 documentary essays about Tibet with about 5 million words. This has indeed produced good results, and one poem after another about Tibet has been produced in a specific "environment". Such as: "grab the pastoral songs and dream of loneliness, and spread your wings in the sky. A hook of cold blood tears the snow map of the wilderness. " (Snow Eagle) "Snowflakes hide in the plateau, and mountains and rivers are full of mountains and rivers. Occasionally, the wind blows and blows a few pieces to the world. " It can be said that these poems can only be produced in the environment of Tibet. After several months of practice and reading, I wandered in the vast atmosphere of Tibet and meditated under the prayer flags like Cordyceps sinensis. This fully proves that reading a certain kind of books frequently and repeatedly is also an important way to produce environmental thinking.
Of course, there are other ways to cultivate inspirational thinking, which should be chosen according to everyone's thinking habits. For training, I just summed up my poetic thinking. In fact, this article was revised on the basis of "Cultivation, Capture and Expression of Inspiration" in Poems of China published ten years ago. The article "Modern Construction of Poetic Thinking" published in China Poetry Yearbook 20 1 1 also has some parts, so some people will be familiar with it.