During the Northern Song Dynasty, there was an outstanding writer and historian named Ouyang Xiu, who wrote excellent articles and made great achievements in literature.
Ouyang Xiu was born in Luling (now Ji 'an City, Jiangxi Province). When he was four years old, his father died and life at home was very difficult. His mother Zheng wants her son to go to school, but where can he afford it? After careful consideration, Zheng decided to teach his son himself. She couldn't afford a pen and paper, so she took a straw to write on the ground instead of a pen and paper and taught her son to read. This is the famous story of "painting a adopted son" in history.
Ouyang Xiu is so diligent and attentive in reading that he can recite all the books he has read. After reading the books at home, he borrowed books from his neighbors. When I meet an important book, I will copy it myself. After his mother's hard education and his own efforts, he laid a good foundation of cultural knowledge in his youth.
On one occasion, he came across an anthology of Han Yu, a great writer in the Tang Dynasty, in the foothills of old books (Lu, You Zhu) and took it out to read. In the early Song Dynasty, some people wrote articles, only pursuing flowery rhetoric and paying attention to the symmetry between sentences, but the content was very empty. Han Yu's article is rich in content and thorough in reasoning, which immediately attracted Ouyang Xiu. The more Ouyang Xiu read, the more interesting he became. He is determined to be a writer like Han Yu, so he studies hard and even forgets to eat and sleep.
When Ouyang Xiu was in his twenties, he went to Xijing (now Luoyang City, Henan Province) to be a left-behind magistrate (assistant to the local governor) and served as a left-behind person in Xijing in Qian Wei Yan. Qian was a famous scholar at that time. Many of his assistants are good at writing articles. Once, Qian built a post station in Xijing and asked Yin Shilu, Xie and Ouyang Xiu to write an article. Three people brought the written articles to watch each other. Xie's article is 700 words, Ouyang Xiu's article is more than 500 words, and only Yin Shilu's article is more than 300 words. Yin Shilu's article is short, but the text is very refined, the narrative is clear and complete, and the structure is rigorous. Ouyang Xiu, unwilling to lag behind Yin Shilu, took wine to visit him. They stayed up all night discussing the writing of the article. Yin Shilu said to Ouyang Xiu, "Your article is well written, but it has a low style and more nonsense." Ouyang Xiu understood the shortcomings of his article and wrote another one. The rewritten article is 20 words less than Yin Shilu's, but the content is more complete. After reading it, Yin Shilu admired it very much and praised people for saying, "Ouyang Xiu has made great progress. It' s really a thousand miles a day! "
Ouyang Xiu summed up his writing experience and said, "Write three more articles, read more, do more, and consult others."
Ouyang Xiu has a serious writing attitude. Whenever he writes an article, he sticks it on the wall. Whether he is sitting or lying down, he can see it and modify it at any time. He won't show it to others until he is satisfied. It is said that the manuscript of his famous essay Zuiweng Pavilion begins like this: Chuzhou (now Chuxian County, Anhui Province) is surrounded by mountains, east and west, north and south, so dozens of words have been written. After Ouyang Xiu finished writing, he felt too wordy and revised it repeatedly. By the time he finalized the draft, there were only five words left: "The Weichu River is also a mountain". There are few words at the beginning, the language is refined and the meaning is clearly expressed.
In his later years, Ouyang Xiu took out the articles he had written in the past and carefully revised them. His wife dissuaded him and said, "Why do you have to suffer so much? You are not a student, are you afraid of being scolded by your husband? " He smiled and replied: "I am not afraid of being scolded by my husband, but I am afraid of being laughed at by future generations."
Ouyang Xiu occupies an important position in the history of China literature. He was the leader of the ancient prose movement in the Northern Song Dynasty. He has always opposed the flashy and incomprehensible style of writing and advocated that articles should be popular and fluent. He also actively cultivated talents and made great contributions to the poetry innovation movement at that time. His prose, poetry and ci are all well written, and he is a versatile writer. He has written many books in his life. Besides 150 volumes of Ouyang Wenzhong's Poems, there are two historical works, one is the Book of the New Tang Dynasty co-edited with Song Qi and others, and the other is the History of the New Five Dynasties. These two historical books provide valuable historical materials for future generations to study history.
Ouyang Xiu's great achievements in his life mainly depend on his own hard work, but also on his mother's hard education in his early years, which laid a solid foundation of cultural knowledge for him.