Ambitious mindset, professional pride
The arena of fiction writing is both cruel and high risk, but the sparks born of recent collisions are more brilliant than those seen in the past. In Fantastic Island, as the plot progresses, the writers seek to frame one another, setting traps on the one hand, solving riddles on the other. They display a playful subcultural mindset and fabricate unpredictable ups and downs in the storyline.
At the Alphabet Lab, in addition to the authors meeting once every two months for discussions, Yang Kai-lin also writes a brief essay of 1000 characters or so for each letter of the alphabet. But this essay is not for the purpose of “guiding” creation; to the contrary, it aims to kill off various options. As Chen Xue puts it, Alphabet Lab’s creative process is an “extreme sport.”
These rigorous rules of creation suffice to ensure that the work originates from the authors’ true selves. More gratifying is that the professionalism born of this sincerity also occurs at all points in the supply chain, including editors, book designers and bookstore outlets, which are linked for maximum synergy.
The book designers’ participation facilitates capturing the attention of readers in different domains. Acropolis Publishing headhunted the young designer Vansler Huang to produce the cover design for Fantastic Island. Inspired by Guo Xuehu’s gouache paintings, he borrows elements such as brushstrokes and keys to evoke the concept of “fantasia.” Meanwhile, graphic designer Wang Zhi-hong’s solution on behalf of the Alphabet Lab goes beyond the concrete meaning of letters and characters, transforming them into symbols that jump off the paper, and this avant-garde style echoes the group’s attempt to connect with trends in contemporary thought.
The Alphabet Lab’s intended effect takes place organically at brick-and-mortar sales points. For example, Changhua’s Text Apartment has designed interactive games related to the group in order to whet readers’ appetites. “The bookstore told us that since the Alphabet Lab is very experimental, they wanted to use an experimental spirit to reciprocate our program,” says Patience Chuang, editor-in-chief at Acropolis. Other bookstores such as Hualien’s Bookslight and Eslite indicated that the Alphabet Book series had given the staff the chance to get to know writers they were previously unfamiliar with, such as Tong Wei-ger and Yan Chung-hsien.
“The Alphabet Lab’s heartfelt mission is to promote Chinese-language literature to the world, and link it to global thought,” says key promoter Patience Chuang, the editor who is always at the authors’ side. To achieve such an ambitious goal, a blueprint instilled with dreams and courage is required. This includes hosting a reader’s club meeting for each letter; staging workshops where discussion can expand from the featured letter to the level of literary criticism; and hosting lectures by international masters, modeled on the Frankfurt Book Fair’s poetry lectures. “Only when the Alphabet Lab progresses to possessing such capability,” she says, “can this cycle be realized.”
Frenemies: The Fantastic Island authors are both friends and rivals. In the course of their collaboration, they have developed a mutual understanding and are discovering new branches of possibility concealed in one another’s creative writing.