Chapter 4

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The next day, on the mountain, he had already written ten jokes on the unused homework notebook.

However, this still didn't solve the big problem. "Storytelling" is a monthly magazine, and it can only use one of your jokes per issue. How much would the payment for a small joke be? At most 10 yuan. Although 10 yuan is not a small amount for a 12-year-old, it can only be considered a drop in the bucket for his current situation.

He still needed to think of something. He needed to write something longer, with a payment of at least a few hundred yuan.

The content was another issue. It not only had to align with the current mainstream but also fit his age and experience.

With his amateur level, he could still be a critic, but writing himself wasn't impossible. However, the chances of being accepted by a magazine would definitely be low, which wouldn't align with his goal of making money quickly. So, he could only borrow or plagiarize.

In the first few years after graduating from a vocational school, he would still buy some literary works in his spare time. Later, when he started running sales and his own store, he mostly read news and web novels. News was obviously not useful, and web novels, with their millions of words, he couldn't remember everything. However, they could be condensed into medium or long stories.

He recalled and still found issues. Magazines that could adopt stories about穿越 (time travel), 玄幻 (fantasy), 魔法 (magic), and 仙侠 (immortal heroes) were probably few and far between. Pure martial arts stories could work, but there were very few pure martial arts web novels. With Jin Dada and others setting the standard, few had the courage to write pure martial arts stories, and even fewer stood out.

Moreover, at 12 years old, he had almost no life experience. Writing stories about conquering the world, building a harem, or traversing different worlds wouldn't be appropriate.

Becoming a prodigy or a genius was still acceptable; he didn't want to be seen as a monster.

What could he do?

As a student, school, and real-life scenarios, he thought and thought, but he couldn't come up with such an article. However, he did think of a few movies.

In 1998, shortly after starting his job, he watched Zhang Yimou's "Not One Less," which featured non-professional actors playing themselves. Later, he watched "The Beautiful Big Feet" with Ni Ping. Because these movies were close to his childhood life, he remembered them vividly.

If "The Beautiful Big Feet" leaned more towards idealism, "Not One Less" was more realistic and closer to daily life. He watched it at least three times: the first time to watch, the second time to appreciate, and the third time to find flaws and nitpick.

Since they weren't professional actors and had no previous acting experience, there were many stiff performances. Finding flaws in a well-known director's work gave him a bit of an inappropriate sense of achievement, hehe!

So, even now, he could recall about 80-90% of the movie's plot. He could definitely adapt it into a story. Many literary works have been adapted into movies, so why not adapt a movie into a literary work?

Additionally, he later found out that the movie was adapted from a novel "There's a Sun in the Sky" by writer Shixiang Sheng, published in 1997. He hadn't read the original, but in 1992, adapting the movie into a novel meant there was no possibility of plagiarism.

Moreover, with so many great works by Director Zhang and Writer Shixiang, borrowing this one story wouldn't affect them, Feng Yiping reasoned to himself.

He wasn't a professional writer and wrote very slowly. Due to his habit of using a computer for pinyin input, he often forgot how to write certain characters and had to bring a dictionary to the mountain.

Thus, it took him a week to finish a nearly 30,000-word novel, titled "Not One Less."

Movies and literary works are two different cultural mediums with entirely different forms of expression. In the movie, due to time constraints and the limitations of non-professional actors, some details were not as refined, and some plots were not as smooth. There were still areas that could be detailed and improved.

For example, in the village, only the village chief appeared frequently, and other parents were not mentioned, except for Zhang Jike's bedridden mother. In reality, this was unreasonable. Especially when the whole school of children were taken to the brick factory to move bricks, wouldn't the parents notice and intervene? Feng Yiping expanded on this to make the story more plausible.

Another example is when Wei Minzhi stopped people at the TV station to find the station chief. After a day of searching, the station chief suddenly appeared in the office, unaware of the situation, and only learned about it after being reminded by subordinates. He then criticized the unadorned female security guard and tried to help Wei Minzhi. The plot twist was too abrupt and felt forced.

Feng Yiping added more details. Wei Minzhi, without enough money, squeezed onto a bus to the city without a ticket. On the way, the conductor checked tickets and tried to make her get off. She explained her situation to the conductor, but he had seen too many people without tickets and was numb to it. He didn't believe her, even if her story was true, and still tried to make her get off.

At this moment, three middle school students, two boys and one girl, who were going to the city for school, paid for her. Middle school students are often passionate, and with two boys and one girl, the boys wanted to show off in front of the girl and had a bit of competition, so they vied to pay.

When Wei Minzhi arrived in the city, the middle school students returned to school. The girl told her deskmate about the incident on the bus. The girl then told her father, who was the station chief, about it at dinner.

With these additions, Feng Yiping felt the story flowed much better.

He spent another day reading through and checking the story several times, feeling confident that there were no issues, and finalized the draft.

As for "The Beautiful Big Feet," because it involved a lot of emotional entanglements, such as Zhang Meili and Wang Shu, Xia Yu and her husband, it wasn't suitable for a 12-year-old with barely any facial hair.

With the story finalized, the next question was which magazine to send it to. The magazine that Feng Yiping remembered and thought was appropriate was "Harvest." This was a pure literary magazine founded by Ba Jin, and he had bought several issues before.

Now, he needed to find the mailing address for "Harvest," which he could only do at the town's Xinhua Bookstore. Also, since there was no email, he needed to transcribe the manuscript onto lined paper, which would cost money. With such a thick stack of paper, he couldn't send it by regular mail, so he would need to buy stamps and envelopes, which would also cost money. Additionally, he needed to send the small jokes to "Storytelling" by express mail, which would add up to several yuan, nearly ten yuan.

He couldn't ask his parents for the money. They wouldn't lend it for something so uncertain. After much thought, Feng Yiping felt that only one person could help him: his grandfather.

There were five days left before school started. Feng Yiping discussed with his parents that he wanted to visit his grandfather and spend a few days there. Considering that he had spent nearly two months of the summer helping at home, cutting wood and even injuring his foot, and now only five days were left, his parents agreed.

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