ABSTRACT
Shen Congwen’s literary skills at that time were just beginning to take shape, but readers assess the author’s success retrospectively. He adopted a whole new autobiographical perspective to reexamine the writer’s profession. Water and Clouds traces in parallel the author’s inner journey and his literary career, spanning nearly 10 years, from his years in Qingdao to the time of the writing of the essay. In Shen’s writing theory, feelings and reason are in a dialectical relationship: in literary creation, emotion is very important, but at the same time it should be controlled by reason. Shen’s preference for planning is reflected simultaneously in two areas: love and creativity. Shen seems to have found advantages in traditional philosophical ideas, such as those in Taoism, and he used these philosophical ideas of the ancients to conduct self-analysis. Shen is very excited at the end of the meeting because the “by chance” attempts to blur the boundary between life and fiction.
