Guo Jingming believes the charm of his writing lies in his passion in narrating.

“My story is like a drop of condensed dyestuff, once in water, it diffuses and becomes pervasive,” he says.

Tiny Times series

2008 – 2011

Guo Jingming says it’s not difficult to establish a fictional character, but it’s ultimate challenge to write about people’s transformation in a way both credible and elevated from the harsh reality.

That’s why he spent the toughest time writing the second book of Tiny Times, in which the protagonists are graduate-to-be interning in the society, the critical point of turning from innocence to the evil maturity.

The trilogy, started in the same year when Guo left Shanghai University (diploma unclaimed) and jumped eagerly into the adult’s world, is about Guo’s own transformation, he says.

He sees the series as his landmark, signaling a beginning of new era of his creation shifting from puppy love and friendship on campus to responsibility on society and family.

“It’s not about the whole and big age, it’s about the four young people’s times of living in current Shanghai, an age parallels mine’s,” Guo explains the title.

In the book, Guo tries to cut a slice of Shanghai’s contemporary panorama, and use the representative young protagonists’ vicissitude in metropolis to record the time we’re in. In the book, four talented students graduate from university and dissolve into urban vanity

“Some say they read too many about the top fashion brands in Tiny Times,” Guo said, “If they see too much money there, that’s the sign showing I’m telling about a real Shanghai, a Shanghai a reader will find truthful of reading 50 years later.”

Critical series

2010 – to be continued

Guo’s literary ambition and cosmic views reveals in the setting of the Critical series. He’s constructing a fantasy world called Autin that is divided by four kingdoms that feature respectively natural elements: Aqua, Wind, Earth and Fire. He’s planning to write a two-volume series for each kingdom. Now he finished and published on the Aqua kingdom, and the first volume of the Wind one.

Guo has set complicated skills and hierarchies in the story. And he says he’s trying to bring out the profundity of death, freedom, peace, under the entangled distinctions between the evil and the good, mirroring and reflecting the real world.

Other novels:

Cry Me a Sad River, 2007, centering the suicide of a pregnant high school girl, and stories with young people she meets before the death.

1995-2005: Rush to the Dead Summer, 2006, about pursuing dreams and love of high school graduates from a beautiful small town Qianchuan to Beijing.

Never-Flowers in Never Dreams, 2003, about a love triangle of teen students in big cities, which used to be tear-pumping story for many and was known mostly for plagiary.

City of Fantasy, 2003, a fantasy story about slaughters in fictional Ice Kingdome, which brought unforgettable shock of literary power to readers then.