Melancholy nearly overwhelmed him for the first time in his life. He took to writing to vent his anger. His first works were a dozen fuming journals.

Sun returned to his hometown in Caoxian county, Shandong province, and then joined friends in Zhengzhou, Henan province. But nothing could alleviate his growing sense of "desolation".

"People working there have no idea how toxic their lives are," he says.

"They only care about their wages, as if that's all there is to the world."

Sun began to rely on writing to give meaning to his otherwise "boring" life while working as a clerk at a Zhengzhou pesticide factory.

"I just felt I had to write or I'd be wasting my life," he says.

He still believes that.

Sun soon found his repertoire of literary skills to be too limited and began intensive self-training.

He learned to divine writers' essences from reading just one of their short stories.

Sun closely analyzed stories' structures, narrations, syntaxes, semantics and word choices. He highlighted and transcribed his favorite phrases into a notebook and rehearsed them. He would spend four days on short stories intended to be read in about two hours.

He rapidly progressed.

Sun says the method enabled him to dissect Raymond Carver to the last nuance, and he feels he has already learned whatever he could from the author and some others.

Sun often visited police officers "to get the feel" of the criminal interrogations he would write about.

"Every part of the story lives as an image in my mind's eye," he says.

In September 2011, Sun's submission to Tiehulu Books connected him with A Ding, the poet and playwright who cruised through Europe. A Ding phoned him, praised his story and offered him an editing job. Sun now works with A Ding at the literary website Jianguo Novel.

Sun also won over Nicky Harman, the UK-based literary translator who worked on The Shades Who Periscope Through Flowers to the Sky and translated the works of Han Dong, Xu Zechen and Anni Baobei into English.

Harman considered Sun's crime story rich in imagery and layered meaning.

"The story looks like a realistic one, but it also has a subtle touch of surrealism," Harman says.

"It's not just a crime story. It lets the readers' imagination fire up. I see a huge amount of talent in Sun Yisheng."

She says she was also impressed by Sun's fastidiousness.

"For a good writer, these are equally important things," she says. "Sun has such qualities."

Sun works hard because he knows how fragile life is, he says.

His family used to run a cremation business. He knows too well how a person can vanish in an instant filled with wails.

That's why he treasures his literary ambition and strives for it.

That's also why he hopes to become China's best novelist.

sunye@chinadaily.com.cn