R.F. Kuang writes through doubt to find her strongest stories

Rebecca (R.F.) Kuang sold the rights to her first novel, The Poppy War, on her 20th birthday. Even more impressive is her string of critical and commercial successes since. So far, all six of her novels have become New York Times bestsellers, and she has won numerous literary awards.

Her professional career has developed alongside, and frequently drawn inspiration from, her academic studies. She conceived of The Poppy War trilogy, an epic fantasy series modeled after the Second Sino-Japanese War, while studying Chinese history at Georgetown University. Babel, a story about a Chinese orphan who discovers arcane magic while at Oxford, came together while she was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford and Cambridge. Her most recent novel, Katabasis, which follows two PhD students venturing into hell à la the Divine Comedy, was written while she is pursuing her own PhD in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale.

Kuang’s early rise to prominence brings to mind certain questions: How did she overcome the doubts and insecurities that weigh on so many young writers? How did she manage the pressure of her previous successes? And what does she tell herself when she sits down to write, but no words come to mind?

In a brief but jam-packed interview, Big Think spoke with Kuang not only about the craft of writing but also the mindset of the writer. Her answers to our questions were as thoughtful as they were surprising.

Big Think: Tell us about your routine and workspace. Are there any stressors that need to be eliminated for you to write?

Kuang: Life is full of distractions, and I find that the more things you add to your writing ritual, the more obstacles there are. Under ideal circumstances, I’d be in a quiet room and have nobody talk to me, but I’ve had to train myself to write in airport terminals, on planes, on trains, outdoors, at cafes. 

It’s about discipline. It doesn’t matter that there are a million things going on. If I have 15 minutes to myself, I’m going to try to do all the writing I can.

Big Think: What about distractions from within? Is there a kind of headspace you try to get into?

Kuang: When writing a manuscript, I’m reading as many novels in that genre as I can. [That way], I always have an exemplar book to turn to when I’m feeling uninspired or having trouble cracking a scene open. I read a couple of pages of really good fiction from an author I admire, and that usually sparks something to aspire to, or it gives me an idea of what to do when I’m stuck.

It’s good to have a beginner’s mindset, to keep going over the fundamentals of the craft because they’re easy to forget. That can lead to bad habits. I’m always looking for books on writing, and I’m always going through the same exercises I assign my college students. When I go back and look at the essentials — how to construct a sentence, how to approach dialogue — that also gets me excited about the scene I’m working on.

Big Think: Many people who run into writer’s block end up putting their work down and returning to it later. How do you find a way through?

Kuang: Oftentimes when I have writer’s block, it’s really just my brain telling me that I’m taking the safe way out and fleeing from something uncomfortable or distressing or traumatic. When I linger in that place, force myself into that territory, it makes me really uncomfortable. But that’s also when I end up writing some of my best scenes. 

So, I treat writer’s block like a friend. It’s not a block; it’s more like a little alarm bell telling me the scene is not good enough and that I have to go back to the drawing board and rethink my approach.

Big Think: Many young artists get stuck in a cycle of procrastination, feeling they need to hone their skills and acquire more knowledge before they can be good enough.

Did any of these thoughts occur to you before you started writing professionally? If so, how did you overcome them?

Kuang: I’m an impatient person. I don’t like to spend too long on any one project. My going rate for a novel is one to two years. If I go beyond that, I’ll change too much as a person. I’ll develop a different set of interests and thematic concerns. I try to write quickly so I can capture this fleeting personality.

I don’t think there’s any point in waiting until I can write a magnum opus because I’ll have transformed. The stories that seem exciting to me right now might not be the ones that I want to tell when I’m 35 or 40.

Big Think: Every author has a different way of conceptualizing the writing process. George R.R. Martin likes to say he writes like a gardener, letting his characters and stories grow on their own accord. Others compare writing to sculpting, seeing it as more reductive than additive. 

Which are you?

Kuang: I’m a gardener insofar as I plant seeds that sprout and take me in unexpected directions. Often, the shape isn’t what I imagined it would be when I started. I like to discover where my questions lead me, and I am pretty open-ended about the shape of the story until I’ve finished the first draft.

After which, I snap into the architectural mode and start caring about story structure. I think about pacing, about how long each act is taking. I get very technical with charts that track the characters’ changing motivations and the direction the story is going. I love the technical architectural stuff, but I find that I can only do it once I have let the garden flower a bit.

Big Think: How do you navigate the switch?

Kuang: I try to come up with the ending early in the process. I might have no idea what happens in the middle. I might not even know where to begin the thing. But I know the climax. 

If I know what everything’s going to look like when the dust settles, the direction of the story is not difficult to control because I know what everything has to turn towards. Even if I don’t have a clear sense of chronology, even if I don’t really know the characters’ names or their personalities, every time I write a scene, I have that end goal in mind, and it’s not leading to a big, sprawling mess.

Big Think: What makes a good ending?

Kuang: I had a great writing instructor named Jeanne Cavelos, and she told me that a satisfying ending should feel both surprising and inevitable. And the best way for my endings to feel surprising and inevitable is if I knew them all along, but the characters didn’t.

Big Think: How much pressure do you feel as a result of your previous success?

Kuang: All I care about is whether I like the work. One of the worst jobs you can have if you care about how you’re perceived is writing, because only 1% of the job is going on tours and talking to people. The rest is lots of lonely days in your office, where it’s just you and the manuscript.

I’m not totally Zen about all this — it’s nice when other people like my work, too. That said, I hold myself to pretty high standards. I would never write something just because I know it’s going to sell well. I would never write something to cater to others. I only ever want to work on a project if it’s fascinating enough to sustain my attention for a year or two.

Big Think: Do you ever find your standards paralyze you with perfectionism?

Kuang: I don’t think I’m a perfectionist, in part because I don’t believe that a perfect book exists. All I can do is write the best thing I’m capable of at that point in my life, and then move on. I’ve been willing to let go of all of my books, and that’s because I got into the industry when I was pretty young. I understand the production schedule and know I can’t take 20 years on a book.

Big Think: Do you find that writing gets easier or harder as you gain experience?

Kuang: Definitely harder. As I read more, as I grow as a person, as I learn more about the craft of writing, the number of mistakes I’m able to see multiply. There are so many things about my first novels that I would change if I got to do them all over again, but that’s something to be grateful for. When writing feels harder, it means you’re getting sharper.

I hope writing continues to feel hard. The day it starts to feel easy is when I realize I’ve let go of my standards.

Big Think: What about those days when you feel like you’re making a breakthrough without breaking a sweat? Isn’t there something enjoyable and rewarding about that, too?

Kuang: I used to think this, but I’ve come to see there’s a myth among writers getting into a kind of natural flow state where you’re perfectly inspired and everything feels easy, and the sentences write themselves. 

There’s a book on writing that I like to assign students when I’m teaching creative writing courses. It’s called Several Short Sentences on Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg, and he argues that hard writing is good writing. The easy writing is lazy writing. When the sentences are writing themselves, they’re volunteer sentences. That means you’re not being careful about their construction. You’re imitating sentence structures you’ve picked up in the discursive air around you — sentences you might have heard on a TV show. It might be natural to the way you speak, but it’s not a deliberately written sentence. 

The tough part is going back and asking yourself: Are these choices right for this piece? Paradoxically, the days when writing feels like pulling teeth out, when every next word seems like it was a battle to win, produce my best writing — because I thought really hard about every choice I made. 

When you’re not thinking about those choices, it doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly entered this genius flow state. It just means that you’re not thinking very hard.

Big Think: Literary fiction often lives and dies by its characters. How do you embody someone completely different from you and speaks in a voice unlike your own?

Kuang: Another piece of great writing advice I was given is that your capabilities as a writer only extend as far as your knowledge and understanding of other people. This is tough for me because I’m an introvert. I’m shy. I’d rather be alone in an office than talking to a crowd. But I’ve tried to train myself over the last few years to treat every social situation as an opportunity to learn about the inner lives of people who are fundamentally unlike me.

I also think this involves learning to love everybody a little bit. No matter how deep your disagreements are, no matter how much you personally dislike someone, they have to wake up and get through their days, and they face challenges you might be totally unable to relate to, but the writer’s job is to imagine those challenges and approach every character with the most charitable intentions.

I strive to achieve an internal coherence in my characters, even the ones I despise, like June, the protagonist of Yellowface, or Letty, one of the antagonists of Babel. They make really awful choices, but there’s a part of them that’s deeply sympathetic. Most of all, I want to convey characters who do bad things, who feel quite close to alternate versions of ourselves. The line between good and evil is thin. We’re always so close to making the wrong choice, and fiction’s a good way to express that.