Meet The Writer Who Sold Millions of Books Before 30 (R.F. Kuang Interview)

RF Guang came on the show to talk about her love for language and what it means to live like a writer. She's written seven books, won the Nebula Award for best [music] novel, and trained at some of the world's top universities, Cambridge, Oxford, Yale. What stands out is her ability to write in so many different voices, the economical, the poetic, the minimalist, the maximalist. How do you cultivate that dexterity as a writer? It's rare to meet somebody who writes so well and also can explain their process with such joy and precision.

So, you just taught a class on writing about intense emotions. So, let's start there. >> Sure. Um, well, sort of to preface, I let my emotions drive a lot of my writing because I treat writing as therapy. Every time I am going through something really hard, something really heavy, um, something that feels like I won't be able to recover from this. Um, one of the first things I do to try to get a grasp on uh all the negativity is is sort of to like split my psyche into two parts. And then there's the part that is living through the the grief or the panic or fear or what have you. And then there's the other part that is floating around on the outside that's just like sort of detached and curiously observing. And I'm asking myself questions like, what is my body doing right now? What is the rhythm of my crying? What's happening to my breathing? How are all these thoughts and feelings like sitting on my chest?

And then I'll try to document them. And it it doesn't make the the sadness go away, but I think trying to articulate how it's functioning helps me get a grasp on it and makes me legible to myself. So to get to the brass tax of like how you actually turn that into narrative, how you turn that into interesting writing, um I was talking to my students about how feelings aren't abstract. Emotions are not these abstract concepts that are applied to the body like love, hatred, anger, etc.

It's not like you think like oh like this is what I'm going through right now. This is love. but rather all feelings start with a physiological response. All feelings are is how your body is reacting to some piece of information. So we we started not from theorizing like how would you describe like like say you're you're writing about triumph, right? You could reach for words like um elation, victory, but that tells the reader like nothing material about what's going on with the character. Um, so we did this exercise where I passed out these like kindergarten level like silhouette diagrams of the human body and I was like without reaching for any abstractions tell me how like joyous triumph like suppose you just got a call and you got a promotion like tell me where that sits in the body like describe only what is happening >> on a physical level and people were saying like oh an elevated heart rate

like palpitations butterflies one girl was like I feel joy in my toes like my toes start to tingle and I was like that's weird. [laughter] But when when you start on the physical level that allows you to do really interesting lateral slides to emotions that are confusing and contradictory and that gets you into the second level of the complex ways in which we feel things because we never feel things in like a one-dimensional flat way, right? Like joy is always mixed in with something else. Um so in the case of triumph or elation people are saying like oh like shortness of breath wanting to yell and I think especially like the elevated heart rate those are things you also associate with fear and anxiety and um about half the people in the class were like when I get a piece of really good news I am immediately scared about like when is the other shoe going to drop or I've gotten this opportunity how am I

going to mess it up or is this what I even really wanted or how can I replicate this success now that I've gotten it. So already there you have a much more interesting uh like puddle of of feelings multiple feelings that are going on at once that is so much more interesting to read about than just Bob got the call that he was promoted and he felt great like that gives the reader nothing. >> And what did you feel like you needed to impart on your students in terms of doing this better? Is it just a byproduct of practice of doing this over and over again or are there certain blockers, limiters that people have that inhibit them from writing well about their own emotions?

>> I think there's two things at play. And I think the first is just observational. Like I think like 90% of good writing is just being very attentive to what's going on around you and writing with specificity about those observations rather than reaching for the theoretical. Um, and even just basic practices like as you're moving through your feelings um, throughout the day, ask yourself, where is it sitting in my body? How am I physically responding to this? That's already going to push your writing to a level past what the reader could easily imagine for themselves. Um, and the second is mixing your primary colors to use a metaphor. Right? It's not interesting when it's just red, blue, yellow. I printed them a diagram that's an emotions color wheel. And we played around with mixing opposites. So, um, fear and and courage. I was asking like, how could those both sit in the body at once? How could they be a part

of the same moment? And love and revulsion or or joy and triumph versus panic and anxiety. I think we're always feeling multiple things at once. Even in even in a moment that is supposed to be so pure and um singular like like getting married for instance. I think back to the moment um my husband and I did our first look and it was at the top of some library stairs. And I remember tapping his shoulder and he turned around and and that should have been a moment of just like shining like love and intimacy and joy. And as I was holding him, like I was also terrified, not of of getting married. I'm so excited to be married, but when you love somebody so deeply, you're also scared of loss. Like loving means dread and fear and and panic that this can be taken from you. And reaching for those opposites and having them collide in a singular experience, I think always makes a scene so much more fascinating.

>> You were talking about being an observer of the world and how important that is. And so far, you've talked about observing yourself, but how about observing others? >> That's tough for writers. I think a lot of people become writers because we are introverts. Um but at some point in I think shortly after college I I developed this attitude where I thought well every social interaction is really interesting data gathering. Um and and this springs from an argument that is actually in the field of ethics. So Iris Murdoch is this philosopher I admire a lot and she has an essay of sovereignty of good. She argues that morality, goodness, ethics comes from stepping outside of yourself. It's a sort of um vanishing of the ego. When you look at your own actions from the perspective of somebody else, when you free yourself of your petty biases and um you know, when you remove the blinders of just your

subjective experience of the world, that's where that's where goodness begins and that's where compassion begins. And I think like a parallel attitude is very important for good craft as well. I think if you're just writing from the inside of your own head, you you maybe have one really good story or one really good novel in you. But I think the best writers are able to erase themselves and constantly be asking how are other people experiencing the world? How are people holding perspectives that are really different from my own? So, I try really hard with all of my main characters to give them flaws or perspectives or ideologies that I don't hold. Um, alternate responses to questions that I'm asking myself. And you only get that from constantly being in the world. So, unfortunately, going to parties and talking to [laughter] people, but also challenging yourself to um to learn surprising things and and

learn from experts who work in fields that are not your own. I think this is part of why um even as my career is growing, I I think I always want to be a teacher. I always want to be in the classroom. I never want to go full-time as a writer because then I'm alone with my own expertise and my own thoughts and that stagnates really quickly. But I like being in places where I I'm surprised and challenged and where I'm very much not the expert. So I I can observe how somebody else is learning and researching and forming opinions about the world. Can you take me to a

person, an experience where it was different from how you see the world and learning to listen and observe and then how you went from that experience into sentences on a page in a book that you published? >> Yeah. Well, can I talk about a book I haven't published and I'm working on right now? >> Please bring it on. >> Um, so my next fantasy novel is a retelling of the FA mythos. Um, and it's about art and politics and um, mass appeal and mechanical reproduction and but it's also a love letter to different art forms and and what we lose when um, you give up on like that very human creativity, the the slow human process of creating art, which is very relevant right now. Um, but the issue is that I have one art form and that's writing pros. I'm not a painter. I'm not a visual artist. I'm not a singer. So I was like, "Wow, I have to get on the inside of these different art forms so I can write compellingly about them and

also write from the perspective of somebody whose whole world view is shaped by um their very different artistic practice. So I actually started going to um life drawing classes. I I went to this three-week workshop that was an introduction to figure drawing. And I kept coming back to this great artist collective around Boston where every week they do nude figure drawing. And you're there with your sketchbook and somebody comes in and they're modeling in the nude. And the first time this happened, I I didn't realize I was going to be a part of the course. So the model comes in and just like drops trow and like stands um in like a Vuvian man pose. And I was like, "Oh my gosh." But but the amazing thing is like how quickly you get used to it and you're like there's nothing weird or embarrassing or even remotely sexual about this. It's just like you're gazing at a fascinating human body and all of

its curves and complexities and and you're trying to capture the relationship between different um important angles. So, so one thing I learned in that process is actually learning to unsee or how to reduce what is happening in your visual field um to certain dimensions like values or lines or proportions etc. Um because a mistake that a lot of beginning artists and I I still am a beginning artist. The the mistake that we make is you try to capture everything that is going on in your visual field and it comes out looking like a blob because um you you don't have mastery over the relationships between those elements yet. Uh, but my my drawing instructor when he was teaching us how to capture values was actually like like squint a little like let your vision blur and just pay attention to what's darker, what's lighter, what what are the different shades and values going on and their relationship to each other. Like

where do we focus on first to to put down like really heavy dark values and and where is the light coming from? So where are places we might actually use our eraser to to create those highlights. Um so so learning to look at an object and reduce it to its basics across a bunch of different dimensions was something that I had never done visually. And then I applied it to the perspective of this character who's a painter. And I I created this I think um fantastic um and and weirdly intimate scene where the model hasn't shown up.

So he asks his friend that um who they're they're building complicated possibly romantic feelings for each other. Um he asked him to come step in instead and he'll also you know get some money from the modeling session. Um but the the intensity of being observed and broken down into parts and and looked at not for who you are but where the shadow for instance is falling on your face or or what is the relationship? where's the triangle between like your nipples and your crotch, etc. And and undergoing that um uh as the model uh from the perspective of somebody you care about who you want to see you fully um I think that created like such a rich um an emotional scene full of friction and insecurity and weirdness about how much they're looking at each other, how much they really see each other. And that's good metaphorically because like that whole story line is about failures of perception and failures of

communication. So >> yeah, at the beginning of that answer you were really talking about failures of perception. And there's a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. And one of the early exercises in the book is that you paint a portrait of somebody, but you flip it upside down and then you draw the person upside down because then you don't have all of those preconceived judgments and notions and you can actually see that person clearly and that's how it's teaching you how to draw.

>> Yeah. No, that I think that very much aligns with what I was being taught. you're you're being you're learning to put down what is actually there and not what you think you're seeing. And that's such an important distinction because a lot of seeing is actually just filling in from memory. When I turn my head and look at like that side of the room, which I haven't been looking at this whole time, like I might track like 10% of what's actually there, and my brain is going to fill in from memory the rest like other rooms I've been in, other couches, tables I've looked like. like that's like automatically populating from um my pre-existing data. And I think something similar happens when when you write pros. If you're just staying within your subjective experience, your own memories, your preconceived notions about the world, you're automatically populating some stuff, but you're not, again, you're not

really observing. You're not seeing what's really there. So, I guess another lesson that learning visual art has taught me is to focus on what's there. What am I missing? what is not already in my data set um that I need to observe and process and put on the page.

>> Yeah, I see everything coming together here when with the way that you talk about your writing process and how the most productive days are your hardest days because with the hard days that means that you've actually poured over the sentences and rejected the filling in. I don't want to put words into your mouth but that's what I've gathered from from what you've said. >> Yeah, absolutely. Um I I learned this attitude from a book called um several very short sentences are writing by Verlin Clinkenborg. Um and he basically debunks this assumption of genius or flow that a lot of us carry into not just writing but all art forms. Um where the assumption is if it feels good and easy and like the words are coming to us while we're writing that's a good writing session. Like that's when your best paragraphs are being formed. really comes from the heart or from divine inspiration or what have you. And his

argument is like no, like there's there's no relationship between how good writing feels in the moment and how good the product is. And actually, >> if your words are coming too easily, he calls this volunteer words for volunteer thoughts. He's saying they're they're volunteering themselves because you're just putting down what's already floating around in the air. you're uh you're repeating discourse that you've seen, that you've read, you're you're putting down ideas that are easy and simply simple to digest um because that's what you're used to. Again, filling in from your pre-existing data set. And hard writing is when the words are not volunteering themselves. When we actually have to sit there and do the the messy and hair pulling, like teeth pulling work of of really thinking about like what word combination do I need to articulate this emotion or experience or observation that I have not seen other

people write about before or that other people haven't written about in this way. So when it feels hard, when you feel like you're actually building the foundations from scratch rather than hastily sketching in something that is loading automatically, I think that's where the most impactful interesting writing comes from. >> This episode is sponsored by Alpha School. When you think of school, what comes to mind? For me, it was lectures, homework, being stuck at a desk. And the worst part is that it doesn't even work.

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>> So can you take me then to a moment of stuckness? Maybe we can bring in an emotion that you're trying to write about. So you're you reach a moment of stuckness and what happens? What do you say to yourself to kind of keep pushing through? What do you feel like you're going for? Every time I'm stuck on a manuscript, it's because I'm unconsciously holding back and I'm scared of pushing the scene to where it needs to be, a place of actual emotional honesty. Um, and and that's because like I like to be comfortable, readers like to be comfortable. We want the characters to be okay, but you actually have to push them to the precipice for the scene to come alive. So there's a moment in Catabossis where the main character Alice, she's been struggling with depression. The book really is about suicide and suicidal ideiation and she she's in hell because she doesn't want to be alive. So she's been

operating from this default state of doing the bare minimum to get to tomorrow, but she's just sort of like rottly doing the things that that would make her survive. And there has to be this inflection point uh near the climax of the book where she decides I don't just want to make it to tomorrow. I I want to think about the future. I want to really live. And when I was thinking about that from a very abstract place, um, and I was putting down like I don't know, like silly therapy speak, like she had a revelation that, um, she wanted to to continue after all or she was finding value in the world, like that was coming out so flat and uninteresting um, because it is. So I I put myself um in that scene instead. And again, I I tried to focus on the material and what was actually going on in her body. And I also pushed myself to think about moments where I didn't want to make it to tomorrow. I think there's always

moments where I like I don't want to search too deep in my emotional memory because I'm I'm scared of what that will dredge up. Um but but something that came up when I I pushed was was hunger. So Alice has she's had this fraught relationship with her body and she hasn't been eating very much. And I think that like slow starvation or that slow whittling away of herself is consistent with her desire to disappear. But in this moment where she's like, I don't actually just want to survive. I I want to fight for something. Um I want to see something bleed. Um it's, you know, there's a lot of background for this scene, but basically she she ends up next to this carcass of a dead cat.

And and I wrote this response where like she smells the hot blood gushing out and she's like, "Oh my gosh, I'm famished and I'm going to devour this cat." So, she's uh using a knife to like slice its inards apart and she's building a fire and she's roasting its liver and she's like gnawing on the heart um with her bare hands and and her teeth are sore and there's like blood all over her face and um that like rush of blood and messiness and nutrients and energy is is like, you know, sending her into this ecstatic state of like I'm I'm nourished and I have like a fighting instinct in me and I want to get to tomorrow. So once I like let myself settle in the physicality of that emotional shift, I think that's what made the scene come alive as opposed to the the flatness of um again the the therapeutic way of describing that turn.

>> I like what you said about pushing that sometimes once you push beyond what you're comfortable with the landscape you're familiar with, new things emerge. >> Yeah. I mean, it's a advice I give to my students all the time when they turn in first drafts. Like, I think the comment that I leave most is what else is going on here? Um, what's what else is this character thinking about? Can you push this idea a little bit further? Can you take us to a place where it's truly uncomfortable? Um, can you get past the shame? Can you stop? Like, I think a lot of us write looking over our shoulders wondering how somebody's going to react to this and what they're going to say about it. and and the moment you're looking over your shoulder, then you are not taking the scene where it needs to go. So, it's always about pushing past

the point of comfort. >> You've written in so many voices and so many different styles. How do you cultivate that sense of kind of flow of pursuing what's new and different? >> Um, I think that part comes easily to me. um because I just get bored very easily and I can't imagine writing the same kind of project over and over again. Like I always have to switch up the genre, the pace, the literary influences. And I think it might have to do with um it learning English as a second language because my English accent has also always been very reflective. Um, when I was growing up in Texas, I I had a Texas accent and when I'm around Texas people, it pops back out again. Um, then I moved to New England and there are parts of my speech that are just peppered with like very like Boston mannerisms. Um, when I get to the UK, um, I start I don't put on like a phony British accent, but I do start adopting their pronunciations of

words that are less common. Um, I I never said the word leisure very often in college because it's like not like a word you use all the time. Um, and I was in this film class where we were talking about like describing depicting leisure. Um, and it just happened so much over this one week. So, I'm stuck in the mode where I say leisure. Uh, so I think coming to English as an outsider and perceiving how other people were using it and then reflecting that back through my speech patterns is is where it started. Um, so with my writing voice, I I don't think that I have a default writing voice. There's no mode of constructing sentences, no particular attitude or viewpoint that I find most comfortable. rather when I start on a new project, I read around a cannon that I think is most interested in those questions. So with um Babel, it was reading the Victorian cannon and sitting a lot with Dickens and mirroring their

precise um maximalism and run-on sentences and just deep need to describe every single object in a room before you can move on. Um, and then when I was writing Yellowface, um, that was very much written in the tone of a online flame war. And it helped that I was chronically online when I wrote it because we all were because we were in lockdown. So I was thinking about the the rhythm and the efficiency of a viral tweet. A viral tweet is actually an incredible accomplishment of English because it has to grab your attention in a fraction of a second. It has to be funny. It has to appeal to, I think, parts of our um brain that that are that want provocation, that want a reductive and like crazy take on a situation. Like it has to pull you in like like nothing else does, right? Like um a P novel doesn't have the um like there's not a single sentence in Bruce that is operating at the speed of a viral tweet.

And um and I was like, how do I take this maniacal energy and make a whole book read like that? And then I was like, I can't do that anymore. I don't like the internet. I don't like um thinking in this shape because while it is efficient, it also it's efficient because it is so binary and it obliterates nuance and complexity and it trains you to look at the world um through really uh a very one-dimensional lens and it's just not good for you.

It's not good for democracy. Um so I scrapped that went back to P and um for like upcoming projects I am thinking in that meandering like if if you were tracing somebody's uh stream of consciousness like the the subtle shifts in their mood and thought as they're taking in a painting or a film like what would that look like? What would that feel like? Um so all this to say like I've I've done like short um punchy contemporary fantasy. I've done slow maximalist Victorian pastiche. I've done the internet novel. Um, now I'm doing like the slower coming of age stuff and I I can't wait to see uh what other voices I can adopt because I really don't think I have a default voice and I think a lot of the best writers don't.

Like it's all it's all a construction. the voice of the narrator is always a very carefully considered uh conceit to deliver a story in the right way to the reader. >> So then how is voice different from personality? Cuz I've always thought about voice as a personality on the page. Um and I think of hey you know that person has a personality. David has a personality. RF has a personality. How is voice different? >> Um I I think they're pretty similar. I I do think that's right. like the voice is the the subjective um uh personality that the reader is getting acquainted with um to enter the world of this story. But I think it's really important to detach the personality personally of the author from the personality of the voice and in none of my novels do I share the personality of the narrator.

Um, and I think it is uh an assumption that reviewers and also um beginner writers make that the the voice is how you feel, the kind of attitude that you're putting on. Uh whether that's like the kindly grandfatherly tone of like a children's fantasy novel or the detached ironic tone of one of those like millennial slice of life novels. Um, but I think my favorite authors and and what I'm trying to do is construct a voice that is may not necessarily be the main character, but is an interpretive lens and sort of, you know, a mask in itself through which the reader encounters the the world. So, with Taipei story, the voice is ry. It is slightly absurd and ridiculous. Um, it takes on without questioning a lot of undergraduate assumptions about the world and how it operates because it's a coming of age study abroad novel that makes fun of um, really American study abroad students and the simplistic um,

framing that we apply to new places that we encounter. um how we try to slot everything we're experiencing into our um really shoddy understanding of geopolitics and um culture. So, so the voice is both clever and observational but also brash and uh reductive all at once. Um but that is really distinct from my understanding of the issues that the character and the narrator are experiencing. So, it's like all these layers of artifice to create this reading experience that you hope the reader would then um like be able to reflexively think about like this is what the character this is the standpoint the character is coming from.

This is the standpoint the voice is coming from and none of these are necessarily the standpoint of the author. But I do think in contemporary reading culture like people conflate all of these all the time and that's when you get like really silly criticism like this character like killed the dog. the author therefore supports animal cruelty. And I'm like, that's stupid.

>> I was trying to work out where that way of thinking might come from. And it reminds me a lot of my friends who did debate in high school. And I'm like, ha, maybe that's it. Because that's a lot of what debate is, is here is an argument and then you either have to take this side or that side and you have to embody that perspective fully when you're doing it. And I know you did a lot of that. What? High school, middle school?

>> Yeah. Um I debated uh all four years of high school and a little bit of college. And um my job when I was in college was coaching high school debate and teaching at summer debate camps. Um and you're absolutely right that experience, we call it switchside debate, the particular virtue of debate that um forces you to adopt different perspectives on one issue because um you don't get to make the same arguments in every round. you have to be for and against a proposition often depending on a coin flip. Um, and I think that really formative adolescent experience has uh informed my literary shapeshifting. Um, but yeah, after doing that and doing all sorts of different things with my voice and then with the added layer of already not being a native English speaker and adopting other people's accents and vernaculars, um, I think all of that's trained me to think of language as this really fluid and flexible thing that I

can play with however I like. I'm never locked into one way of telling a story. >> And why do you use the phrase literary shapeshifting? >> Uh, I like I think that's just literally what I do. I I become a new person, a new persona, a new type of author every time I graduate on to a different kind of project. And I hope I keep doing that. I just I mean there are authors who I love who write the same sort of novel over and over again. Um, there are people who've built careers on like 10 book long epic fantasy novels or they just write hard-boiled mysteries and and that's amazing and I admire them, but I would just get so bored with myself.

Like I I have to reinvent myself otherwise I feel like I'm stagnating. It

seems like you're pulling a lot from what you're reading because you're talking about starting a book, reading in clusters around that book. And I'm curious to hear how you did that with say the Victorian era. You talked about Dickens in the 1830s as you dive into their work and you see the maximalism like describe that. I so this started from um just trying to do an accurate historical representation of that period. So I was reading all of these like contemporary monographs on like um social mores or dress codes or the food or transportation and 1830s London and that's great. you get a lot of rich data um you know historical facts from doing that but then you have to dive into the primary sources uh for a sense of how people are describing themselves because when you're doing especially when you're doing a period piece it matters less that you are accurately writing about like what we know in in 2026 they were

thinking about and dealing with um and and more that you're able to capture the the narratives that they were spinning about their own worlds, flawed as they were. Um, so then I ended up reading a lot of campus novels or student diaries from the early 19th century. So I was paying attention to how people talked about their their teachers and their experiences at Oxford um and the the slang that they were using. Um, actually there's just so much modern sounding slang that the Victorians were using that I picked up and then people who then read Babel were like, "This sounds too modern. Like they didn't talk like that." And I'm pulling my hair out thinking like they literally were talking like >> I pulled this from their writing.

>> No, exactly. Like I pulled these um like Oxford in particular, like the Oxbridge system. These are worlds with highly developed um social codes and um terms that don't make sense to anybody outside the system. And you get in there and you like pick up all these words like page and long back or whatever. Um I don't think anybody says long back now, but it is a term I picked up from the primary sources to describe like the long vacation. So um you spot those and then you try to have your characters uh spit them back out. But it is I think it's just so important to understand the the narrative and the story that somebody else is telling themselves about who they are and the worlds that they live in. And I think good historical fiction is just trying to replicate that as much

as possible. >> You were talking earlier about the humanity of creation. So we have to talk about AI. What were you hinting at when you said that? Um I just like the more I'm working on this on this FA novel which um is about writing novels but also visual arts and painting and poetry and songwriting um and singing the and and as I'm doing my best to learn the like the enormous skill and and slow development of that skill still involved in in creating anything in those fields. I'm like, it's terrifying to think all of that might be lost. Not just and it's not like the same way that people in visual arts were freaking out when the camera was invented. Like people are like, "Oh my gosh, now that you can like capture an image in an instant, it's it's going to make people less interested in like like photorealistic painting >> in like the Walter Benjamin sense."

>> Yeah. like like people were really worried that cameras would destroy artistic sensibilities. That wasn't true because the camera just created so many other avenues of capturing an image and like and the camera is never a neutral objective image either. You're thinking about the perspective of who's taking it, how they're choosing to frame the image, what they're focusing on, um how they're thinking about light and shadow, etc. So the camera expanded creative options, right? So, so it's not about reproduction. It's not about um convenience. Uh it's about what adds to your artistic arsenal of of the skills involved in observing something and then creating something to deliver that moment of perception or feeling or all those, you know, weird uh like encounters that all of us go through because we're human and messy and awkward. like like good artistic developments just keep adding to the

toolbox of ways you can do that. But AI created art bypasses that entirely. You're never even asked the question, what am I observing? How do I feel about this? What do I want to put on the page? What is it about my like perception of the world or somebody else's perception that I'm trying to capture? like what is that little spark of human existence that I'm trying to deliver through this medium to somebody else who hasn't felt that before and is learning about this for the first time or who has felt it before and is searching for that little moment of recognition that little hug across pages right AI doesn't do that there's no spark it's just a faximile of like a lot of other things that have been created and that people like you know it might fool you once but it's it's not it's never going to push the envelope or create uh possibilities for artistic innovation without constant human input as well. So that's why I'm

like not that interested or worried about AI replacing authors um or animators or illustrators. >> So here you're saying two things there. One is sort of this virtue of slowness and then the other is AI's inability to really do something original and add something new to the pile. Is that right? >> Yeah. Well, so the slowness part goes back to what we were talking about um with Verlin Clinkborg's argument that anything that is volunteering itself too easily doesn't push boundaries. Um, and all AI can do is offer volunteer words for volunteer thoughts because it's trained on the data set that it has. Um, and that's related to why why it can't do literary innovations. Um, because I think of authors like like Shakespeare and Nov, right? Uh, and the particular beauty of Novokov's play with English and uh like he can only do that because he's not a native English speaker. He uh started his career writing in Russian.

He's a polyglot. He immigrated to the US. He decided, I'm just going to become a master of the English language instead and put out masterpieces in in a second language. Um but you can tell um at every turn like he's he's fascinated with the oddities and the opportunities involved by certain word combinations in English. And he's always playing around with alliteration and rhyme. um and in hilarious juaposition he is playing and stretching and innovating with English in a way that no native English speaker does um or that would be very hard for them to do because he has that perspective of an outsider. And the consequence is his books are like such rich um like hilarious and like deeply entertaining um experiments in language that are still legible. And AI is like never going to do that play because it's it's not looking at English as this this foreign body that you're you're using brute force to make your own and turn

into building blocks to do things that nobody else has done with. um they are functionally designed just to spit out what everybody already has been doing. And it it sounds good because people have been doing pretty amazing things, but you're not going to get your next pale fire from an LLM.

>> Let's talk about your process of writing drafts. So there's multiple drafts. You start off doing one thing, you end up doing something else. Walk me through that process. >> Yeah, it's horrible. It's like it's not advice I would give any of my students of but it is the only way that I know how to do this. Um we start with the the word vomit draft the zero draft. Um and this is really brainstorming and research and this is when I'm feeling my way around the story and trying to figure out uh which moments are really emotionally resonant and where I think the beating heart of the story is. Um so I don't write according to an outline. I don't even come up with the outline first. Um I just start by doing a lot of research. Um so this novel I'm working on right now there is uh the whole first section is in the late 19th century in in Germany and it's about the Francoressussian war and German

nationalism and the role of classical music within all of that and I'm just reading monograph after monograph about these topics and every time I come up uh against a interesting historical development or an encounter or just something surprising something crunchy I will build a scene around it and like either like toss it into a line of dialogue or or create like a very brief character interaction where I can import that friction. And these are not linked together in any chronological way.

There's there's no order. There's no purpose. I'm just like these these things are cool to me. Um because I am I'm sort of led by my gut. Like I follow my nose. Um, I think a lot of the research brainstorming process for me is just discovering what's shiny and and collecting it all like a magpie and and putting to it together in this this nest. And then my writing process is really offering up things to the reader like I found a nickel, I found a used tampon, I found a button, etc. Then when I have that, I I step back and ask, well, where is the story here? Like where is the face um poking through the stone? Um, like it's like if I were a sculptor, like what what is it that I have to liberate from this mess? And and if I have the zero draft, like that's a little clearer to see than if I was just doing all that research and thinking about it in the abstract. Um, and that's where the technical structural stuff

comes into play. That's when I start thinking about plot structures, possible templates, um these sort of global choices like uh the distance between the reader and the narrator and the story and the characters. Uh what like point of view are we going to choose? Is it going to be uh in the present tense, the past tense? Like how are we going to play with chronology to deliver the story? Um that that comes together bit by bit. And then I do go back and write like a beat by beat outline based on what all the interesting moments are.

And then after I have all of that, I'll go through and do like a chronological draft to the best of my ability, but it will still be so messy and ridiculous. And a lot of the sentences will be placeholder sentences. Um, and especially so characters faces and character descriptions, they come in last for me. Um because somebody's visual appearance is it's often like the least interesting thing about a character to me and it's al also like often the least interesting thing about people I meet in real life. So um I've described it as like uh layers of the animation process where you just have like balls on sticks for a long time. So in like subsequent passes I go through and start fleshing things out. Um and I do this with the setting as well. like in the first pass like there's not going to be a comment on the particular style of architecture or the furniture or what color the drapes are. The final pass I

actually I'm going to make intentional choices about that. It is an extremely timeconsuming process. Um it also means that at no point until the very end do I have like pages that I would be happy with any other human being reading which is why it's so hard for me when people are like oh you've been working on this for like a year. Can I see like the first few chapters? And I'm like, I have nothing. Like, I have I have everything and nothing at the same time. Like, give me a month and and you'll have the entire novel. But until we've like gone through and done all those polishing passes, it's like it's this horrendous Frankenstein mess.

>> How do dreams play into that process? So, I often won't let myself write a scene if it feels like um if it feels too artificial, if it feels like I'm constructing everything that's happening. If I have to start from the place of what are the characters doing here, what are their goals? What does the atmosphere feel like? If I have to answer these questions from scratch in the moment that I'm writing the scene, I I think my subconscious is not ready to approach that scene yet. Um, so I've described it rather as uh a a scene has to feel like recounting a daydream or recounting a previous memory of a life I never had for it to come organically.

And I think that comes from again brainstorming and feeding the inputs and letting it linger in my subconscious long enough that I'm there with the characters and I'm feeling what they're feeling and I'm also feeling that drive towards whatever conflict is arising in the scene. Um yeah, so I do rely a lot on the instincts uh that come from dreams and daydreams before I let myself um approach anything from like the more analytical bird's eye perspective.

>> And is there a quality of mysticism in this process? One of the best pieces of advice I ever got in college was if you're struggling with a writing project and you don't know where to start or you don't know what tone to take, you don't have an instinct about all of these global choices structurally you have to make for the piece to work. You just open a blank document and you maybe type the title or you type like a word or phrase and you save it and close it. And there's something about that act that gets the gears turning in the subconscious part of you. Um so I guess the most mystical thing about my process is that I have learned to trust the subconscious uh uh mechanisms like if I'm like I am stuck here this scene is not moving forward I don't know what it is that I don't know how to close this circle um I'll I'll do some little ritual to get like sleep Rebecca to start working on it and then and come

back like days later or a week later and and something will have popped up. Do you spend a lot of time with other writers? >> Yeah, I like I have a lot of friends who are writers. Um, but we don't like to talk about writing. Uh, first of all, like any industry talk or publishing talk like just really stresses me out. So, like that shuts down or I shut that down when it starts to happen. Um, and I find we'll also talk about we like to talk about other books a lot and we like to talk about choices that other writers have made and how we appreciate them or how we're thinking about them. and we enjoy like being audience members together. Uh, but I don't like talking to other writers about my own process or about um like I don't really I don't like co-writing with people. I don't like brainstorming with other people.

Like I'm very solitary about that process until I get to that acceptable first draft and then it's like send it out to everybody and tear it apart. But I I really don't like to open the hatch um with colleagues because then I get nervous about their influence and um I'm like very protective and cy about ideas when they're germinating and if I open them up to others too soon then I'm I'm worried that like people project their own visions onto the project and then I'm not writing from an internal drive.

I'm writing to suit what what other people think would make a good story. You talk about the analytical side, the technical side of writing and make the case for leaning into that and then I'm also curious to hear the risks of leaning into the technical the analytical side of writing too much. um you you have to lean into it because you have to make conscious decisions. So that uh constructing a scene in real time and also if you trust your subconscious too much um you fall into the Clinkenborg problem where um you know the Verlin Clinkenborg argument against um genius and flow like you do have to apply that very rational craftsman's attitude to the work where it's not just you know I had a dream about this I had a feeling like here it all is on the page. No, you actually have to ask the really hard questions of well, what dreams what what questions is this dream opening up? And um on a really boring level like what are the

thousand little choices I have to make to convey this feeling, attitude, encounter as clearly as possible. Um but the danger of like only doing this is that your writing starts to feel kind of lifeless, right? like unless that that drive you have to have that momentum and the drive um in order to be able to shape it. You can't shape nothing. Um then you're just you know you're writing a story but you don't really believe in it. And I have shelved a lot of projects because I realized they were interesting technical exercises and the the craft was good, the writing was polished, but um they didn't feel burningly urgent to me. Like there was no there was no subconscious push. So I I guess like what I'm moving towards is like a very disciplined form of exploiting and shaping and delivering your own dreams.

But you've got to have interesting dreams first. Mhm. Do you do any copy

work where you'll find a writer who you really admire and you'll just write in their cell? I just went to this exhibit in Paris with uh Alexander Calder and what you notice is he's got a specific style and then he goes to the studio of PA Mandreon and it just like unleashes his sense of possibility and then what follows from that is all these copied paintings of PA Mandreon in his style and then you can see how then from there he begins to develop his own style but informed by what he took from PA Mandreon. Is there anything like that that you do in writing to learn from other writers, expand your own voice?

>> Yeah, absolutely. I It's one of my favorite teaching exercises as well. Um there's this um passage from Ursula Leguin's book on craft uh steering the craft where she says like imitation is a fantastic exercise. Like don't let anybody tell you that's just lazy plagiarism. Like when you are writing in conscious imitation of another author, you're doing a deep dive into all the little choices they're making to create the cumulative effect of their voice, their perspective, their personality and and that is worthy of study. It's more about like seeing to to pick it apart rather than just trying to copy um because you don't have your own voice and and you need to adopt somebody else's. Um, so I do exercises all the time where like I'm working on this short story that is very influenced by Kazu Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. That sort of uh confessional like extremely polite, extremely differential and

emotionally restrained and um sort of abject tone you get from the narrator of Never Let Me Go. I'm I'm trying to see like if I write in in this viewpoint um and try to tell a similar story about um a school that is not what it is and a student that is clinging to a world that doesn't exist. Like where does that get me? And that's not in service of building a whole career where I'm just like a kazawi copycat. Uh but you you have to learn to write not like yourself. Um, again like I think it's dangerous to fall into a default voice where you're not even questioning where is this coming from? Why is this the right uh vehicle to tell this story? And I think imitative exercises make you ask that why over and over again for other authors so that you can be conscious about applying that why to yourself.

>> Talk to me about goofiness, playfulness. You talked about the playfulness of Nbakov. I've seen you talk about the goofiness of Lay Miz. >> Yeah. I mean, first of all, I just like camp. And I think uh I think more people would be less intimidated by classics if they realized that a lot of them are silly camp. Like I I think so. A Tale of Two Cities was one of the Dickens books that I like embarrassingly hadn't read until like two years ago. And I finally picked it up and I was like this is I don't know. It's like a soap opera.

like it's not this like highly sophisticated inaccessible like crystalline treatment of of what revolution is and what individual lives are in a period of social upheaval. It's just like I don't know like um yeah it is camp. Um and and I like when authors mix those registers where they're dealing with very serious topics and there are points where their pros or their observations about human nature like reach such soaring sophisticated heights and then in the very next paragraph they are making like potty jokes. Um and I think there's that uh irreverence and that humility um that like treats with interest like equal care and fascination the whole spectrum of the human experience. So Alberto Ekko does this really well like at the same time that he is writing such dense and rich passages about history and philosophy he's also making fun of everybody in every story. Bourhees is great at this. No book of this is

hilarious to me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is like full of of humor and self-deprecation. Craftwise, a willingness to to get ridiculous and also be able to laugh at yourself, the narrator, yourself, the author is essential here. So, this is also a core part of my um teaching philosophy. I I try to cultivate a classroom environment where my students are like they do not think about presenting their most polished or beautiful writing to each other. Like nobody is caring about their reputation.

Nobody is worried about coming off as the best writer. Rather the goal is to get out of their comfort levels as much as possible. So we do a lot of timed writing exercises. I tell them like you're going to produce your worst writing now in the worst possible circumstances for writing. You will have only 15 minutes. You'll have a prompt that you haven't seen before. you'll be surrounded by other people and you'll have to share at the end like like nobody is producing publishable work uh under these circumstances but and I'll also give them ridiculous prompts like so so we were doing a exercise on on thinking about how setting might change entirely depending on who is encountering and filtering their observations of that setting. So I was like, describe a gorgeous tropical location with like the the clearest water and the the whitest beach and the the loveliest weather. Now write it all from the perspective of somebody who

hates every second there. But like >> that's that contrast again, huh? >> Yeah. Yeah. Give me, you know, but but don't use abstractions like Tilly hated beach vacations and she didn't like to swim. Like tell me about physically what she is seeing and sensing. uh filter through her hatred of this place and and they get 15 minutes to do that and the results are ridiculous, right? You you get like some lazy writing like you you get results like Tilly hated sand. She's always hated sand and it's like okay Anakin Skywalker. Um but then you get perceptions like the light was too clear, it was blinding or there's something disturbing about the water.

There's something weird about uh ocean water where you can't see animals. So like people were reaching for the uncanny and the artificial. There's like there's this dystopian tone that crept into a lot of what they came up with. And those those ideas don't come up and and that play with observations doesn't come up unless you are in that like timed pressure cooker environment where you've just got to get something on the page. Um, so I yeah, I I try to teach that playfulness and spontaneity and the willingness to get really messy and just roll your sleeves up and try out everything that doesn't work so that when you are working on a project that you want to publish like you have a better sense of what does work.

>> Can you talk to me about the driving questions behind your books? Like what does a question look like? What are the examples? And how do those pull you through the novel? Um [sighs] I I do think every new work has uh helped me enter into a different set of inquiries that were relevant at different points in my life. Um but there are these overarching questions that I keep coming back to and and one is language translation moving between worlds. different people that you become when you're speaking different languages and the richness of miscommunication and mistransation. And so um the shape that it takes in this uh latest novel Taipei story is actually what are the virtues of getting everything wrong. When we think about language and acculturation and and trying to become a functional fluent individual in in a foreign place, we are so fixated on how do you get to that end point successfully so that you

can start living your life in Spanish and Chinese etc. Um and there's also a lot of shame and embarrassment associated with uh speaking with the wrong accent, mispronouncing things like using the wrong metaphor etc. Uh, and I was really interested in in that shame. Um, to come back to the idea of play, uh, I I've studied a lot of different languages over my life and been in a ton of language classrooms and there was always a a magical moment where everybody in the class realizes, oh, we're all in the same boat. We absolutely suck at Japanese. There is no point in really taking our time and sitting there quietly and and trying to come up with the perfect sentence before we dare to utter anything at all. Um, in order to like really start feeling our way around this language, we just have to get goofy. Um, and then you've got people saying ridiculous things and using the wrong words and and like

people are cracking up constantly. But once you reach that place of like uh like group silliness and humor and and compassion for everybody else's mistakes, whether you're in a creative writing classroom or in a language classroom, like that's where the interesting learning really begins. So, I wanted to write a book that's that's all about making mistakes and saying the wrong things. and and I have this character moving through uh really like the the coming of age trajectory that she really goes on and starting with this rigid judgmental um and sort of terrified attitude of moving through a foreign place, a foreign culture where she's like, I have to get everything right and I'm going to judge everybody who's behaving in the wrong way and I'm not going to speak until I'm totally confident in what I say. And that's a horrible way to live your life. Um being scared of embarrassing yourself when you're

studying abroad. um is the best way to learn nothing from studying abroad. And by the end of it, she's been humiliated in every way possible. She's been proven wrong in every way possible. Um and the argument I'm trying to make is like that is a good part of the human experience. Being laughed at, learning to laugh at yourself and and saying all the wrong things um are are how you get closer to others, how you live more fully in the world. And I think that is a perspective on language and language acquisition that I didn't arrive at until much later in life because my experience learning Chinese was really focused on mastery and competence and sort of eradicating that shame of being Chinese American but not speaking Chinese well. And even in an earlier book like Babel, it is about mastery of a language and and using it and making magic with it. And if if you don't have it or if you're using it in

inaccurate or silly ways, then that's uh framed purely as a loss. So So Babel is thinking about language as a resource. Um but now I've moved on in Taipei's story to questions about language, misuse of language and failure at language as a a bonding human

experience. >> Last question about writing. What are the things that you want your students to understand in a semester of working with you? >> The main takeaway or the the attitude that I hope everybody leaves my classroom with is an attention to the rhetorical choices and all of the texts that they're reading. Um, and learning to dissect a piece of fiction that they might have just picked up for enjoyment. Um, and not to see it just as this like fluid delivery of feelings, a story, idea, whatever. Uh, but to see it as a series of, you know, thousands, millions of little choices made on every level to create a certain effect or uh to tickle the reader's brain in a particular way.

And and that's all good writing is understanding what those thousands of choices are and then learning to employ them deliberately yourself. And and once you're reading at that level and writing at that level, once you've moved past the uh the attitude of, oh, this book makes me feel good. Can't really understand why, but it does. Or writing this story just made me feel good. It poured out of me. And if it felt good, like that's great. like these are these are really mystical, vague and um extremely unhelpful uh ways to think about reading and writing. And I think that also contributes to u myths about how writing is fundamentally unteable or that there's just this like special something that separates like great writers or efficient storytellers and and people who have no writing talents.

And really what I try to do, especially in my beginner level courses, like you know, I could talk about all these particular craft takeaways that I want them to learn, but really I want them to have the attitude that writing is a technical activity. It you are a craftsman. You are tinkering with words and and some people can be more innovative than others. Like some people can have a more instinctive grasp of all the tools than others. But at the end of the day, like you can look at a passage and break it down into its component parts and ask yourself all these questions about like how is it functioning at every level and you can learn to do that yourself. And that's where the ongoing education part comes in because I'm never going to teach my students everything that they need to become a good writer. sort of what I did and what I hope they do after they leave the classroom is feel empowered to to

keep like teaching themselves by just going to the library and reading something new every week and absorbing everything that's in it. And and even if they don't become professional writers and and the majority of my students are are not going to embark on writing as a career, they're they're doing it to like, you know, scratch a niche or fulfill a humanities requirement. Like that's still going to train you to read better. It's going to make the the experience as an audience member so much more interesting when when you can sort of see how the sausage is made when when you see the choices involved. So,

>> last question. One book, one movie and what you took away from them as a writer. >> Okay. One book is a book I just finished called A Whole Life by Robert Setheller and he's an Austrian writer. I'm just so amazed at how he can make a singular human existence over the course of like 200 pages. Um, and an existence where like nothing that remarkable happens. It's like a very common humble life how he can with so much magic and romance um regardless. Um, and it's a similar attitude. I know this is cheating, but he has another book called The Fields, which is about um all of the gravestones in the cemetery, and each chapter is another little life um of the person who's lying in that plot. And it's just such a expansive and dedicated um portrayal of of how all these other lives were lived and how they were all special in their own ways. And I think it's the best example of what we're talking about, the

Iris Murdoch attitude of step out of your own subjectivity and and find the beauty, the goodness, and the romance and how somebody else is moving through the world. >> Um, one movie, >> one movie, >> uh, it's uh, part Changuk's JSA. He's the director best known for Old Boy. Um, he did Stoker. He just did a new film called No Other Choice. JSA is about two um border troops from South Korea and two troops on the border um in North Korea who are stationed um like very close to each other and as they start to cross the border and form relationships and friendships like you know the potential for tragic outcomes multiplies and it's about human connection over like uh extreme separation. Um, and it's it's beautiful and tragic and hilarious and slapstick all at once and and just really really special.

>> Those are the two. Well, your students are very lucky to learn from you. You're so articulate. You really care about the craft and you're also welcome to come back on how I write whenever. Let's do this again. A >> thank you so much. I had so much fun. Thank you.