Literary Birthday – 29 May – Rebecca F. Kuang

Happy Birthday, Rebecca F. Kuang, born on 29 May 1996.

Rebecca F. Kuang Quotes

1. I like to draft to music because it gets me in the mood, but when I’m doing revisions, I need either silence or the white noise of a coffee shop. I suppose it comes down to two modes of thinking–my free, creative, broad strokes mode, and my more focused, analytical, craft mode. (Fantasy Hive)
2. 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. (Big Think)
3. I prefer to type because I tend to make a LOT of changes to my material (I’m not a clean drafter–I write many bad versions before I hit the right version), and because I don’t write chronologically across chapters or even scenes, which requires a lot of copy and pasting and moving stuff around. (Fantasy Hive)
4. 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. (Big Think)
5. I stress a lot about not getting my writing in on days when I am truly exhausted. I’ve had to teach myself this year to let go of that anxiety–sometimes you need your days off to rest and recharge. (Fantasy Hive)
6. I write from a loose thematic structure, but am definitely a pantser–I think the term is discovery writers? Basically, I just start composing movie scenes in my head, then figure out retroactively how I can make all the cool stuff link up into something coherent. I cannot write from a scene by scene outline; for me, it takes the spontaneity and joy out of the process. (Fantasy Hive)
7. 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.  (Big Think)
8. I try to read as widely and diversely as I can, and to learn from as many authors as possible by figuring out what I like about their prose and working little bits of it into my own style. (Fantasy Hive)
9. I do three drafts on my own: a brainstorming draft where I just write down all the scenes I think would be cool, a structural draft where I string those scenes together into some form of coherent order, and a clean-up draft where I make aesthetic edits. (Odyssey Workshop)
10. 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)

Rebecca F. Kuang is an award-winning Chinese-American writer of speculative fiction. Her genres include historical, dark academia, and Grimdark fantasy novels. She has also written a psychological thriller, Yellowface. She is well known for her 2022 novel Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, which was number one on The New York Times Best Seller list and won the 2022 Nebula Award for Best Novel. She is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface, Katabasis, and Taipei Story. She was included in the 2023 Time100 Next list and the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2024. She has also won or been shortlisted for many other awards. She has been influenced by the works of Vladimir Nabokov, Kazuo Ishiguro, Susanna Clarke, and Joan Didion. In 2025, HarperCollins announced that they had signed Kuang to a new four book deal, which includes Taipei Story, until 2030.

Source for photograph: Author’s website Photo: John Packman

by Amanda Patterson

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