Best-selling novels, empathy and unlimited ideas, with Rebecca F. Kuang

0:00Net-a-Porter presents The Incredible Women Podcast, Series 10, Supernovas. Welcome to the 10th series of The Incredible Women Podcast, in which we sit down with women who shine bright and draw greatness into their orbits. All at the top of their game, some of these incredible women you'll already be familiar with, and others we're excited to introduce you to. I'm Alice Casely-Hayford, Content Director at Net-a-Porter, and I'm thrilled to be joined for this episode of our Supernova series by best-selling author R.F. Kuang. Being too interested in your own fame can be devastating to any kind of creative, but especially a writer, because a writer's job is to write about others with empathy and curiosity.

0:50You have to be really good at stepping outside the eye. Rebecca F. Kuang has packed an extraordinary amount into her relatively short career. Born in China in 1996, she moved to the United States at four and grew up in Dallas, Texas. After studying history at Georgetown University, she took a year out to live in Beijing, teaching debate to high school students while working on her first novel in her free time. That novel, The Poppy War, published in 2018, launched a trilogy that would land on Time magazine's list of the 100 best fantasy books of all time. From there, her momentum hasn't slowed.

1:28Her fourth novel, Babel, topped the New York Times bestseller list in 2022. Her fifth, Yellowface, has become a global phenomenon with screenwrites sold to Lionsgate television. And last month, Kwong published her sixth novel, Katabasis, all before turning 30. Her accolades include the coveted American Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards from Nebula, Locus and Crawford, as well as the British Book Awards. She studied at Oxford and Cambridge and is currently pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. Let's meet Rebecca. Well, hello, Rebecca. Welcome to the Incredible Woman podcast.

2:08It is such a pleasure to be speaking with you today. How are you doing? I'm all right. Some trained fiascos today, but I am sad and excited to chat. Oh well first and foremost congrats on Katabasis. How do you feel now that your sixth novel is out in the world? I think it still hasn't really hit yet. It is a little weird working on a novel and then sharing it with the world because by the time the book comes out you're already two years ahead of your readers. I finished the first draft literally years ago. I'm already into revisions on the novel that will come out after that and doing research for the novel after that.

2:47But I felt this way for all of my novels. There's a bit of a readjustment period where I have to remember the artist I was when I wrote the book and what I was going through in my life and be ready to talk about it. But yeah, with every single artistic project, it's always like introducing people to a version of me who I've already grown out of. Well, quite. And I think this novel is so different to your last release. But I think before we get into that. Let's go back to the very, very beginning with your debut, The Poppy War, which was published in 2018. Whilst you were still graduating from college, how was it writing your first novel whilst you were still studying?

3:24I was just having a lot of fun. I never imagined a creative career for myself when I was growing up. It felt like a dream when I finished that book and got a literary agent and then an author from a real publisher. And every day I was just walking around pinching myself, asking myself, is this my life? Is this actually happening? And then slowly I got used to the idea, but it just, it felt like a really weird college experience where I was going to classes, but also I was coming back at the end of every day and working on the sequel because I'd been contracted for a three book trilogy. And yeah, I think still every day I wake up and I'm astonished and grateful that this is my life and this is my job.

4:10I just get to tell stories for a living and that's so much fun. Well, we are very grateful that you do. You have fans all around the world. Your career has been incredibly prolific. You're not even 30 years old. I think we need to talk about time management and I'm sure you get this question a lot. But how are you able to churn out so many novels in such quick succession? As you said, you've already announced your seventh. I think it's tentatively called a Taipei story. And then you just mentioned that you're doing research with the one after that. How are you packing all of this in? Well, part of it is that this just is my natural rate of production.

4:44I'm not the sort of person who could spend 10 years on a novel. I think I would get bored of the project really quickly and just be antsy to move on. So I don't feel like I'm rushing. These are just, this is the natural timeline on which stories come to me and I'm able to put them together and then I grow and I have a different set of priorities and I'm just excited to work on the next thing. But juggling the writing and dissertation work, I'm trying to finish my PhD, and the teaching because I teach undergraduates and that's a very big part of my life, that is tough and there are days when it feels like there's just not enough hours.

5:26Something that I think that has really, really helped is digital minimalism, which is a phrase I'm taking from the computer science professor and author Cal Newport. He has this fantastic book called Deep Work and also this book called Digital Minimalism, where he makes a really persuasive argument about how all these social media apps and productivity apps, under the guise of helping us be more productive and make the most of our time, actually just leech all of our attention. They really prey on our attention and they just sell ads to us and they make more money the more time we spend kind of zombified scrolling through our phones.

6:05So I've kind of taken a big step back from all of that. About two years ago, I just purged my phone of all social media apps. I use this app called Freedom, which is fantastic because it blocks everything, YouTube, Reddit, Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram. And I'm allowed to go on Instagram for like five minute increments every few days or so when I had to post stuff for work. But that's just amazing because I feel like I have my brain back and I have my attention span back. And the days felt twice as long when I did my digital purge. So I think that has been a huge part of how I structure my days over the last few years.

6:45I'm just able to concentrate on things and linger with things for longer because I'm not looking at a tweet that I'll forget in 10 seconds. Well, there's so much there that I want to unpack, But I think first and foremost, that stepping back from social media when you're having to do a world book tour and promote your latest baby. How do you juggle stepping in and out of social media and also navigating fame? Now you are an international bestselling author who has millions of fans and tens of thousands of Instagram followers. How do you toe that line? It's actually pretty easy for me. I came to this revelation a while ago and it's been how I live my life since.

7:25I'm just not that interested in how people talk about me on the internet and I'm not interested in being famous. I think being too interested in your own fame can be devastating to any kind of creative, but especially a writer because a writer's job is to write about others with empathy and curiosity. You have to be really good at stepping outside the eye. And there's so many authors I admire who write about this need to let go of the ego, to let go of this narcissistic, navel-gazy obsession with your own lived experience. Rousseau has this idea of the amour propre, your fascination with the love of others that they have for you.

8:10And Iris Murdoch also writes about an ethics based on stepping outside of your own subjectivity and seeing things as they are instead of how you are perceiving them. And Sally Rooney, who is an author I dearly admire, she has this great essay written early in her career where she talks about her experience being a championship debater. And she has this great line where she says, being a novice at an activity like debate teaches you a lot because you're learning about the event, you're learning about your competitors, you're learning about how to get better, but winning only teaches you about yourself and I think that's a terrifying place to be at the top where you're only thinking about yourself and how others perceive you and your reputation and it's a really boring place to be because then you're not curious about the world around you so I stepped back from almost every single social media platform around when yellow face was taking off and this is just incredibly freeing because all I was thinking about was the next project.

9:12Where do I go now? What am I researching? What are the big questions I want to explore? And to linger on my own perception. Of course, I do that sometimes because I'm an anxious person and everybody's anxious about how we're perceived. But I try to remind myself, this isn't interesting at all. So let's think about Simone de Beauvoir instead. You mentioned there, obviously, about being able to block out the noise. But are there people or communities whose opinion really matters to you and their criticism constructive or otherwise on your work? Oh, definitely. I have a circle of writers whose work I really admire.

9:50And we don't critique each other's manuscripts. I'm actually really private about my work. I don't have a beta reader. I take feedback from my agent who's very harsh and critical and has amazing storytelling sensibilities. And I love that my editors have known me for so long that they're not afraid to be harsh with their feedback either. I feel really lucky to have a professional team who's invested in pushing me with every book instead of just kind of signing off on manuscripts as if I can do no wrong. Actually, the edits get harsher and harsher with each book, which feels great because it's nice to know that they set the bar so high for me.

10:32So aside from those people. I don't let my writer friends read my work, but I have some friends who, when I sit down with them for coffee and we talk about the literature that's interesting to us and the prose that's inspiring us and the big ideas that are getting us excited about what we're working on, I leave those talks with, it's like a fire has been lit under me. I think, oh my gosh, Their mind is so active and it's racing and they're being so ambitious and I need to catch up with that. I can't slow down. So I'm really, really grateful I have that. And I think that is about as much feedback as one person can take that's healthy.

11:14Yeah, absolutely. So what are those big ideas that are exciting you most at the moment? A lot of things. Let me try to set on the short version. For Taipei Story, which is the novel that's coming out next September that I'm still revising, I'm really interested in how our personalities shift across languages, which has bearing on diaspora experiences. I'm interested in what it means to grieve in a language that you don't know well. I'm interested in family history and missed connections. I think a particular kind of grief that a lot of people in the diaspora have is they lose the language that people in older generations of their families speak.

11:56And when you come back to learn that language, it's often so that you can reconnect with your family. And this novel, rather than offering a kind of happy diaspora ending where that reconnection is possible, it asks what happens when they pass away before you have that chance to speak with them. what happens when you learn your mother tongue, but you only are able to pose your questions to silence and to the grave. So thinking about that, partly because my own grandfather passed away while I was in Taipei studying Chinese. So that's what motivated that book. Beyond that, I'm really interested in the myth of Faust.

12:35I'm interested in deals with the devil as a metaphor for art and complicity and collaboration in fascist regimes. I don't know what shape this story is going to take yet, but I'm thinking very hard about whether art necessarily has to make sacrifices in order to find patrons and reach a wide audience. And if it's true that radical art, free art, the avant-garde, must always be relegated to the sidelines, or if there's a place, a dominant place for art that doesn't compromise itself. Wow, well that's a plethora of very big ideas there and we can't wait until your next novel but I think going back to your body of work and you know the topics you've just touched on the novels you've released have covered different centuries, different worlds, the living, the dead different genre.

13:25Where does this breadth come from and where do you seek inspiration? I just read a lot. I read voraciously. I think if there's anything I'm afraid of, it's running out of time to consume all the ideas that are so appealing to me. This is why I love being in academia because I never run out of ideas. Every degree I've done has inspired a book I've written on the topic. When I was in college, I did my undergraduate dissertation on military history and wartime memory. And that's the well of ideas that the Poppy War trilogy came out of. Then I went off to Oxford to do my master's. So naturally, I wrote a novel that criticizes Oxford as an institution and its history within British colonialism and imperialism.

14:15Well, I didn't do a degree in the publishing industry, but by that time, I'd spent years of my life in it. And the questions I had about the publishing process and what it does to people, especially voices that have not historically been prioritized by the industry. And all those conversations and research I did that became yellow face. And hilariously, well, not, yes, hilariously, Catavisus is the first novel I've written that has nothing to do with my fields of study, but everything to do with my husband's fields. And he is also an academic, He is a philosopher and he thinks a lot about math and logic and questions about the immortality of the soul.

14:58So that book was a lot of fun because it's really a love letter to him. And it's based on conversations we've had through our marriage instead of just a novel about ideas I work on on my own. So, yeah, I would say the biggest sources of my ideas are the scholarship that I do and the scholars around me, most important of which is my husband. Oh, well, how beautiful. But moving from your first novel to your latest release, how has your writing process evolved, if at all? It's gotten more scattered. And I think this is a good thing. A book on craft that I teach to my undergraduates who are studying creative writing is Verlin Klinkenborg's several very short sentences on writing.

15:44And Klinkenborg has this concept of volunteer sentences for volunteer ideas. And here he's referring to the writing that feels easy when you're in a flow and sentences are just sort of materializing on the page without any effort. You might think that's fantastic. That is precisely the kind of artistic flow that you want to enter into when you're writing. And I used to think this, and I used to think that I was doing my best writing when it felt natural and easy. But Klinkenborg actually says, no, that's when you're being lazy. That's when you're not thinking hard about all your word choices and about the thoughts you really want to express.

16:21That's when you're not pushing yourself. You're just repeating the things that you've heard floating around in the discourse around you. And that's why they're volunteering themselves to you so easily. So I think when I was earlier in my career, I wrote faster and I wrote complete sentences at a time, sometimes complete paragraphs at a time, because everything was a volunteer sentence. As I get older and more experienced, I agonize a lot more about the rhythm of my sentences and the precise word order and the little shades of gray and the choice between one word or its synonym. So I find I can't even write in complete sentences anymore.

17:01It has to start with the crucial phrase or the crucial idea that, you know, the precise combination of letters to get across this, this little gem of thought that I want to put down on the page. And then when I've danced around that, after half an hour or so, the page, the, you know, my word processor, it looks more like freestyle poetry, because I am really thinking just in terms of metaphors and strong images and strong turns of phrase. And then I go back, I'm not a poet. So it's very bad poetry. But I go back and try to stitch it all together in the cleanest, most elegant way. So yeah, I think there's just a lot more anal attention to detail on every level.

17:46And it makes the writing go by a lot more slowly. And it's a more agonizing process. But in the end, I think it can only be good for the quality of prose that is the final product. Wow, well that sounds like quite an evolution since your first novel, just less than 10 years ago, so I wonder where your writing process will be in another 10 years' time. You touched on Sally Rooney and debate earlier in our conversation, and I know you were a pro-debater at school, and then one day you just decided you were no longer interested in winning, I think you said, which I love, and then you channeled that energy and that focus into writing.

18:26where has that amazing drive and self-confidence come from? Well I think the four years that I did do high school debate were hugely influential for me because it taught me that my voice mattered and that people would listen to me and also it taught me what it felt like to win. I was having a really fun conversation with a friend recently about the sheer range of emotions that participating in something so intense and competitive like high school debate exposes you to. And I'm not athletic at all. So I never was going to get the highs and lows of high school football. And so I would never otherwise would have experienced what it's like to be in a high stakes tournament, to be in the finals of a national championship, that kind of adrenaline, the nerves, the fear of losing, the preparation, the desperation to win every part of your body, like feeling like it's on fire when you're on stage.

19:26And then just that sheer thrill of being told like it's over, you won, you are a national champion. That's crazy to experience when you're like 15 years old. And I think it's really great to compete in games when you're in school. I think there is a time when everybody has to put the games aside and grow up. So I think it was very good for me to step away from debate when I did. But I was longing for that thrill still, that adrenaline. You know, you never forget that feeling once you've experienced it. But I wasn't interested in competing against other people anymore because that would be meaningless.

20:05I wanted to pour all of that into something that was meaningful and lasting, something that would really impact the world rather than just making me feel good. So I think all of the strong emotions funneled themselves into writing instead. Amazing. Well, you spoke then of growing up, you are still just 29 years old. What, as you enter your 30s, do you hope to achieve in the next decade? I just want to get better at writing I think I'm not very good yet and this is a good thing I'm of course proud of what I've done but I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of what I might be capable of as a scholar and a writer but this means reading a lot more and thinking a lot more and frankly just going through more life milestones I think that writing is one of the things, only professions, where you can only get better as you age because just your understanding of the human condition deepens and matures.

21:07For instance, when I was writing the popular trilogy, I was 19 years old. I didn't know what it was like to fall in love yet. All of my grandparents were still alive. I didn't understand what grief felt like on a really intense personal level. I'm not a mother yet and someday I might want to have kids and that will be a transformative experience that will totally change how I think about other people and about the future and how we relate to each other so I'm excited to keep living life so that all of those experiences can enrich my writing. Totally and how do you feel about your writing being adapted for the screen Obviously, Yellow Face has been a massive phenomenon.

21:50And every day I sit opposite someone reading it on the tube and it's been absolutely incredible. How do you feel sort of handing it over to someone else? And are you very involved in the process of that? I'm not very involved in the process. And it's really easy for me to hand over the reins. I am a massive cinephile. I love the movies. my husband and I's favorite way to spend a weeknight evening is to hold hands and walk over to our local movie theaters and we'll watch anything really old black and white films and new releases and and we especially love talking about adaptations of texts that we're really familiar with and I think there's two sorts of adaptations um there's like a spectrum and the one is when the filmmaker is trying to be really really faithful to every description every line of dialogue, every plot beat in the novel.

22:42And I think the best, the most successful instance of this is Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. I mean, every character depiction and almost all the dialogue is just lifted straight out of the novel and it works really well. But I think even more than that, I love adaptations that take the novel as a jumping point for inspiration, but then creates completely independent vision. Because filmmaking just is a different medium. You have the tools to convey so many more emotions. You get to work with light, you get to work with sound and image. So I wouldn't want an adaptation that cares too much about what I think because I'm only familiar with the tools of prose.

23:28So in all of these adaptation deals, what's been important to me when I sit down and talk with directors and writers and producers is not how much they care about the integrity of my text, but rather do they have an interesting and original and independent vision that I can sign off on? Or I don't even need to know the vision. I just need to know what kind of person they are and how they think. And if I can trust my collaborator, then I can trust the process and know that they'll make something really cool and they don't have to keep coming to me for permission. Incredible. Well, I think we all are very excited to see the different interpretations of your work.

24:07One thing I will say as a mother of two young kids is as a film fanatic, you don't get to go to the cinema spontaneously. So if you do choose to have children, enjoy it now while you can, because that's one thing that I truly miss. They'll be the youngest cinephile. Watch everything at home. Exactly. You said that you love going to the cinema with your husband. Are there other ways that you enjoy your downtime? Yeah, I've actually recently gotten back into visual arts. I used to draw addictively when I was in elementary school and middle school. I actually thought I would become an artist before I became a writer.

24:44And my mother went to art school. So from a very young age, she was teaching me art fundamentals, and I was playing with oil pastels and watercolors and acrylics. And I got so much joy out of that because it wasn't professional. I wasn't entering competitions. I was just doing it because it was fun and I was creating images out of nothing. And at some point I just put my pencils down and I didn't touch them again for a decade. And I know why it's because I started debating and then I went to college and I got so busy with other things. And then I started writing professionally and it felt like I had no time to draw just for fun.

25:23But recently I started doing art again because it's a chance for me to be creative with zero expectations or pressure or, you know, zero risk that anybody who's not me would even look at it and have an opinion on it. And this has been a really good rescue. It's been a good coping mechanism for the fact that when I write a novel, probably thousands of people are going to read it and have a thought on it. And I can pretend to be stoic and zen about it. But of course, you get this creeping anxieties about how is my work going to be received. And going back to visual arts, where I'm terrible and nobody cares, has helped me remember what it's like to create art purely for the sake of the art and not for the audience.

26:11And I think that carries over into my writing process as well. So while I've been on tour, I actually brought my sketchbook with me and I'm trying to do a half hour drawing tutorial every single day. So later tonight, I might try to sketch some mountains or the view up my window. Your 24 hours look very different to the majority of our 24 hours. But I also love your humility and that you saying a few thousand people will read your book and you know, you're still not very good at writing. I think most of us would beg to differ. So my last question for you is, who are your incredible for women of 2025?

26:46Well, I have to talk about women authors because they're who I think about all the time. You've already mentioned Sally Rooney, another author whose work I think is incredible and has a book coming out in September that is Patricia Lockwood. I think she's so smart and so funny. Her 2021, I believe, novel No One Is Talking About This really blew my mind because it was such a hilarious and tender and really compassionate way to think through what the internet is doing to us and how we relate to each other. So if there's any thinker and writer and just public person I admire, it has to be Patricia Lockwood.

27:29Amazing. Well, Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been such a joy speaking to you. We've packed so much in and we all cannot wait to see what's next for you. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. I had so much fun. This series, Supernovas, was brought to you by Net-A-Porter and Chalk and Blade, hosted by Net-A-Porter's content director, Alice Casely Hayford. The team at Net-A-Porter was Katie Barrington as senior editor, with casting by Olivia Wakefield and coordination by Erin Shanahan. The producer at Chalk and Blade was Laura Hyde, original music by Alexis Ademora and the series was mixed by Hannah Stewart.

28:07The creative director is Ruth Barnes. To make sure you catch all the episodes in this series, subscribe via the platform you use to stream your podcasts. For more information, visit netaporte.com.