R.F. Kuang has written seven books, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and trained at some of the world's top universities: Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale. Her wisdom-per-word ratio is also off the charts. Some highlights from our conversation: 1) Emotions are like colors. Mix them! Emotions are never one-dimensional. Bring together fear and courage, love and revulsion, joy and panic. This collision of feelings is closer to how emotion actually works. 2) Practice literary shapeshifting. Become a new person, a new persona, and a new type of author with every project. Do not confuse your habitual voice with your authentic voice: there is no single way of constructing sentences that must define you. Treat language as a fluid and flexible tool. 3) There's no correlation between how good writing feels in the moment and the quality of the product. We mistake effortlessness for genius, flow, or divine inspiration. So don't evaluate a day’s work by the pleasure of producing it. Judge whether the sentences escaped your pre-existing patterns and helped you think something through. 4) Good writing comes from being attentive to what's happening around you and writing with specificity about those observations, rather than relying on the theoretical. Throughout the day, ask: “Where is this feeling sitting in my body? How am I physically responding to this?” Those questions force you beyond the abstract label and toward something more specific than the reader could easily imagine for themselves. 5) Use your zero draft to discover the beating heart of the story, not to prove that you can already write it. Research, brainstorm, follow your nose, and collect whatever feels surprising or “crunchy.” At this stage, coherence is less valuable than emotional resonance. 6) Draft in layers. Let the early draft remain “balls on sticks.” Add the setting, architecture, faces, furniture, and drape colors in later passes. A person’s visual appearance is often the least interesting thing about them. 7) Use the outsider’s perspective to make language strange again. Nabokov could play, stretch, and innovate with English because he was fascinated by the oddities and opportunities of particular word combinations. 8) Be suspicious of “volunteer words for volunteer thoughts.” Volunteer words are the phrases that offer themselves immediately because they are already floating around in your head. They repeat common discourse and carry ideas that are easy to digest; you are filling the page from your pre-existing dataset rather than articulating something you have actually observed or thought through. 9) If you're stuck, put the subconscious to work. Open a blank document, type a title, word, or phrase, then save and close it. Return after the problem has had time to work on you in the background. 10) Serious writing doesn't require solemnity. Soaring observations about history or human nature can sit beside potty jokes. 11) AI can offer readily available words for readily available thoughts, but readily available thoughts do not push boundaries. It may reproduce impressive human patterns, but “you won’t get your next Pale Fire from an LLM.” 12) Thinking about the audience as you write a first draft is a death sentence. The moment you start writing while looking over your shoulder, you stop taking the story where it needs to go. Timestamps: 0:29 Writing your emotions 6:44 Observing people 15:20 Why easy writing doesn't work 23:09 Building unique voices for each book 30:47 What Kuang learned from debate 32:52 Why primary sources matter 35:33 AI & writing 40:54 How to start a book 45:16 Trust your subconscious 50:25 Copy the writers you love 52:57 Being goofy 57:34 Find a driving question 1:01:36 What every writer needs to learn 01:04:38 Book and movie recommendations I've shared the full conversation with R.F. Kuang below. If you'd rather watch the full thing on YouTube, or listen to it all on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Enjoy!