Natasha Onwuemezi

RF Kuang is having a chaotic start to the year. Before we chat, she kindly warns me that she might have to step away for a second to take a call from the mechanic. She also asks if we can Zoom with our cameras off – she’s just had eye surgery and shouldn’t spend too much time looking at screens. Feeling the effects of screen fatigue myself, I am more than happy to oblige.

When we log on, she updates me that the mechanic has already called so we’ll be able to chat uninterrupted. Apparently, she’s been a victim of a spate of thefts of precious car parts that have been ramping up during the pandemic. “Turns out someone stole the catalytic converter from my car during a snowstorm – so . . . that was great to find out. The auto shop can deal with it; it’s just gonna cost me quite a lot, which sucks but that’s life; there are worse problems to be had.” I’m surprised by her youthful voice and self-deprecating demeanour; it reminds me that she is only 25 and further underlines how much she’s achieved in such a short space of time – she’s currently working on her fifth book. As a Londoner, I’m also so amazed that she can drive.

She’s speaking to me from New Haven, where she’s currently studying for a PhD at Yale. This comes after two Master’s degrees at Oxford and Cambridge that she received a prestigious Marshall scholarship to undertake. She took a year off between her time in the UK and beginning this PhD to avoid starting her course in a totally virtual environment and now has to reacquaint herself with the challenge of balancing a writing career and coursework at the same time. “It just feels like chaos constantly with deadlines hitting me from all directions but, honestly, I like things this way; I’m just very busy and disorganised all the time but at least, you know, every day is interesting.”

Kuang seems to be someone who sees the beauty in the madness and thrives while working with a jumble of ideas and straightening them out as she goes. “My writing process is so messy and chaotic that I can’t really in good faith give it as advice. It also keeps changing from book to book but what stays the same is that it all has to originate from a complete mess before I can go back and retroactively make it fit a plot and sort people into characters,” she says. She wrote the first title in her epic fantasy trilogy, The Poppy War, when she was 19, and she cringes when we speak about it like it was a Year 7 creative writing assignment and not “the best fantasy debut of 2018” as per WIRED. “I think it’s very apparent that it’s the work of an immature, inexperienced writer.” Yep, totally apparent. She says “potato”; I say “wunderkind”.

Rooted in the history of 20th century China, The Poppy War is a fascinating blood-soaked epic that follows a hot-headed and obstinate orphan called Rin who, against all odds, is accepted into the most elite military school in the country. Fighting prejudice and a brutal and unforgiving environment, she is guided in her journey to control her new and lethal power by a hilariously deranged teacher, all the while keenly aware of the threat of war looming ever closer. Kuang started writing it to make sense of everything that was going on in her life while she was living and working in Beijing during a gap year. “It was the first time that I lived in China on my own for any extended period of time,” she says. “It was the first time that my Chinese was good enough for me to really communicate with other people, especially my grandparents who I’d grown up not really knowing.”

For Kuang, writing The Poppy War was a way to crystalise and explore the dominant themes she had been thinking about when learning about the “very painful, very violent” history of China during the 20th Century, including China’s role in World War II and the Rape of Nanjing – the mass-scale random murder, rape, looting and arson commited by the Japanese army against the residents of Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, after a battle that took place during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937: “I was not a history major when I took that gap year. I became a history major when I came back because that was the first time that I learned about any of this and it was all so much,” she says. “My perception was that this was a forgotten history that nobody in the West talked about, that nobody cared about. And it was an atrocity that was covered up so I think what I was trying to do with the ending [of The Poppy War] is to create something so shocking and so searing that nobody would be able to look away and that everybody would be forced to think about the bloody events of December 1937.” Comparing the novel to Quentin Tarantino’s pulpy Nazi revenge-flick Inglourious Basterds, Kuang says: “It’s a movie that swings really really hard and either hits the ball out of the park or misses dramatically depending on how you feel about it. [Like that] The Poppy War is written from a place of rage and retribution and it’s the big violent bloody messy revenge narrative.”

Rin’s character arc parallels the trajectory of Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong and, from the very beginning of the writing process, Kuang was interested in exploring the story of how one becomes a dictator. So, while Rin is the protagonist and we begin the trilogy sympathising with her, she is not necessarily a “good guy”. “I think the morality in The Poppy War is a lot more black and white than the morality in the sequels and I think that’s also the reason some people don’t like sequels as much because I think when we read fantasy, we really just want to be able to unequivocally root for the hero and, by books two and three, it’s not really apparent who the hero is and everyone is implicated. I think the ending especially doesn’t sit well with a lot of people who are on Rin’s side from the beginning,” says Kuang. “But I don’t think there’s any other way that I could’ve written about Chinese history given what I know now.”

With the benefit of hindsight and after delving deeper into Chinese history with her studies, Kuang developed a more “balanced and nuanced reckoning with complicated interests at play”. For instance, her understanding of the perception of the Rape of Nanjing changed: “It’s not the case that it’s been totally forgotten about by the world, in fact, remembered very well by the People’s Republic of China and I think it’s worryingly co-opted as a vehicle for stoking anti-Japanese sentiment and for stoking nationalist sentiment within China and it’s very complicated because on the one hand this is a very real thing that happened and it was awful and many people died and on the other hand this pain and trauma is used by the state for political purposes which is not the vehicle towards truth, healing or reconciliation.” (1200 words)

As a result, The Poppy War is bolder and more provocative than the following two books in the series – The Dragon Republic and The Burning God. Kuang says there are also many structural and “craft-level” things she would have done differently if writing The Poppy War now as a more experienced author, although she does admit that the book does “more daring things narratively than I’m willing to do now”. She says: “It’s always going to be that slightly misshapen immature, very bold, experimental first novel that lives on in perpetuity and is still embarrassingly the thing that most people encounter for the first time when they’re getting to know me as a writer. But I think it’s fun because I think that you can see me growing as a thinker and a writer over the course of the trilogy.”

While The Poppy War is a rich and captivating mediation on Chinese history that intergogates issues of colourism, prejudice, war and drug addiction, what really stands out for me are the intricate, vivid fight scenes and fascinating perspectives on military strategy. It’s no surprise then when Kuang reveals she has a black belt in Taekwondo – although she says she’s “forgotten literally everything”, including the laws of physics, according to her dad: “There are some scenes where Rin does some stuff and it’s cool but then my dad read the books – he has a PhD in physics – and sent me comments like, “this is physically impossible. Force cannot be distributed this way. You are making things up,” and I’m like “dad, this is a fantasy novel . . .”’

Discussing the technicality of writing the actual battle scenes, Kuang says that the lessons she learned from her martial arts training were less about the moves that would be good in battle and more about the simple fact that people get tired while fighting. “I think we have this tendency to dramatise fights and make them very long and artistic and cool-looking both in film and in literature, but in real life, take a knife fight, for example. A real knife fight lasts like five seconds because everyone gets their hits in and then everyone’s exhausted and someone’s down. There’s really not this constant back and forth of trading blows.”

Kuang explains that, for her, fantasy fight scenes aren’t really about the physicality, but instead are a form of dialogue or a way of exploring characters in more depth; something she says anime illustrates really well. “Really epic and well-known anime fight scenes are considered well done because when the characters are trading blows, they’re not just trading physical blows. Every interaction and every development in that fight scene is a development in their relationship and is reflective of the cause they stand for, their warring personality traits. Like, for example, if somebody fights by dodging a lot and doesn’t get quick massive hits in but uses their wiles and trickery, that says something about that character.”

The cinematic scenes and compellingly audacious plot make The Poppy War a great choice for an adaptation – in fact, the trilogy has been optioned by Starlight Media, the company that backed Crazy Rich Asians. Big news, but Kuang, ever the pragmatist, won’t be lured in by the fickle Hollywood machine: “I think that publishing is already an industry full of disappointments and unpredictability but if there’s any industry that’s even more unpredictable I think it’s Hollywood. So I just take my wins when I get them, I celebrate option deals when I can get them and I try not to think about the rest because it’s just completely out of my control,” she says. “I just try to focus on writing books as well as I can write them and if the Hollywood stuff works out, then that’s great but if it doesn’t, then that’s not where my heart is invested in the first place.”

Luckily for us, her heart is in books. Her latest title, Babel: An Arcane History, is set in Oxford and influenced by Kuang’s obsession with the dark academia genre, with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History an inspiration. It’s also a “tonal response” to Susanna Clarke’s alternate history novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. “I think that stylistically, the way that [Clarke] imitates a Victorian style of writing was so interesting and so entertaining for me that I wanted to see if I could do that with Babel,” says Kuang. “There’s such an art to the Victorian sentence: the run-on, clever witty Dickensian sentence that has attacked like four different targets by the time you reach a punctuation mark. That’s so different from the way that we’re taught as modern novelists how to write, I think. With contemporary action novels there is an emphasis on short sudden sentences, very direct dialogue, very direct sentence structures. It was a lot of fun to change my voice so much for Babel.”

Coming next is Yellowface, which has the deliciously intriguing premise of a white writer stealing her dead Asian friend’s manuscript and publishing it as her own while also rebranding herself, “complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo”. It’s influenced, somewhat surprisingly, by Kevin Wilson’s darkly funny novel Nothing To See Here. “The voice is so different from most speculative fiction novels,” says Kuang. “It’s very irreverent, it’s ridiculous, it’s absurdist and it just moves so fast and it feels a lot more like a quick text conversation with a friend in 2021 than a grand epic fantasy narrative in the 1600s but I thought that voice was just so addictive.” Kuang was particularly attracted to the way Wilson explored difficult issues like child abuse and toxic friendships in such a “quick, ridiculous and irreverent way”. She adds: “Sometimes that light, comedic touch lets you dig deeper than a very sombre meditation, so learning to write a very funny satire novel was really fun, and a stylistic development from what I’ve done so far.”

Exploring racism and the erasure of Asian-American voices in the publishing industry is especially timely now given that diversity and inclusion is such a… hot topic, at the moment. Kuang is reluctant to discuss it but at the same time ardent in her views. “I think one issue is that in publishing, identity and background become commodified as a marketing tool and a metric to hit rather than as something that is valuable in and of itself,” she says, adding that works by writers of colour are often mainly spoken about in terms of the writer’s identity. “I get shelved with a lot of other East Asian writers like Fonda Lee or Ken Liu even though our books are very thematically and stylistically different. I think that if you like Ken Liu’s books you might like mine but not if you’re looking for the same mode of storytelling or the same type of narrative.”

Kuang says that the appearance of progress can actually be more insidiously harmful than the blatant poor representation of yesteryear and that we have not in fact reached a publishing “golden age”. “It’s obviously amazing that more writers of colour and writers from marginalised backgrounds are getting good book deals but there is also a disproportionate perception of who is successful in publishing and who is actually getting paid and getting deals,”, she says. “I think that when individual works by writers of colour get a lot of attention, people look at that and think ‘oh this means that everything is fixed’ but that’s obviously not true on the numbers level; things are still wildly unequal and we all have to stop lying to ourselves about how publishing works.”

How to write a novel: The RF Kuang method

Your book starts as a complete mess that you go back and retroactively tweak to make fit a plot and sort people into characters.

You always start with the arguments. You can’t really write a book unless you know what the themes are and what you’re trying to say because you’re an academic and because you did debate for so many years in high school. You always think about ideologic themes first.

Once you have the idea in mind, the characters start coming together but they don’t begin with appearances or personality traits or even background. All characters that you come up with represent a different point on the ideological spectrum and nobody is ever redundant.

Once you’ve locked down these aspects of the characters, their backgrounds, traits and appearances start coming together.

It’s even messier in terms of plot. You can’t write chronologically because you can’t write a scene unless you’re really excited about it which means you can’t do a bird’s eye perspective outline before you start a project because from that removed distance you can’t really tell what twists or what plot beats will be interesting to you, so you just have to get into the thick of it and start brainstorming scenes you think will be really cool.

At this stage of drafting, it feels more like composing a music video than writing a story because all you have are vibes, but you can’t write something unless it feels true.

Draft as if you are remembering something rather than trying to come up with something, but in order for it to feel like you’re remembering something you need to let it percolate for long enough that it’s there in your subconscious.

Pull out cool scenes and interactions out of your subconscious and get these down on paper – this is your zero-draft because it’s not really a draft at all, it’s a starting point for you to look back and retroactively construct the plot by filling in the gaps.

Pinpoint what you’re interested in, where it looks like the plot might be going and the character interactions that are going to push it along.

From there, you can impose a geometric structure onto the plot. You really rely on three- and five-act structures

Once you’ve settled on the structure, you can go back and reorganise your plot points to fit it.

At this point you come up with an outline and use this to write your proper first draft, which is just creating the linking connective material between all the beats you’ve already come up with to make it make sense.

All subsequent drafts will be spent smoothing this out again and again until iteratively it builds into a coherent novel.

This takes a lot of time. It’s very messy; it’s very hard to juggle all these plot beats at once, but it’s literally the only method of writing that works for you, so it’s what you’re sentenced to for the rest of your career.