Nebula-winning novelist R.F. Kuang on writing: the feel of writing predicts nothing

david_perell · x · 2026-09-03

David Perell shares 11 takeaways from his conversation with R.F. Kuang, the Nebula Award-winning novelist trained at Cambridge, Oxford and Yale:

Mix emotions like colors: fear plus courage, love plus revulsion — collisions of feelings mirror how emotion actually works.
Practice literary shapeshifting: become a new author with every project; don't confuse habitual voice with authentic voice.
How good writing feels says nothing about its quality: judge whether sentences escaped your pre-existing patterns, not whether the session felt effortless.
Write from specific observation, not theory: ask where a feeling sits in your body to get past abstract labels.
Use the zero draft to discover the story's heart: collect surprising material; coherence matters less than emotional resonance.
Draft in layers: add setting, faces and furniture in later passes — appearance is often a person's least interesting trait.
Beware "volunteer words for volunteer thoughts": instantly available phrases recycle common discourse instead of articulating real thought.
Let the subconscious work on stuck problems in an untouched blank document.
Serious writing doesn't require solemnity, and she notes AI offers readily available words — precisely the volunteer words writers should distrust.

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