1) Is he kind?
2) Can I tell him everything in my heart?
3) Does he help me become the best version of myself? 4) Does he make me feel safe and secure?
Sorry I chased you through the woods, tackled you, ripped your clothes off, put you in a head lock, and fucked you until the forest was echoing your screams I think you're really cute. Can I hunt you down again please
@AdamaxBro I don’t understand the cagey word salad when you could have just said “I knocked up some chick when my wife was 5 months pregnant and she didn’t want the baby so here we are”.
At least blunt honesty might be somewhat amusing despite your wife’s likely initial horror at it all.
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!
succession is truly the show of all time because these four scenes alone completely changed the way i engage with media. i’ll never be able to watch anything without viewing it through the lens of these lines.
เค้านำเสนอการเลือกคู่ชีวิตค่ะ
Choosing a life partner is not the same as choosing someone you have chemistry with.
ความรู้สึกและ chemistry เป็นสิ่งที่สวยงามนะ แต่ปัญหาคือมันมาได้ง่ายและหายได้ง่ายเหมือนกัน
วันนี้เราอาจรู้สึกตื่นเต้นกับใครสักคนมาก ๆ
แต่ความตื่นเต้นไม่ได้บอกว่าเขาจะเป็นคู่ชีวิตที่ดี
ถ้าต้องเลือกใครสักคนเพื่อเดินไปด้วยกันอีก 10–20 ปี ฉันคิดว่าเราควรถามคำถามที่ลึกกว่านั้นว่า
คนคนนี้ทำให้ฉัน เติบโตขึ้นหรือเล็กลง?
เค้าทำให้เรามีวุฒิภาวะขึ้น หรือทำให้ชีวิตเต็มไปด้วย emotional chaos?
เวลาเกิดปัญหา เขาช่วยกันแก้ หรือกลายเป็นอีกหนึ่งปัญหาที่เราต้องแก้?
เขามี emotional discipline (EQ)ไหม?
เขาสร้างอนาคต หรือใช้ชีวิตไปวัน ๆ แล้วให้ฉันเป็นคนแบกอนาคตนั้นด้วย?
เขาทำให้ชีวิตฉันมั่นคงขึ้นทั้งทางกาย ใจ ความคิด จิตวิญญาณ และแม้แต่เรื่องการเงินหรือเปล่า?
เพราะคู่ชีวิตที่ดีไม่ควรเป็นเพียงคนที่ทำให้หัวใจเต้นแรง
แต่ควรเป็นคนที่ทำให้ ชีวิตของเราดีขึ้นในระยะยาว
เลือกคนที่คุณสามารถสร้างชีวิตด้วยได้
ไม่ใช่แค่คนที่คุณรู้สึกอะไรบางอย่างด้วยในตอนนี้
Butterflies are lovely.
But character is what keeps a relationship alive after the butterflies leave.
Did digital detox last month with my girl. 3 weeks of zero short form video/video games/entertainment for 3 weeks and we both had withdrawals almost the entire break
Extreme fatigue starting from waking until night, slept early every night and got 7-8 hours (usual 5-7), still exhausted next day and would sleep early again on repeat. Had trouble focusing my eyes which I learned is regulated somewhat by dopamine. Brain fog and headaches. It lasted so long without reducing intensity that I started doing research on whether something else was wrong with me coincidently at the same time. Symptoms didn’t subside until 3rd week
i love when a new nicole kidman interview drops because the way she views and experiences the world is always so fascinating - you can tell she’s a very sensitive, introspective person 💌