THE ACHIEVER

The otherworldly ambitions of R. F. Kuang.

- BY HUA HSU

Rebecca F. Kuang finished her second year of college with little sense of what she wanted to do with her life. In the fall of 2015, she took a leave from Georgetown, where she was studying international economics, and got a job in Beijing as a debate instructor. In her spare time, she took coding classes online. “I really like mastering the rules of something and then seeing if I can crack it and get really good at it,” she told me. One day, while on a coding website, she came across an ad for Scrivener, a popular word-processing application. Though she had dabbled in fan fiction, she had little experience as a writer. But Scrivener seemed so easy to use that she downloaded it and began writing a fantasy story. Kuang didn’t know much about structuring a story, so she searched Google for how-to books about plotting, world-building, and character development. Each time she finished a chapter, she emailed it to her father in Texas, where she'd grown up. He was an ideal reader, offering nothing but praise and a desire for more. When she sent him the final chapter, he asked, “What are you going to do now?” She consulted Google again and, about seven months after she'd begun writing, found an agent.