Author R.F. Kuang Talks Magic and What's Lost in Translation

Goodreads: Can you tell us a little about the genesis of this story? Where did it start?

R.F. Kuang: Sure, well, I have always tended to write about students and about the academy. The Poppy War starts off in the first half as a classic fantasy “magic school” story. I've always been very attached to that setting. I think it’s just a function of having been in school for most of my life, and still being a student at a Ph.D. program.
 
I love campus novels, dark academia novels. And I knew that when I finished the Poppy War trilogy that I was going to move on and do something in that genre. That's the setting in which I am most comfortable and familiar. Those are the interpersonal dynamics that I observe and most enjoy writing about—between students and rival students, students and teachers, etc.
 
There's so much in the microcosm of the academy that both represents larger issues and also really doesn't. As Donna Tartt’s The Secret History tells us, the isolated world of the academy is sometimes very, very different from what real life is like.

GR: And how about setting the book in an alternate-universe Oxford?

RFK: It just so happens that when I was wrapping up the third book of that trilogy, The Burning God, I was studying for my master’s degree at Oxford, which is a very magical and attractive place. I think if you're a writer, and you’ve spent time there, you always end up writing your version of the Oxford novel. Philip Pullman did it. I think you see a lot of Oxford in J.R.R. Tolkien's work.
 
And so I had to write about Oxford. I think what made my experience there a bit different is, first of all, I'm a Chinese American student at a very classically white, classically British university. And I felt like an outsider on many, many levels. Also, there's a colonial history there that I was acutely aware of, that I think other dark academia novels don't always engage with. So that’s where the setting came from.

GR: Among its many other concerns, Babel is very much a book about language.  

RFK: Well, I studied translation and East Asian literature, so I'm constantly thinking about what gets lost in translation. And it seemed very fruitful for a magic system—the ways that miscommunication and deliberate mistranslation are so political and so ideological.
 
It's really this invisible force that has acted throughout history. I wanted to do something that would explore how translation and languages have historically been tools of empire and colonialism, how this thing we don't really think about exerts immense influence on interpersonal and national interactions.
 
So that's where the magic system came from. And once I had the setting and the magic system, it seemed pretty obvious that there should be some scholarly insurrection at the heart of all this…some enormous climax in which to manifest. That was the seed of Babel. And, yeah, now it's a real book!

GR: The magic system is always a critical part of world-building in fantasy, and I thought yours was so fascinating—magic that is powered by the tension and friction in the act of translating from one language to the other.

RFK: There are a lot of fantasy novels that deal with the power of words and language and naming. I think Ursula Le Guin has done this a lot. I know Samantha Shannon is very interested in etymology and wordplay in her novels as well. I think my innovation is coming at it from the translation angle instead.
 
There were two things I wanted to convey about translation that were at the forefront of my mind. First, it was very important to me that the magic system felt like a real historical facet of the world. I wanted the characters to talk about it and use it the way that they would have used any number of Victorian implements.
 
The second thing is that translation can function as a metaphor for difference. It's my way of talking about difference at large. Translation is just trying to make yourself understood by other people. We're all translating ourselves to the world. Even if we're not bilingual, we're all trying to put our thoughts and feelings and experiences into words, and hoping that somebody else gets it.
 
And there are so many things that can interfere with that—obviously racism, colonialism, malicious intent. So in that sense, translation becomes a way to talk about prejudice and the avarice of the British Empire in the 1830s. But even unintentionally, there are all these things that cause us to refuse to listen to each other. It’s just the intersection of how different people engage with one another.
 
GR: Reading the book, I remember being very pleased that I was also learning about all these historical issues, in a history-nerd kind of way. Not only in England, but in China and India and Haiti. Can you talk a little about the historical research you did for Babel?

RFK: Oh, I did an enormous amount of research. [Laughs.] I tried very hard to not only look at secondary source scholarship on the 1830s, but also a lot of primary source documents—letters between various government officials. I also read a lot of fiction written at the time. I ended up just diving into the Victorian classics.
 
I read so much Dickens. I really enjoyed Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which is one of the very acclaimed and wonderful pastiches of that literary era. I was trying very hard to absorb the particular phrasings of Victorian authors and their brand of humor, which I think is very wry and silly, and I love it.

GR: The four main characters in the book have such tight and complex relationships. It made me think of those friendships you make in college and how they are really such a central part of the whole experience—no matter what alternative universe you’re in.  

RFK: That was one of the easiest things to do. Particularly when you're in a school setting, you're always surrounded by a cohort of very close-knit friends. You love each other, and you hate each other, and you have all this history. You're capable of hurting each other so much by virtue of how well you know each other and how much you care.
 
A lot of that came from personal experience. One of the very first scenes I ever wrote for Babel was based on a night we were all at my friend's place, sitting on the floor playing Bananagrams. And somehow the room smelled terribly like bananas. We were all so confused that it smelled so strongly of bananas, because she claimed that she hadn't been eating any. There were no bananas in the room, no banana peels anywhere.
 
Then she confessed that this banana smell had been lingering for weeks and she couldn't find the source of it. So we turned her apartment inside out looking for these bananas. [Laughs.] It turned into the Spanish Inquisition. Someone was shining a flashlight like it was an interrogation, demanding: Where are the bananas? We were rolling on the floor crying with laughter.
 
And I just thought, this is so magical. It's these golden moments that you always think about nostalgically when remembering college and university. I went home and wrote down every single detail I could remember of that night, and there’s a scene that's almost beat-for-beat of this in Babel.

GR: Did you ever find the bananas?

RFK: No! And we still have no idea!

GR: On the technical side of things, you have an interesting format thing with Babel, in which the text is regularly interrupted with these footnotes and sidebars and addenda. It underlines the scholarly theme and gives the sense that we’re truly reading this document of an alternative history.

RFK: I love the fact that footnotes allow you to add a second narrator. The narrator of the main text is Robin, whose point of view is extremely narrow and limited. He only knows what he knows, and he doesn't know very much, so he's confused most of the time.
 
He's a classically unreliable narrator, and if you take the text through his eyes, then you come off with a very small idea of what's going on throughout the story. But the [footnotes] narrator lets me add another character who is omniscient and situated differently in time; I think she’s positioned much later than these events. I’ve joked around that the narrator's voice is God, which is the author, which is me.
 
But I tried to leave my personality mostly out of that voice. That narrator knows a lot more than any of the other characters. She's a bit like the omniscient Victorian narrator who sometimes pops in to whisper clever and snarky asides to the reader about things that the characters don't know.

GR: Do you have a typical day if you're just sitting down to do some writing? And do you have any habits, good or bad—anything in that direction?

RFK: It really depends on whether it's term time or not. If the semester is on, then I'm just doing course readings and going to class and trying not to think too much about the writing deadlines that are stacking up.
 
I write furiously during the summer vacations and winter holidays, and sometimes over spring break. But otherwise, I find it impossible to write and do schoolwork at the same time. On days that I do write, I try to get my writing done as early in the morning as possible. I'm a morning person. I like it when I'm alone, nobody else is awake, and it's just me and the birds. That's the time that I think the most clearly.
 
When I'm actively drafting a project, I try to knock at least 1,000 words out of the way before I have breakfast. Then I'll come back to my writing desk later during the day, but that's just to do revisions and fix up stuff. Anything that doesn't require serious creative thought I save for later in the day when I'm less invested in being clever.

GR: Do you have a system for outlining the books at that high-altitude level—what's going to happen when, and where everything is going to end up?

RFK: I do, and It's not a great system. [Laughs.] But I’ve found that it's the only system that works for me.
 
Unfortunately, I have two very contradictory impulses. The first is that I won't let myself draft a scene unless I'm very excited and passionate about everything that's happening on the page. But you can't really do that from a bird's-eye view. I find it impossible to write an outline first and think about character interactions when I don't know them very well yet. I haven't gotten down in the weeds with them—to watch them think and act and speak. So I can't outline, or at least I can't start from an outline.
 
My second impulse is that I really love structure. I like turning to three-act structures and five-act structures and others that people have invented over the history of storytelling. I just like the mathematical neatness of it all, when things are symmetrical and line up neatly with certain rules of pacing.
 
I reconcile these two impulses by first letting myself write a very ugly “zero draft” in which I just kind of word-vomit, onto the page, everything that I think is cool about the characters and the setting and the plot. Somewhere around the 20,000- to 50,000-word mark, there's a point where I realize I just keep doing this, because the book will never be done.
 
Because I don't know what the plot is, I go back and take everything I've learned about the story and retroactively impose a structure onto it. And then the proper writing of the first draft begins.

GR: If it’s any consolation, in talking to authors over the years, it seems like there is no “normal” to any of this. Everyone seems to have their own different method of outlining.

RFK: Yeah, I like that I'm at least self-aware about this process now. I know exactly what phase I'm in, instead of just groping around blindly. Knowing that one day the book will get done—no matter how much of a mess it feels like right now—is very reassuring. [Laughs.]

GR: Our readers are always interested in author recommendations. What are some of the books that are on your nightstand these days?

RFK: Well, I just finished Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, which is a sequel to The Idiot. They're both campus novels about a freshman at Harvard, and she's just one of my favorite writers ever. I think The Idiot might be my favorite novel of all time. It's just such a witty, compassionate, ridiculous account of somebody coming up through a humanities curriculum. Learning all these difficult, complex ideas and having a complete mess of a personal life. Then trying to fit those abstract theoretical ideas to what they're going through. This is something that English majors do all the time, I think. I certainly do.
 
Up next is Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. I'm really going back to the classics. These days, I find that I can't read too much contemporary stuff—especially contemporary fantasy—because I find my voice just imitating everybody else's. I think the only way to build a unique and mature voice is to go back to the classics and read things from a period in which people were writing differently. That forces you to actively think about what's working and what isn't.

GR: Do you remember, as a kid, the book or books that were the first to kind of tackle your brain and really inspire you?

RFK: Yeah, I have a funny story about this. When I was little, and we had just recently moved to the U.S., we weren't buying nice editions of novels from bookstores. My dad thought we should read the English classics, in order to become good at English, but he thought he would save money by printing out free versions online. I don't know if Project Gutenberg existed then, but it was the equivalent of that. He would print the Word files out and staple them together.
 
So I read Pride and Prejudice this way. I have a very clear memory of, when I was five or six, my dad reading Animal Farm with me as a bedtime story. George Orwell is baked into my storytelling DNA, and I think it was completely age inappropriate. [Laughs.] But we had a lot of fun reading it together.