Q&A Excerpt: Rebecca F. Kuang

Rebecca F. Kuang was a 2024 guest lecturer for Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. Rebecca is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface, and Katabasis (forthcoming). Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. She has been named to the 2023 Time100 Next list and the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2024. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies Sinophone literature and Asian American literature. She is a graduate of Odyssey 2016. 

In this excerpt transcribed from a question and answer session, Rebecca talks about how to approach description of innate traits like eye and hair color and how to “breadcrumb” description throughout the story instead of delivering it in one large chunk.

QUESTION: Last week we had Jessie Mihalik talking about romantasy. And I was thinking, there are certain types of tropes that we have to follow in a romance, and that includes descriptions, and a lot of that has to do with eye and hair color. So I’m wondering: how much can a person who writes romance get away with not doing that, maybe using some of the techniques that you described in your lecture?

RFK: Well, I’ll preface this by saying, I don’t know a ton about romantasy or the involved tropes. I’m not a big romance reader, so there might be stricter guidelines than what I’m used to. But I—and I suspect I’m not alone in this—I’ve never found eye color or hair color all that scintillating or physically alluring in and of themselves. It’s really about how the character chooses to emphasize that, or how they react to those innate traits, that tells us a lot more about the character and makes them physically interesting to me.

So, for instance, a character might have green eyes. That’s fine. But how does the character choose to show those eyes to everybody else? I think one example that immediately comes to mind is that if they’re aggressively lined with kohl, for instance, immediately we have a character who’s chosen to emphasize this color and wants to be visually arresting. That also tells us something about how they’re moving through the world, what ways in which they want to be looked at, what kind of excitement they want to spark.

So I don’t think that thinking through character choices comes at the expense of these innate characteristics that you say are common in romantasy. It’s all about how we present them. As I like to say to my friends who don’t like to get dressed up: I think hotness is a choice. Hotness is never really about just how you’re born. It’s about your confidence and how you’re working with what you have. So don’t tell us that the character has brown hair. Tell us how the character has styled that hair. That tells us so much more about their background, their personality, the ways in which they wish to be seen, and how our point of view character is responding to them.

QUESTION: So I often find that readers glaze over big chunks of description, and so you often want to dribble little bits of description in, or at least that’s what I often like. But then I feel like if I don’t describe a character pretty immediately, the reader might form an image that’s kind of hard to change. So do you have any advice on kind of breadcrumbing in little bits of description instead of doing it in a chunk, but without overly disrupting the reader’s view of what the character already is?

RFK: I have exactly the same problem as a reader. If I see a really thick paragraph that’s just description, my eyes will immediately glaze over it. I’m a pretty restless reader, so I don’t like sitting there for a long time forming a mental image in my head. I wanna know what people are doing, what they’re saying, and what their role in the story is. So a general rule of thumb that guides me as a writer is: what’s interesting to me right now? And what would be boring to me right now? And if it would be boring to you as a writer to keep going on and on about what the character is wearing, what their armor looks like, how old their sword is, etc.—just skip over that, because I think that’s a nice intuitive guide to what is absolutely crucial for the characters to notice about each other in the scene.

You only need as much exposition and visual guidance [as it takes] to keep the story going. You don’t have to paint out the entire tableau at once. So the reader just knows that this person has a regal air about them. You can always fill in later the very regal haircut that they’re wearing, or exactly what jewels are in their crown, or the whale fur coat they’re wearing. I’m reading Dune Messiah right now, and Princess Irulan is described late in a scene as wearing a whale fur coat, which stopped me because whales are not furry. But you don’t have to give the reader all the information that might possibly be relevant in the first opportunity you get. You just need to give the reader enough to stay interested and be able to make sense of things.

And you can always get away with being halfway through a story before you tell the reader they have green eyes, because oftentimes green eyes are just so not important to events earlier in the story. And the reader might have to mentally adjust their visual image, but more likely the character that’s in their head will be like a ball on a stick bobbing through the events of the plot, and as you tell them things, they’ll fill it in. But otherwise, I think readers are quite happy to have a blank moving through, because we are just more drawn to action and dialogue and the development of plot events than we are to a thoroughly fleshed out image.

NOTE: This transcript has been edited for clarity.