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R.F. Kuang wrote the first draft of Yellowface in a month because as a digital native, she didn't have to do any research into how mean people could be on Twitter

For Yellowface, R.F. Kuang already knew the plot and the characters, plus she had already seen how nasty people could be on Twitter so she didn't have to do much research.

Yellowface Novel Cover Header — Image credit: HarperCollins

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Sun Apr 19 2026

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For writers, there is something reassuring about being a subject-matter expert. It means less research and usually means you can get straight to work writing your novel. However, R.F. Kuang might wish she didn’t have that luxury; she didn’t have to spend much time researching her novel, Yellowface, because she had already seen how nasty people could be online.

During a panel at BookCon 2026, R.F. Kuang talked about her writing process, which varies from book to book. “Certainly for me, there is no template,” she explained. “There is no predictable outcome. There’s no process that’s been the same from book to book. It’s just me with this mess of a draft. And sometimes it comes together in a matter of months. The first draft of The Poppy War, I think, took three months to draft and then six months to something that I was sending out to literary agents. Babel took over a year because I was doing so much research, and I only spoke some of the languages involved, so I had to pull in a lot of other experts. Katabasis took like maybe a year total, but it was interrupted because I was taking my qualifying exams and also I got married, so I was like, ‘I don’t want to work that year.’”

However, sometimes the process can be even faster, particularly when Kuang knows the subject particularly well. “And Yellowface took like one month to get to that first draft because, I think, more than any of my other books, it plopped into my head fully formed, and I knew the ending, and I knew the character arcs. And I was a digital native, so I didn’t have to do that much extra research to figure out all the ways people can be nasty on Twitter.”

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