By Issay Matsumoto, Plympton Writing Atlas Fellow
Last week, Plympton Story Atlas Fellows had the privilege to speak with award-winning author, futurist tech consultant, lawyer, and former software engineer Ken Liu.
Addressing the Fellows building Story Atlas, a catalogue database of short stories accessible to film and TV producers, Ken titled his talk, “Three Times my Career Almost Ended.” It’s a curious title for a talk given by a Hugo Award-winning writer whose work has spanned six original novels and short story collections, dozens of magazine publications, and a handful of award-winning Chinese-to-English translations.
Nevertheless, Ken insisted that his failures are more interesting than his successes.
Ken’s journey started shortly after college, when he first seriously pursued short story publication. After a slew of rejections, Ken began receiving acceptances to major publications. Following this newfound success, he wrote what he thought, at the time, was his greatest piece.
After almost two years of shopping this piece around and receiving rejection after rejection, Ken realized that he had been obsessing over the piece and hadn’t written anything new the entire time.
His career almost failed for the first time because he had put all of his hopes and dreams into one story, and neglected to do the most important thing a writer could do: sit down and write.
“Almost every writing problem,” Ken advised the Plympton Fellows, “can be fixed by writing something new.”
So Ken did just that. As he continued his career outside of writing as a software engineer, a student at Harvard Law School, and a corporate lawyer, he found time to write during commutes and lunch breaks.
But when his career began to take off again with major publications and national awards, he found it difficult to break free of the natural “desire to please.” This was the second time his career almost ended.
Ken advised the Fellows to interrogate the ways they have been socialized to please those assessing them, whether they are evaluating them in school or reading their work with a critical eye. Ken stressed that this tendency to please can be problematic in an industry that has been dominated by what he called the “universalist” literary approach. Writers of all backgrounds have been compelled to privilege the stories of middle-class, white, and suburban male characters that they are told are “universal.” Rather, writers from historically marginalized backgrounds must prioritize their own approaches to storytelling, speak to the readers they value, and sometimes even forgo those who will not attempt to understand them in good faith.
Ken explained that for him, storytelling is like building a house that the reader enters. Readers make themselves at home, bringing their own “baggage” and their own ways of making meaning. But, according to Ken, some readers will not understand or like living in the house that the writer constructs, and that is okay: “My house is not always for them.”
In describing the pitfalls of his career, Ken thoroughly debunked the false choices that plague this industry and promote selfishness over collaboration.
According to Ken, one of the most powerful ways writers can challenge these choices as individuals is by understanding the difference between goals and milestones. Too often, writers mistake milestones for goals. Following the insight of writer Tobias Buckell, a goal is something a writer can control: writing a certain number of words or finishing a manuscript. A milestone is something outside of a writer’s control: selling a book, or getting accepted by a magazine.
Writers who cannot understand this crucial difference are not only trapped by critics evaluating their work: lose sight of the basic task and art of writing. Worse yet, they are doomed to be consumed by the dangerous idea that storytelling rewards selfishness and egomania over collaboration.
For Ken, another powerful way to challenge the competitiveness of this industry is by focusing on community building. This realization saved Ken’s career the third time it almost ended. Instead of enviously scrolling through Twitter, where writers often boasted their accomplishments, Ken took time away from his own writing and began to support other writers’ work. He found it incredibly rewarding to translate stories by Chinese authors for English-speaking audiences and volunteer for writers conferences.Ken found that by building solidarity among writers, sometimes across political borders, he could “make the pie bigger.”
“Why fight like rats over a few crumbs?” Ken asked the Plympton Fellows.
Moreover, supporting other writers helped him rediscover the driving force behind his own writing: making stories more accessible to a wider readership.
Ken’s time with us showed the Plympton Fellows how to make this possible and he was gracious with his advice for aspiring writers and generous in responding to questions. By focusing on collaboration and sharing career knowledge, writers can reject selfishness and insecurity and instead focus on the task of telling the stories we hope to tell.