The highly prolific R. F. Kuang has in just a few short years published multiple knockout successes. From her bestselling fantasies Babel and The Poppy War series to the publishing social media satire Yellowface, she has delivered one success after another. At the same time, she is still pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale.

Rather than seeing her studies as something that gets in the way of her writing, though, Kuang seems to take that part of her work as a boost to her fiction. She told Clarkesworld:

Academia is fun because you’re constantly being challenged by smarter people to revise and reinvestigate your opinions. Stories have to come from somewhere; for me, they come from whatever research questions are bothering me at the moment. Reading critical theory makes my fiction better because good, interesting fiction is mired in precisely the stuff critical theory addresses. Whatever depth or profundity makes its way into my work comes straight from people much smarter than me. I also just really enjoy research on its own terms…

Being surrounded by people and ideas that challenge your assumptions is often seen as the kind of thing that spurs sharper thinking, but not necessarily sharper writing. Try it out.

See what you might be wrong about. Dive into something new. Write about something entirely different.