Pipeline Artists

When you start writing, your first instinct is to want to write for other people—but you quickly learn that it's not always sustainable to do so.

It's okay to take the time to find and seek—both yourself and the story you hope to tell.

If you’re trying to hit the zeitgeist, you’re gonna miss and be too late. Authenticity is timeless ...

And all of this is happening at a time when the culture is redefining women—tossing aside Harriet and Lucy for Maude and Mary Tyler Moore—and deciding that female student-athletes should have access to the same benefits as the guys (with the passage of Title IX).

I was dropped into a radioactive vat of freckles and now roam the Earth to ginger-fy its people. Er—no. Wrong origin story.

After college, I worked as a freelance writer and editor, along with several other side gigs, including an ill-fated stint as a Hollywood apartment manager.

I’ve learned I’m really stubborn about my work. I just can’t bring myself to give up on something once I’ve started.

In hindsight, it’s easier to find the meaning of suffering because you are removed from the cloudiness that suffering itself can cause.

I was busy imagining other worlds where gravity was different and people grew differently. I was inventing stories in these other realms. It wasn’t science I loved—it was science-fiction.

My whole process of writing the story was just imagining, what kind of person would actually do this? And what kind of person would pay for this?

If I were going into a meeting with a potential agent ... I’d try to be familiar with every title the company has recently produced, and learn as much as I can from social media about anyone who I know will be in the meeting.

It was really therapeutic to have something I could throw myself completely into and take my mind off of whatever was giving me stress during day-to-day life.

Honestly, I listened to a lot of Tupac. How he is able to make each song an ode to a person or an ideal or a memory was the magic I needed. I paid attention to his meter, to how he is able to captivate an audience.

I ended up inserting a lot of the challenges I faced growing up as a Chinese American into the character: expectations from my parents, from society, and even from my Asian American peers on “what” or “how” I should be.

... the more meetings I took and the more people I spoke with, I realized that it’s not about settling for some light, some immediate relief. I needed to look at the long-term.