Liu Cixin's Writing Routine

He treated the fiction as a parallel life. The engineering kept his feet on the ground. The writing took the rest of him somewhere else.

Writing Inside a Demanding Day Job

The practical question, for anyone reading this page as a writer, is how Liu sustained this for twenty-plus years. He was writing fiction while holding a full-time engineering position, in a genre that required extensive research and careful construction, building toward something whose scale made the usual "finish the draft, then revise" approach inadequate. The trilogy took roughly four years to complete across its three volumes once he began it seriously, but those years rested on a much longer foundation of short fiction, reading, and thinking that had been accumulating since the late 1980s.

One answer is that the long day-job period functioned as something other than an obstacle. Those years gave him time to think at the scale the material required. The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy is structurally intricate in a way that suggests very long-term planning. The solution to the three-body problem that drives the first book's threat is set up years in advance, in a way that only works if the writer had the whole architecture in mind from early on. You don't build that architecture under pressure of a deadline. You build it across years of thinking in the background while your hands are doing something else.

Liu has described the power plant environment as providing a kind of mental quiet that office work or editorial environments might not. Industrial work, when you know what you're doing, creates a particular rhythm: demanding enough to require real attention, but not the kind of attention that fills every corner of the mind. There's space in that rhythm for something else to develop. The great ideas in his fiction, the Dark Forest theory in particular, feel less like clever plot devices than like slow crystallizations, ideas that formed over years of accumulated reading and thinking and then arrived in the fiction when they were ready. If you want to find out how to think about what kind of writer you are, the Liu Cixin answer is that you may already be doing it, just not on the page yet.

The Long Game

Liu Cixin won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, at the ceremony in Spokane, Washington. The book that won was first published in Chinese in 2006 and had been available to Chinese readers for nearly a decade before Ken Liu's English translation reached Tor Books in 2014. By the time Western readers encountered it, Liu had already written the entire trilogy. The win was a recognition of work that was already complete.

That timeline matters. Liu didn't write The Three-Body Problem aiming for a Western audience, or for an international prize, or for any of the external validation that now defines how the book is talked about. He wrote it because the questions in it were the questions he was most interested in. The Cultural Revolution setting in the opening pages, the specific tensions of Chinese scientific history, the way the book is steeped in the experience of a particular generation of Chinese intellectuals, none of that was softened or translated for a hypothetical foreign readership. It's a deeply Chinese book, and the English translation works as well as it does precisely because Ken Liu resisted the temptation to smooth those edges down.

For writers who've been at it for years without the external markers of success, the Liu Cixin timeline is genuinely worth thinking about. He published his first story in 1989. The Three-Body Problem came out in 2006, seventeen years later. The Hugo came nine years after that. At no point in that span could you have looked at his career from the outside and said, confidently, that something historic was building. He was an engineer in Shanxi who wrote science fiction on his days off. He kept writing. The work accumulated. And then one day the accumulated work turned out to be one of the most significant science fiction trilogies of the century so far. That's not a story about a shortcut. It's a story about a very long game, played patiently, without a guaranteed outcome.

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Liu Cixin's Writing Routine

Liu Cixin's writing routine during the years of the trilogy was structured by his engineering schedule at the Niangziguan Power Plant rather than by any ideal conditions for fiction writing. Shifts at an industrial facility are not built around a novelist's needs. He wrote in the time that remained. In interviews he has described the arrangement as one he accepted rather than designed, and that acceptance seems to have been genuine rather than reluctant. The fiction wasn't suffering from the day job. The day job was providing something the fiction needed.

He has spoken about the role of the physical environment in shaping his imagination. The power plant itself, the turbines and cooling towers, the scale of the infrastructure, made industrial human ambition visible and concrete in a way that abstract reading alone doesn't. When he wrote about the three-body problem, about the chaotic gravitational dance of three suns that makes an alien civilization's existence permanently precarious, he was drawing partly on an engineer's intuitions about what systems under extreme constraints actually do. The fiction and the engineering fed each other in ways that wouldn't have been possible if he'd quit the job to write full time in his twenties.

By 2010, when Death's End was published in China and the trilogy was complete, Liu had spent more than twenty years building one of the largest narrative structures in contemporary science fiction, a volume at a time, in whatever hours the engineering schedule left open. He left the power plant after the international success of the trilogy made it possible to write full time. The working conditions that produced the books were, by any conventional standard, difficult. The books themselves suggest they were also, in some important sense, exactly right.

Sources

The primary sources for Liu Cixin's working life and routine are his interviews with major publications around the time of the English-language release. Jiayang Fan's profile in The New Yorker, published June 24, 2019, "Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds," is the most detailed account of his biography and working life available in English, covering his years at the power plant and the writing of the trilogy. The New York Times has published several interviews with Liu around the trilogy's publication, including pieces covering his engineering background and the Chinese cultural context of the books. Ken Liu's translator's note in the Tor Books edition of The Three-Body Problem (2014) provides essential context on the translation process and Liu Cixin's prose style. See also: Liu Cixin on Wikipedia for a documented overview of his bibliography and awards history.

What You Can Steal

Liu Cixin spent two decades building a science fiction trilogy in the margins of an engineering career. If you're writing something ambitious while holding down a demanding day job, his approach has more to offer than most writing advice does:

• Let the day job feed the work instead of fighting it. Liu's engineering background gave him the conceptual vocabulary for his fiction. The ideas that make the trilogy distinctive, the systems thinking, the scale, the interest in constraints and second-order effects, came from his daily professional life. Your day job is probably doing something similar for your own writing, whether you've noticed it or not.
• Build for scale over years, not drafts over months. The trilogy's architecture was almost certainly developing across the full two decades of short fiction and thinking that preceded it. Some projects are too large to plan in a single burst of drafting energy. They need years of background accumulation before the structure is ready to build.
• Write the book you actually want to read, in the tradition you actually care about. Liu didn't adjust his vision for a hypothetical Western readership. The book works in translation precisely because it wasn't softened. Specificity travels further than you'd expect.
• Stop waiting for the conditions to improve. Liu wrote at the power plant, on a shift schedule, in a city without a literary scene, in a genre that had no international profile. The conditions were never going to improve dramatically. He wrote anyway.
• Think longer than you're comfortable thinking. The Dark Forest theory, the trilogy's central philosophical argument, is the kind of idea that takes years to arrive. Give your best ideas room to develop at their own pace rather than forcing them into the next draft.