For most of his writing life, Liu Cixin was not a full-time author. He was a computer engineer at a power plant, and he wrote science fiction around the job. That day job shaped how, and how slowly, he worked.
The Day Job Came First
Liu worked as a computer engineer at the Niangziguan Power Plant in Yangquan, Shanxi, in northern China. He started publishing short science fiction in the magazine Science Fiction World in the 1990s and kept writing steadily through the 2000s, all while reporting to the plant. He didn't leave that engineering position until 2014, by which point the Three-Body trilogy was already finished and famous.
That order matters. The whole of Remembrance of Earth's Past, published between 2006 and 2010 in Chinese, was written by someone with a full-time technical job. He wrote in the hours around his work rather than in the long, uninterrupted stretches of a full-time novelist's day.
Thinking Was the Routine
Liu's method leaned on thinking far more than on daily word counts. He has said he likes to work out both the outline and the details of a novel in his head before writing, and that his ideas rarely arrive complete. They accumulate.
Many ideas are not generated in a sudden flash. However, they are like plants, growing slowly.
Liu Cixin, China Daily, 2015
That approach explains why the trilogy took about four years even though each individual book was drafted in a matter of months. The thinking was the real work. For the full breakdown of how he balanced concept work with a demanding job, see the full Liu Cixin writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- You don't have to quit. Liu wrote a landmark trilogy while employed full time.
- Protect your thinking time. His real work happened before he ever opened a draft.
- Let ideas grow. He treated concepts like slow-growing plants.
- Write steadily on the side. Years of consistent spare-time output added up to a career.