Rekindling the Flame: How I Found My Way Back to Writing Fiction
by Lucia Tang
I wish I could say it started in the Bodleian. Before you can go into the reading room and page through Oxford’s oldest, rarest books, they make you swear not to “kindle therein any fire or flame.” You read the Bodleian Oath off a slip of laminated paper with a library staff member watching you, and it feels faintly ridiculous, but also solemn, like you’ve become a liegeman or a bride. They call it a vow of “allegiance,” as if literature itself were a sovereign nation, and they print it on tote bags and tea towels you can buy at the gift shop.
I can see why a reader would want to own a piece of that memory. Saying the words made me want to laugh nervously, and maybe I did, but I also felt transformed. That’s why I wish I could claim that I wrote the first few lines of a story there – because the inspiration lit up my brain like a tongue of flame, in that book-lined sanctum where no other fire was allowed.
It would make a good start, that my story opened itself to me just when I was opening a book from a century ago. The gentle turning motion of my hands scented the quiet space around me with the cloudy sweet smell of yellowed paper, which sparked off something in my mind, like a chemical reaction. That juxtaposition of the old and the new, the silence of the library and the loud mental crackle of creation: it’s just the sort of gesture that tends to get me as a reader – so obvious, but still so satisfying.
The truth is, I started writing again in an Airbnb, rented for the three nights I stayed in Oxford for dissertation research. After sitting all day in the Bodleian – flipping through hundreds of pages and mashing the camera button on my phone – my back hurt, and my wrists, and even the outer edges of my hands, where the pinky finger joined the palm. But I turned my sore wrists and aching hands to my keyboard again anyway.
The room, which I took for roughly $20 a night, was a bus ride away from the Bodleian. The review I left calls it “spacious and comfortable” and says I’d come back if I were ever in the area again. But I don’t remember anything about it, not the color or the shape of the bed where I unfolded my stiff limbs and started typing. My mind, I guess, was elsewhere – roaming from the library reading room, to the blinking pain strung along my hands, to the story I was just beginning to write. It was my first piece of fiction in nine years.
I wrote my last story in 2008, when I was a high school junior in Texas who wanted, someday, to be a writer. I turned out baby journalism on the yearbook staff and chased trophies in a statewide literary criticism competition, which I “trained” for by reading the 600-page Handbook to Literature cover to cover, again and again, as I stood in the cafeteria lunch-line. But in my free time, I read Tamora Pierce and Orson Scott Card and short stories from the Nebula Awards showcases. I wanted to do that kind of writing: science fiction and fantasy. This was around the heyday of Christopher Paolini, the teen king of dragon novels, so it already felt almost too late for me; I would never be a prodigy. But I tried my hand at writing fantasy anyway, because it was interesting – more interesting, anyway, than thinking about AP tests and college application essays.
My first attempt was a short story about two teens, a healer and a prophet, who meet at a state-sponsored school of magic. I gave my protagonists old-fashioned, Germanic names as a gesture towards high fantasy worldbuilding and sent it off to Teen Ink, a website that still showcases work by young writers. The editors restructured my story and swapped out my pretentious title – I think it was “Eleven Winter Fugues” – with the more straightforward “The Healer.” But they published it. At the time, it felt like the start of something: I couldn’t know it would be the only story I wrote for years.
I’m still proud of “The Healer”. Not because my work, at 17, was anything more than promising – but because it was proof that, at one point, I could reach into my imagination and pull out some prose. When I applied for an internship at Reedsy, a talent marketplace for publishing professionals, I attached the link as a “writing sample”, along with my long-defunct beauty and travel blogs.
That must have raised some eyebrows, if anyone noticed the pub date. But I felt like I didn’t have much of a choice – I’d stopped writing fiction. My yearbook staffing and Handbook to Literature reading helped get me into Yale, where I got busy: learning to read in a spirit of critique instead of admiration, learning to write in the precise but often colorless language of academe. And after four years of not writing creatively, the grooves in my brain felt set into a routine of semicolon-studded sentences and Chicago style. I went straight to Berkeley for a PhD in premodern Chinese history – and more non-creative writing.
But one day in Oxford, in a room of uncertain shape and color, I started again. I opened my laptop to take notes on the text I’d spent all day photographing, in hopes of corralling it into a dissertation. Instead, I typed out a sentence about a world that never existed. And another. And another. A story started to take shape, about a place that was and wasn’t the premodern China I studied. I took a break to email a friend, another student of my advisor doing his own dissertation research in Beijing, saying I’d “started messing around with writing fiction again, with a protagonist who's like Sima Qian, if Sima Qian were Paris Hilton,” referring to the Han-dynasty father of traditional Chinese historiography.
Turns out, it’s never too late after all. The key is to remember the joy that writing once sparked, like promising allegiance to the sovereign nation of literature, even when that feels like a silly thing to do. Because when you stop writing for degrees or praise or bylines, you can start writing for something better – you.
Lucia Tang is a PhD student in Chinese history at UC Berkeley. She also writes on genre fiction for Reedsy, which was kind enough to take her on despite the absurd age of her writing sample; and she blogs about history books here.