Yulin Kuang on romance debut, book adaptations and tropes

Writer/director Yulin Kuang’s debut “How to End a Love Story” is available April 9. (Images courtesy of Harper Collins)

Thirteen years after her sister’s funeral, Helen Zhang is living every writer’s dream. She’s a bestselling author, her YA series, “Ivy Papers,” gets a TV adaptation, and she’s going to be in the writer’s room. Unfortunately, so is Grant Shepherd, a guy from high school she’s never been able to forgive for the tragic accident that linked their lives forever. 

In writer/director Yulin Kuang’s debut romance, “How to End a Love Story,” Helen and Grant are forced to work together. Unpacking the past, Helen and Grant try to move toward the future, or at least, toward not fighting in the writer’s room. 

“How to End a Love Story” is available April 9. Kuang sat down with SPRHDRS to talk about the book, the “People We Meet on Vacation” adaptation, and describing books based on their tropes. 

Tell me about the inspiration for “How to End a Love Story.”

I wanted to write a contemporary romance that felt like a historical romance novel.

Everything else I was working on at the time was an adaptation of something — and [to] be clear, I am living my dream job. However, I had this moment of like, “Do I have anything original left within me?” It was October, and NaNoWriMo was in the air. I just wanted to write something where the thing I had at the end was the art rather than the blueprint to making something. 

It took me a month [to write], but it took me two years to edit it. I was drafting in kind of a fugue state where I would wake up at 5 a.m., write until 10 a.m., and then from 10 to like 4 or 5 p.m. I would work on “People We Meet on Vacation,” and then from 5 p.m. to, like, midnight, I would go back to the book. I just did that every single day except on the weekends when I would just, like, work on the book. And at the end of the month, I had a novel, but that was kind of a very unique experience I have not been able to repeat. 

I'm really interested in what you said about a contemporary romance that feels like a historical romance. What are the feelings you wanted to emulate?

I feel like historical romances often have life and death stakes in a way where it's like, he wants to destroy her family because her father did something to his dad. And then he's like, I'm gonna ruin you. But then he falls in love with her instead. And for some reason, that's really appealing to me. 

I'd be remiss not to ask you about the adaptation of Emily Henry's books. I feel like there's always a lot of pressure to adapt something that so many people love so much. How’s it going?

It's going. I'm juggling a couple of deadlines right now. I remember watching all of the websites that were tracking news of my favorite books being adapted back in the day and foaming at the mouth, wondering if they were going to destroy my childhood. So I empathize with anybody who is tracking my current movements with that lens. 

I am very aware how much these books mean to people. They mean a lot to me too. I want to do them justice, but I will also say that my loyalty is to the screen adaptation because I think that if you are too loyal to the source material, then you're potentially setting yourself up to fail what I think is the true purpose of adaptation, which is to introduce new audiences to the original source material.

I don't go into it hoping to please every book fan because they will always have the books. What I am trying to do is thrust the heart of the story and what I love about it in front of new eyeballs, and hopefully make them fall in love with it in a different format. And eventually, like if they love it, they'll go back to the source material.

A social media trend I’ve noticed from the last few years has been like talking about and marketing books based off of their tropes. How do you feel about that? And how do you feel about your own work being talked about in this way? 

I'm aware that some people really don't like that, but I don't mind it so much. When I was crafting the novel, I did this exercise with myself where I wrote down the lizard brain level tropes I am just drawn to. And I kind of look at those tropes as my spice cabinet as if I'm cooking something up. This is the cabinet. I'm going to put a dash of forced proximity here. I'm going to put like two tablespoons of star-crossed lovers there. 

In terms of how it gets talked about, it's kind of interesting to me to see what people are getting out of it. It's kind of like boiling it down. I am a daughter of scientists, and one of the first home experiments I ever did was I boiled off some soy sauce to see what crystallized at the bottom because those were essential ingredients. Right? And I feel like when people on social media are [talking about tropes], they're kind of doing that. They're boiling off everything and they're seeing what's left — the base level tropes. There is something interesting about what people are repeatedly drawn to. 

I can also see how when we talk about art, that's not necessarily where you want the conversation to end. But are we really trying to have conversations about art on social media or is that mostly a marketing tool?

Toward the beginning of the book, Helen talks about being a young, female, Asian writer and getting approached/cold emailed for advice by others who wanted to follow in her footsteps. At first, she answered every request, but as she got more successful, it got to be too much. There’s something so real about that. Do you have any advice/light posts for the young, female, Asian writers out there? 

There's this expression: “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation” that I found helpful. There are a lot of things outside of my control, and if I focus too much on those things, I'll be driven to slow madness. So instead, I focus on getting my ducks in a row so that should the opportunity ever rise, I can take advantage.