During yesterday’s community time at the middle school, author Kyla Zhao spoke about the process of writing her third book, “May the Best Player Win,” one of the entries in the lower school’s annual Tournament of Books.
Born and raised in Singapore, Zhao moved to the United States at 18 to attend Stanford, where she studied psychology and media, writing her graduate thesis on influencer marketing. After a stint in the fashion industry, where she wrote for Vogue, she moved into the tech industry.
In “May the Best Player Win” (the first draft of which was written in November 2020 as part of National Novel Writing Month), the main character sets out to prove that girls can be just as good at chess as boys by making a bet with a rival player; whoever wins will captain the chess team at the national finals. Zhao drew from her own life as a young chess player. She began playing at six, being taught by her grandfather, and became good enough to be selected as a member of Singapore’s National Junior Squad.
Despite being a 1,500-year-old game, Zhao pointed out, chess is “still very much dominated by men,” she said. “I was always one of the only girls in chess club, always one of the only girls in competition,” she further explained. “I would hear things like, ‘Girls are not aggressive enough to play chess, girls are too emotional to play chess, girls are too timid.’”
Taking the students through the process of writing the book, Zhao said that the book went through eight drafts before reaching the editing stage, including individual line edits and copy edits, which took another year before the book was ready for publication.
Zhao also offered students advice on how to become writers themselves, even if they doubted their own ability or interest. “When I was your age, I just thought that I was not creative enough. I could never come up with any original ideas of my own,” she said, adding that because she didn’t enjoy composing essays, she believed she didn’t enjoy writing in the first place.
Story ideas, she said, can be found in seemingly insignificant stories from one’s own life: “If your friends do something funny, or if your dad says something funny, that could be a book idea.”
They can also come from paying attention to other media such as movies and music, and by going to museums. Inspiration for Zhao’s upcoming book, “Heirs of Infamy,” arrived during a 2022 visit to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “You never know when an idea might just strike you,” she said.
