Michelle T. King

How did you become a writer? Byproduct of being a professional historian! We are required to write in academia for our livelihood. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Dorothy Duff Brown (the late, great writing guru of Berkeley, who gave advice on how to get it done), Advice to New Faculty Members by Robert Boice (invaluable for figuring out how to get writing done in small bits)

When and where do you write? In the mornings first thing, if I can manage it. Always keep to the same best brain time if you can. I write on my laptop in an Ikea Poang chair. 

What are you working on now? Having just spent the last ten years researching and writing my book, Chop Fry Watch Learn, I'm now just doing small projects, with new ideas for some articles. Making room for the next big idea!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? No, not really. The best antidote to writer's block is to write. Even if it's garbage, just writing ideas down will clear the way for better ideas to follow. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Lots of great advice, but of late the idea of a Zero Draft. Just dumping all ideas, questions, quotes, ramblings into a single file and just getting everything in the brain on the page. Also, the idea that you cannot simultaneously Write and Edit. You have to let the creative juices flow for generative writing; editing should be treated as a different stage that cannot occur at the same time. Forgot where I learned that though, maybe in Boice?

What’s your advice to new writers? Figure out the best time of day that you work and treat that as sacred. Touch the project every day—the longer you are away from a project, the harder it is to get back into it. I think Robert Caro had some kind of word count goal. But you have to treat it like a humdrum job and do it daily, not just thinking of writing during moments of inspiration. 

Michelle T. King is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender and food history. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars grant for Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (W. W. Norton, 2024). King is a co-editor of Modern Chinese Foodways (MIT Press, forthcoming), editor of Culinary Nationalism in Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and editor of a special issue of Global Food History (Summer 2020) on culinary regionalism in China. She is author of Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Food and Foodways, Global Food History, Gastronomica, Journal of Women’s History, Social History, and other publications.