We were lucky to catch up with Rebecca Anne Nguyen recently and have shared our conversation below.

Rebecca Anne, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

I had no business writing a novel. As a writer, I had written everything but fiction: memoir, essays, all sorts of nonfiction, as well as theatrical works like stage plays and screenplays. But I’d never written so much as a short story. The real world interested me too much, and I felt like I wanted to tell real stories about real people, including myself.

Then I went through a difficult divorce and real life became unbearable to face. I needed an escape, but I was a newly single parent with two young children, and my options for escape were limited to what I could do at home, alone, after the kids were asleep. When drinking too much wine and bingeing too much Outlander did nothing to mend my broken heart, I tried to write my way out of heartbreak. But the last thing I wanted to write about was my reality.

Instead, I built a fictional world that was infinitely better than my own. I created characters I wanted to spend time with, and gave them problems that were preferable to my own. Working on the book was a balm, almost an addiction. It ferried me through a dark time in my life and helped me heal.

Being a beginner fiction writer made me humble, and I was more open to seeking feedback and learning from writers and teachers who were experts in a world I knew little about. It took five years of hard work and creative failures, but I was determined to finish, and in 2024, my debut novel was published by Castle Bridge Media. It won the Reader’s Choice Award for Best Adult Novel (Bronze), and the audiobook of the novel has been nominated for an Audie Award alongside Salman Rushdie and Whoopi Goldberg. I am astounded by these successes (I am astounded I finished the book at all), and I’m glad I allowed myself to take such a creative risk. I learned that it’s okay to be bad at something when you first attempt it, and that hardly anyone achieves the best they’re capable of creatively without a ton of hard work and humility. I also learned that I didn’t need anyone’s permission to write a novel. That’s one of the things I love most about writing—no one can stop me!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a novelist, memoirist, and playwright based in Milwaukee, WI. My background is in theatre, and I started my career as an actor. When I was living in Los Angeles, I started writing professionally—short films, screenplays I produced and starred in, then freelance writing for blogs and magazines.

I spent a year traveling in Asia, and during that time I started a travel blog and wrote a travel memoir that (thankfully) never saw the light of day. Then I got a chance to co-write my brother’s memoir when he got a publishing contract with New World Library. The book was about his 2,700-mile journey walking across America to heal from the wounds of war following his service in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Besides being an incredibly rewarding creative experience that brought us closer as siblings, that project sparked my love of long form. I loved working on the same story for years at a time and seeing how it changed and evolved as its author and the world changed and evolved.

I tackled fiction next, publishing my debut novel, The 23rd Hero, in 2024. During the five years I spent on that book, I took a break to revisit my theatrical roots and wrote a stage play, a neurodivergent romantic comedy called Hypotheticals.

Some people have commented on the erratic, even disjointed nature of the work I produce, which is apparent when looking at my eclectic resume. (What does a military memoir have to do with a time travel romance have to do with Autism?) While my work might look wildly different from project to project, there are common themes throughout. I don’t necessarily consider myself a romance writer, but I do write primarily about romantic love. I gravitate toward characters who feel different or othered from mainstream society, often because they have a special gift or ability the world desperately needs. And my work incorporates as much humor and hope as I can muster. In my fiction especially, I don’t write about the world as it is. I write about the world as I wish it was.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

American culture is obsessed with youth, celebrity, genius, and speed. These obsessions are damaging to artists because it teaches us (falsely) that any ability worth having a) comes easily, b) comes quickly, and c) results in fame. Reality for 99% of creatives looks nothing like the picture of the artist that we fetishize. So if you’re an actor who’s not a household name, or a writer without a six-figure publishing contract before you’ve even left grad school, it’s easy to feel like a failure. Which is absurd.

I had so many limiting beliefs that I trace back to this broader cultural belief system. I believed that if I really had talent, I’d be fantastic at whatever I was attempting the first time I tried it, with little to no instruction. I believed I had to succeed while I was still in my 20s or it would never happen (or if it happened “too late,” it wouldn’t “count”). I believed I had to make a living from my art, and that to hold a ‘real’ job meant I was a hack and a failure. Writing fiction for the first time shattered all of these beliefs.

My early drafts of my novel were putrid. Cringeworthy. Terrible. But I was fortunate to meet others writers in workshops and to read their early drafts, and I realized that hardly anyone creates a work of genius in a flurry of inspiration like we see in the movies. Writers are like excavators. We skim the surface of our stories, then go deeper and deeper with every draft until we find that bedrock of truth. “Good” is not what you achieve in a caffeine flurry of activity over the course of days or weeks. It’s the result of discipline plus time. The real talent is withstanding the discomfort of knowing your story sucks right now, and having faith that if you keep chipping away, you’ll find the angel in the marble waiting to be set free.

Working a full-time, corporate writing job was what allowed me the peace of mind to write my novel (there’s nothing that saps my creativity like worrying whether I’ll be able to pay rent). I attended writing workshops where my teachers were novelists at the top of their field—Pulitzer nominees and National Book Award winners. Guess what? Every one of them had a job of some sort. They were brilliant and successful, and even they needed a way to pay their bills. It didn’t make them any less successful in their creative careers. It’s simply a reflection of the culture we live in and how that culture values (or devalues) the arts.

I didn’t start writing fiction until I was 38 years old. And I wrote slowly. Where some authors talk about cranking out a novel in six months, mine took five years, which I’ve since learned from other novelists is not that long at all.

Youth, celebrity, genius, and speed. If you have them, go forth and collect your paycheck! But if you don’t, it doesn’t mean something is lacking. And it definitely doesn’t mean the world doesn’t need your art.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I wish I had read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron when I was in my early 20s. I didn’t discover it for another ten years, and then it took me three attempts to complete the coursework in the book. But once I did, I wrote a novel I didn’t know I had in me. The exercises in the book, which include journaling and taking yourself on ‘artist dates’ to places that feed and inspire you, are deceptively powerful. As I went through the 12-week, self-guided course, I reflected on past experiences that had hurt me as an artist—unkind words from a teacher or classmate, limiting beliefs I had absorbed from other blocked artists. It freed me to take creative risks, and it made me feel like my creative impulses were valid. It takes audacity to be an artist and a certain confidence that what you’re creating has value. I recommend this book and Cameron’s work to everyone. I even dedicated my novel to her!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rebeccaannenguyen.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rebeccanwrites/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebeccanwrites
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccanwrites/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@rebeccanwrites

Image Credits

@refinerymke