How Did Julie Zhuo Get Into Writing?

Julie Zhuo says going home to write every night is probably how she got into her writing practice. She joined Facebook as a designer and an engineer and honestly was not sure she was going to succeed in the profession. If it did not work, she needed a plan B, and the plan B was to be a novelist.

In the first four or five years, after she came back from Facebook, she worked on a novel on the side. She thinks of the novels as an insurance policy of sorts. She has four unpublished young adult novels. She sent them to a bunch of agents, and they were all summarily rejected. She looks back and agrees the novels actually suck. She turned out to be a better designer and technology builder than a novelist. She went home every night and wrote, trying to keep a side thing going if the career did not work. She did four novels with the same practice, and the work stayed secret.