The completely unscientific, slightly absurd and possibly magical process of writing a novel
by Melanie Cheng
When a sparrow once rested on the windowsill of my grandfather’s home in Hong Kong, there was no doubt in his mind that it was the spirit of Hung Yuk, his daughter, who died from meningitis during the Japanese occupation. I spoke to her, he informed us later, but of course she didn’t speak back. This was just one of many tales of ghostly visitations during my childhood and adolescence—supernatural encounters my mum and I lovingly called Joy Luck Club moments.
I consider myself a scientific person. I work in the field of medicine. I believe in cause and effect, null hypotheses and the persuasive power of a p-value. But I also love ghost stories, and this love has a long history. When I was in year 7, I brought homemade Ouija boards to school and encouraged friends to communicate with spirits during recess and lunch (thrillingly, someone always moved the glass, someone always turned off the lights, and someone always screamed and so we were never disappointed). But that was just the beginning of what would become a lifelong—if often secret—preoccupation with the supernatural and the unexplained.
In Charlotte Wood’s book, The Luminous Solution, about creativity, she devotes an entire chapter to gods and ghosts. She writes about how her Catholic upbringing alerted her to ‘the unseen, the ghostly and the imaginative spirit’. She finishes the chapter by describing her sense that ‘redemptive meaning shimmers somewhere beyond our reach, in a reality possible just outside our own. It’s gods or ghosts who are in possession of the mighty stuff of art, and we have to wrestle them for it. We only ever glimpse it fleetingly, but we long for it nonetheless.’
I recall the reaction of my husband (not a regular reader of fiction) after finishing my first book, Australia Day: ‘you’ve taken things from our life and you’ve given them meaning, made them poetic’. Certainly, in that euphoric haze that arrives on completing a work of art, it is tempting to luxuriate—even if only briefly—in the idea that the artwork is not only a culmination of everything that has transpired in one’s life up until that point (possibly true) but that the universe is taking some active role in the production of it (frankly ridiculous).
Take the rabbit, a key character in my latest novel, The Burrow. Now that the book is written, I see references to it everywhere. My favourite book as a child was Watership Down, Richard Adams’ tale about a band of rabbits on a quest to establish a thriving warren. My favourite piece of music to play on the piano during primary school, provided by my favourite teacher Mrs Marshall, was Bright Eyes—the Art Garfunkel song written for the animated version of Watership Down, which was itself released in 1978, the same year I was born. The Chinese year of the rabbit has marked many of the significant moments in my life: 1999, the year I met the man who would become my husband; 2011, the year my daughter was born; 2023, the year I sold my third book, The Burrow, inspired by the pet our family adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was, of course, a rabbit. Many writers have similar eerie stories about their own work.
The rational part of me says: these are all events and details selected for their significance. I could just have easily chosen the date of my wedding, or the publication year of my book, but these dates wouldn’t have suited my hypothesis. My method in this instance is completely biased and unscientific. And yet, the ghost-story-loving part of me wonders: perhaps there is some kind of cosmic connection between me and rabbits.
In The Burrow, the characters struggle with these questions too. The father, Jin, declares that he is a man of reason! and science! As such, he does not subscribe to the bad luck associated with the number four, which in Mandarin and Cantonese sounds similar to the word for death. But in secret, he is prone to magical thinking—a belief that if he throws something away, he will invite even more ill fortune into his life. Similarly, Amy, the mother—a writer and staunch atheist—scolds her daughter for praying, and yet later, in a moment of softness, asks her: ‘Does it work?’
Human beings (and the fictional characters inspired by them) are creatures of wild contradiction. I love scientific method—the neat logic, controlled conditions, reproducibility and predictability of it all—but I also love magic and mystery. I enjoy a reprieve from the enormous burden of knowing that every action creates an equal and opposite reaction; that every behaviour has known and unknown consequences. Perhaps most importantly, I love those shimmers of redemptive meaning amidst the otherwise random cruelty of the universe. Books give me that. Whether it be through the act of reading or the act of writing, fiction satisfies my yearning for the sublime. I am still that child who loved a good ghost story, but now, instead of making a Ouija board, I lay my hands on the keyboard and type.
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Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. She was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2016 and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2018. Room for a Stranger, her highly acclaimed first novel, was published in 2019.
