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How Nury Vittachi writes
Posted: 6 Oct 2008

Once upon a time, there was a man who went to sleep every night and dreamt he was a butterfly. One day, a remarkable thought struck him: maybe he was a butterfly who went to sleep every day and dreamt he was a man.

To me, that ancient Chinese tale sums up the secret of creating fiction. We all live in two worlds. One is the outside world of alarm clocks and commuter journeys and electricity bills. The other is the world inside our heads, which is full of fantasies, emotions, random thoughts – and a very powerful tool called imagination.

To write a novel, you have to put on your swimming trunks, place your finger and thumb over your nose, and dive deep, deep, deep into that second world. You have to immerse yourself in your mind's Mariana Trench, and live there until you are in a lucid dream: until you can see the finest textures on every surface, you can hear the faintest echo of a dog barking in the distance, and you can feel the lightest of breezes on your skin. Once you're settled, you then have to seek out and interview the people who will eventually star in your stories.

Other writers talk at length about the pros and cons of using keyboards or fountain pens or getting a desk in a log cabin with a view of the sea. These things are completely immaterial, in my view. The creative process doesn't happen when you record your story, but long before that. Your first job is to find the motherlode of creativity.

You don't need a pen or a keyboard or a nice desk: they're just distractions. There's only one absolutely essential item for a writer, and that is a park bench. You go there and you sit on it. You focus on the middle distance. You become God. You create the world. You create people.

The truth about dreams is that they are fully formed worlds as valid as this one. To write, you have to be sitting in that place, seeing with your eyes closed. Your novel or screenplay is a story that plays in your head. Sometimes you are an active God, steering events. Sometimes you are a detached one, spying on characters who cannot help but fulfill their intrinsic destinies. Sometimes you are a desperate one, running after them, saying, stop, stop, you can't do that.

Once you're in that world, you have to find the cast. When you create fictional human beings, you have to check CVs carefully, and ask a million questions. Act as if you are interviewing them for a really important job—because, if you think about it, that is what you're doing. "So what are you going to be doing in five years? Starring in a sequel?"

I teach creative writing at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, so I have vast amounts of interaction with people who are struggling to write a great novel or screenplay. These days, young people are so swamped with poor quality, under-imagined fiction in movies, games, and television shows, that their own imagination withers and dies.

Yet it's our imagination which is the key to all our creativity. I tell my students that the first step to writing a powerful story is to go home, pick up the television set, and defenestrate it. And, to return to the subject of Chinese tradition, flinging your TV out of the window is a classic Hong Kong tradition in itself.

Nury Vittachi is a Hong Kong-based author whose works are published internationally. His latest work is Wicked Christmas, illustrated by Harry Harrison, a "wickedly" entertaining Christmas satire with a traditional and politically correct happy ending.