The Anatomy and Chemistry of an Idea: How Inspiration Becomes Story. Christina Li on the writing of The Manor of Dreams . . .
One question I get a lot as a writer is how I come up with my ideas. I’ve always puzzled over how to answer this question. But around a year ago or so, I was reading about author Lauren Groff describing how she likens the process of developing a story idea as nuclear fusion — the collision of creative energy to produce narrative force. Immediately I thought, this is it.
The process varies per writer, of course, for but me, ideas don’t come to me fully formed. More often times than not, I often get small kernels of story inspiration over the process of year. An inclination, a need to say something, a topic that fascinates me. These story threads all hang out and simmer in some corner of my brain. They are quite dormant.
And then there comes a day where there is a catalyst — one last story thread, one theme, one idea that brings these threads crashing into one another, and finally, it becomes a capital-I Idea, and this Idea becomes very alive. And very urgent. I feel a very physical reaction — I get these full-body chills, my heart rate goes up, it’s like the feeling of a train thundering past me.
For my latest novel, The Manor of Dreams, I’ve always wanted to write a sprawling, multigenerational novel. There is something so narratively potent about the dynasties of families, about the cyclical patterns of virtue and downfall. I had a period of time in which I was reading a lot of the once grand, now empty houses of the titans of the Gilded Age of America, this period of the nineteenth century when an unprecedented technological growth and acquisition of resources led to wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few extremely wealthy individuals known as robber barons. They built houses that were gorgeous, sprawling estates with a staggering amount of rooms. I started researching estates in general, around the world. I read an article about poison gardens in England at this one estate. That idea fascinated me — that a whole garden can be poisonous, that flowers so beautiful can be deadly.
Around the same time, I came across a piece about Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, and how she forged a trailblazing career for herself throughout the twentieth century despite prejudices and marginalizations in the industry.
I filed all of that away in the back of my mind. These threads were humming with potential, but dormant. Waiting, I think, for the catalyst, for the right moment.
I remember the moment the catalyst came. I was taking an Asian American Art history course during my last year at university. My professor was talking about the founder of the university, and how he amassed a huge amount of wealth from building railroads through America, partly through the exploitation of Chinese immigrant labor. He witheld from them fair wages and safe working conditions. But this founder also led a quite tragic life; he lost his only son, and built this university in his honor. I walked out of that class a little dazed, and looked around me, at this beautiful buildings that I now knew held such a conflicted origin story, and knew I wanted to write about this feeling.
Just as sure as a scientific reaction, this collided into all of the disparate threads I had in the back of my mind and brought them to life. The Manor of Dreams is about a lot of things: Hollywood, an inheritance battle, a spooky house with a poisonous garden, generational cycles of silence — but they are all tied together by the questions I was wondering after I walked out of that college lecture. What is the moral price of achieving the American Dream, if it comes with a conflicted past? How could that spectre of wealth and decadence haunt the narrative?
One of the things that used to bother me was when writers say their ideas come from everywhere. It seemed like the least helpful advice I could get. But I have found this to be true. What I have come to realize, though, four books in, is that ideas don’t need to be ready the moment they come to you. If I point to the moment my idea became a story, they would be individual occurrences. But if I point to the origin of my ideas, they go years back. These small bits of inspiration can stay with you days, months years. Waiting for the impetus, the spark. Waiting for the right questions to bring them to life.
(c) Christina Li
Author photograph (c) Therese Santiago
About The Manor of Dreams:
At night, the garden comes alive… Mexican Gothicmeets The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo in Christina Li’s completely addictive and beautifully haunting gothic page-turner.
Vivian Yin is dead. The trailblazing starlet was the first Chinese actress to win an Oscar - but at what should have been the peak of her career, she became a recluse. The rest of her life was shrouded in mystery…
Now, her daughters gather for the reading of her will. They expect to inherit their childhood home: a grand Southern California manor house with a sprawling, labyrinthine garden. But due to a last-minute change to the will, the house is passed on to another family instead. The two families haven’t seen each other for decades – not since the tragedy that fractured all of their lives.
Vying for the estate, both families move into the crumbling, vine-covered manor. As Vivian’s daughters race to piece together what happened in the last weeks of their mother’s life, they soon discover they are being haunted by something far more sinister and vengeful than just their memories.
After so many years of silence, will the families finally confront the truth behind the house’s origins and the last, tragic summer they spent there? Or will the manor of dreams – and its deadly secrets – finally lay claim to its owners?
The Manor of Dreams by Christina Li is published in hardback at £22 by Dialogue Books on 8 May 2025.
Order your copy of The Manor of Dreams online here.
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