The facts of being a fiction-writing chemist

For some students, an attraction of studying chemistry is that there’s not too much writing involved. While experiments have to be written up, there’s not the same requirement for writing countless interminable essays as in disciplines such as history and psychology.

But not all chemists share these feelings. For some, the love of writing even goes beyond reporting results or reviewing the scientific literature. They enjoy writing fictional stories. Some enjoy writing them so much that they leave chemistry behind entirely to become professional writers and novelists. But chemistry often doesn’t leave them behind, finding its way into their writing in a variety of ways.

For Weike Wang, a writer based in New York, US, the influence of chemistry has been quite explicit – the title of her first novel, published in 2017, is Chemistry. A coming-of-age story about a young chemistry student at a university in Boston who must juggle the demands of both her academic career and her personal life, it won several literary awards and is currently being optioned for a feature film by Amazon Studios.

The story was partly inspired by Wang’s own experiences studying chemistry as an undergraduate at Harvard University. ‘It’s a lot of fictionalisation of things that I’ve seen,’ she says. She wrote Chemistry as her thesis for a master’s degree in creative writing that she took at Boston University, which she did at the same time as pursuing a doctorate in public health at Harvard University.

‘I think I went into creative writing sort of accidentally,’ she says. ‘It’s something that I feel passionate about and wanted to explore, but it’s so hard to get into that field.’ Her break came when her mentor at Boston University showed Chemistry to an editor at a major publisher. ‘I was incredibly lucky in that regard.’

She is now working on her second novel, about a doctor working in an intensive care unit, partly inspired by her background in public health. Both novels contain quite a bit of science and scientific explanation, although the science sometimes appears in unconventional ways.