Writing medical fiction - It ain’t all “Grey’s Anatomy”

Greetings! After a long hiatus, I’m back to writing a blog, giving my perspective on my path from physician to author.

A great deal has happened since my last blog. I’ve gone into semi-retirement, giving me more time to focus on writing, and I finished my second medical thriller, “The Last”, recently published by World Castle Publishing.

For this blog, I’d like to reflect on my experiences writing the “medical” part of a medical thriller.

For one thing, neurologists (in particular, myself) tend to be very cerebral (pun intended).  As such, if left to my own I’d be inclined to get overly involved in medical details.  Now, this can be important when your target audience is medical professionals.  A writer needs to show his “medical props” to nurses, physicians, etc. if you’re going to convince them that you know what you’re talking about.  By and large, they have little difficulty understanding the Greek and Latin verbiage that are part and parcel of “medspeak”, as I like to call it.  However, I’ve found that TV and film medical dramas have more leeway than if it’s written down.

For example, Judy and I were big fans of the TV show New Amsterdam.  In it, there were frequent scenes, especially surgical operations or diagnostic procedures, where rapid-fire “medspeak” was used.  It wasn’t hard for me to follow but in the absence of a medical translator, I suspect most lay viewers let it all go in one ear and out the other, simply processing it all as “something exciting and life-threatening is happening”, and let it go at that.

That doesn’t happen when it’s all in black and white on paper.  Slogging through laborious details of anatomy and physiology will cause lay readers’ eyes to glaze over, and if they’re in the bookstore (or reading sample pages in an online book seller’s site) they’ll drop your book like the diastolic blood pressure in a patient with Gram negative septicemia (see what I mean!)

This is where I offer my advice to any budding author of medical fiction: make sure you’re married to someone outside the medical field!  Judy is wonderful at reading through a passage and giving me either a thumbs up or that special look of hers that tells me “I’d better tone it down a bit”.  After some back and forth negotiating, we can usually arrive at a balance where I feel comfortable with the accuracy and professionalism of the scene, and she feels that the reader can identify with what is happening without constantly running to Stedman’s Medical Dictionary.

“It would’ve been better if the bad guy was a dog, but other than that I give it 5 stars.”—Penelope

An Introduction to my Thoughts

For several years, family and friends have suggested I publish a blog about my writing experience, as a means of establishing myself in the community of writers, and perhaps encouraging others that are themselves contemplating becoming writers and authors.  I didn’t think that I would have anything to add that hasn’t already been stated by a slew of more experienced writers but, being introspective by nature, I now feel that it would be worthwhile to put down a few of my thoughts and experiences for those interested in beginning writing.

But first, full disclosure so you know if this blog will fit your needs: If you’re reading this on my website, you probably know my background.  I am a physician, specifically a neurologist, in practice in Tidewater, Virginia since 1982.  Since 1981 I have been married to the same wonderful woman, who shares my love of writing, and we have two grown married sons, one living in Richmond, Virginia and the other in Washington, DC (more about them in later blogs).  This means that I have a full-time day job (my wife would call it a full-time day AND night job) and I’m not dependent on writing to pay my bills.  In addition, my writing skills have basically been self-taught.  I took no creative writing, journalism or literature classes in college (certainly not in medical school), and so most of my writing skills have come from observations from pleasure reading, an occasional adult education class, and from “how-to” books about writing.  This is a cottage industry, and I recommend exploring these books on your own before putting pen to paper (or more likely fingers to keyboard).

I have written and published Brain Warp: A Medical Thriller” have just finished a second medical thriller, The Last, and I am currently seeking an agent to represent the manuscript.  Before I started writing, I read a few medical thrillers by well-known authors such as Michael Palmer and Robin Cook, but this was primarily to familiarize myself with the genre, keeping my exploratory reading to a minimum to avoid the tendency to become derivative, either at a conscious or subconscious level.

To summarize, I believe this blog would be of most interest to those budding authors with little or no formal experience in writing, who feel deeply that they have something significant to say, and are willing to put aside some of the pleasures and routines of daily life to get it done.  I have found writing to be an exhilarating, although sometimes frustrating, experience, but I learn from it every time I sit down at the keyboard.