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