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750+ emails.  That’s how many I found waiting for me when I got home last night from the UK. Of course many of them are spam, but still.  That’s a load of email to answer, and I’ve spent most of today trying to whittle down the list.

My book tour in the UK was a blast.  It reminded me yet again that my publisher there, Transworld, is one of the best in the world.  It’s a small enough house so that it feels like a close-knit family, and everyone, from editorial to publicity to sales, seems to have a personal stake in the success of every title they publish.  These aren’t just bean-counters; these people love books. 

For the first three days of my tour, I traveled to Birmingham, then to Manchester, and then to Cambridge.  That’s a lot of driving, but much of it was through beautiful countryside.  I was pleased that each event had a pretty good turnout — around 40 to 60 people.  I’ve discovered that UK crowds tend to be a lot shyer about asking questions.  In the US, people aren’t afraid to raise their hands.  As an author, I really hope for those questions, because they often remind me of things I’d forgotten to say.  Or they open up other interesting subjects that aren’t part of my planned talk. 

My trip also reminded me of how important non-bookstore outlets are for book sales in the UK.  Even before my books officially went on sale in the bookstores, both THE MEPHISTO CLUB and VANISH had already gone on sale in grocery/supermarket chains, and just on the basis of those supermarket sales alone, both books hit the London Times top-ten bestseller lists (MEPHISTO CLUB AT #2 and VANISH at #4) their very first week.  The lesson here?  If your book isn’t picked up by Tesco’s stores, it has almost no chance of making it onto the bestseller lists.

I also encountered the deep discounting that bookstores must resort to, to be competitive.   Nowhere in the U.S. do you find 50% discounts on brand-new bestsellers.  In the UK, readers expect them.   Yet it means that bookstores can’t make a profit on the very titles they know they’ll sell a lot of.  Many independents, for instance, lost money on Harry Potter sales, because they were discounting so deeply that they slashed away all their profits and more.  Such deep discounting is great for authors, since we get our royalty no matter what, and it means a lot more people buy our books.  But surely the stores suffer.

Touring in the UK is so much more civilized than in the U.S.  First, you always get the weekends off, since no stores host weekend events.  The distances traveled are shorter, so there isn’t the rush to get to yet another airport in the morning, the way there is here at home.  My US tours sometimes seem to be marathon endurance races.  Up at five AM for the airport.  Roll into bed exhausted at 10 PM.  Repeat the next day, and the next, and the next, until you’re too tired to see straight.  

In the UK, they love their business lunches.  And they actually drink wine and eat dessert at lunch.  I can’t remember the last time I saw that happen in New York, where everyone’s watching their weight and no one orders wine at lunch — because they all have to rush back to their desks.  In so many ways, UK publishing seems like what publishing used to be: a genteel and civilized profession, just as much about the books as it is about making money. 

This was supposed to be a really quick blog — all those emails are still awaiting me — so for now I’ll leave you with a link to a terrific article about how to end your novel.  I’ve got lots more to post about later! 

Or maybe you know way too much.

In the comments section earlier, Daisy wrote: 

“I’m a biologist (okay, research associate at a biotech company, but that’s a lot of words for “what do you do”) and I have never managed to write a decent story in a scientific setting because I keep getting hung up on the details and the need to explain what everything is.”

Her problem is not unique.  As I’ve mentioned before, I teach an annual course for doctors who want to become novelists, and one of the most common problems they have is “explainitis.”  They know too much and they want to tell you everything.  So they do. 

Readers don’t WANT to know the intricacies of the Krebs cycle.  They don’t want to know the biochemistry of digitalis.  They just want to know how these things affect the character they love.  Yes, you have to include enough detail to make the setting and the story accurate.  You have to use enough jargon to make your character sound like he really is a doctor or a biochemist.  But in the end, it’s not the technical stuff that will be interesting.

It’s the characters.

I find that aspiring novelists who are highly educated or intensely cerebral have trouble understanding what makes popular culture tick.  They’re good at writing elegant phrases that have no emotional content.  They think that anything else smacks of melodrama, and good heavens, that’s like watching that horrid Jerry Springer!

Well, imagine this.  You’re sitting in Starbucks, and the couple at the table to your left is having a deep discussion about the merits of Proust.  And the couple on your right is arguing about the affair that one of them is having.  Which couple would you listen to?

There’s a reason Jerry Springer was so popular.

No matter how unusual your occupation, no matter how much you know about quarks and ion propulsion and string theory, if your novel isn’t at heart about people and their conflicts with each other, then it’s not going to hold our attention.  Yeah, string theory may be interesting — but how does it affect the lives of John and Jane Doe? 

A lot of us don’t have what could be called “interesting” jobs.  Some of us have downright boring jobs.  But we do know what it’s like to grow up, to argue with our parents, to fall in love, to care about a cause that’s bigger than ourselves.  We know what it’s like to lose someone. 

We know what it’s like to be human.

And really, that’s all you need to know to write a book.

Every so often, I’ll get a letter from an aspiring novelist and it’ll go something like this:  “I want to write mysteries, but I’m not in the medical field, and I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know anything about police work.  I’m just a (teacher/housewife/salesclerk) so I don’t know what I’d write about.”

Well, let me tell you about my own life.

For years, I had two careers.  By day I was a doctor.  But in the evening, I’d clear off the dinner table and take out my typewriter and I’d turn into a novelist.  Did I write medical thrillers?  Nope.  I wrote love stories.  I wrote about spies and cops and newspaper reporters.  I wrote about Vietnam vets and English gentlemen and cat burglars.  Oh yeah, I did write about a doctor here and there, but that was the exception.

Mostly, I wrote about other professions.  Professions that I thought were a lot more interesting than mine. 

What? you may ask.  Medicine’s fascinating!  It’s life and death!  But the truth is, when it’s your job, you forget that outsiders find it fascinating.  You just go to work every morning, do a few physicals, maybe save a life here and there, and then you go home and cook dinner.  Ho hum.  Any profession, when it’s yours, starts to feel ordinary.

I remember hearing an account of a space shuttle landing.  The President was there, along with his Secret Service entourage, to greet the returning astronauts.  After all the formalities were over, the astronauts crowded around the Secret Service guys because they wanted to know all about their exciting jobs protecting the President.  And the Secret Service guys were anxious to hear about the astronauts’ far more exciting jobs in space.  Each group  thought the OTHER GUYS had the more interesting life.

That’s the way it is with doctors, too. We think that lawyers live in exciting John Grisham novels while we’re stuck in hospitals poking our fingers into unsavory orifices. 

It wasn’t until I finally got around to writing my first medical thriller, HARVEST, that I realized my job might actually be interesting to other people.  My literary agent gave me a tip that I’ve since taken to heart:  “Readers want to know secrets.  They want to know what only you can tell them.  The things doctors don’t want outsiders to know, the lurid tales from behind the OR doors.  You may think these details are all boring, but others will be fascinated.”

She was partly right.  People are fascinated by the details — but only some of them.   I don’t think they really want to hear about the drudgery of medical charting or the phone calls to insurance companies.  What they care about are details that have inherent drama to them.

And that’s my job as a novelist — to separate the dry details from the really cool details.  The real challenge, as Elmore Leonard once said, is to leave out the boring stuff.

When I include technical details, I find a way to make them interesting.  If it’s necessary to the plot, then you have to find a way to spark a reader’s interest.  In GRAVITY, for instance, I have a section about the way an astronaut prepares for a space walk.  It’s important stuff, because the reader needs to understand that you don’t just suit up and pop out of the spacecraft — you have to camp out for hours in a special room while your body adjusts to a lower air pressure.  And then, when you do leave the spacecraft, you have to make sure all your safety backups are working.  The way I approach such potentially boring details is to tell the reader what happens when things go wrong — and believe me, a death in space is not a pleasant thing to contemplate.  Suddenly that emergency tether becomes very, very important to remember.  And a lot more interesting.

But what if you’re not a doctor or a cop?  What if you’re, say, a waiter or a dishwasher in a restaurant?  Then I suggest you pick up a copy of one of Anthony Bourdain’s books.  Start with Kitchen Confidential.  Tell me if he doesn’t make the restaurant business a wacky, utterly fascinating universe.  What if you’re a schoolteacher?  Think about all the interesting things you’ve discovered about teenagers.  Taxi drivers and airline mechanics and petroleum engineers all know secrets we’d love to know about.  Once I met a geologist who really wanted to write a murder mystery, but he complained that he didn’t know anything about police work.

Who needs cop expertise? I told him.  You’re a geologist!  There’s got to be a geolgoical mystery that you alone can come up with.  Surely you can find something interesting about shale!

Perhaps you really can’t find anything about your job that’s interesting.  Or maybe you’re a lawyer and you hate, just hate your job.  Are you still forced to write about what you know?

Absolutely not.  Then you should write about what you want to know.

After writing four medical thrillers, I was tired of the genre.  I have a lot of other interests, archaeology and history among them.  And every book has been about a subject that I was fascinated by.  In THE SINNER, it was leprosy and nuns.  In MEPHISTO CLUB, it was about the ancient lore of demons.  In THE SURGEON, I explored the history of human sacrifice.  The point is, I couldn’t write the books unless I myself was delving into something that interested me.

If your subject matter isn’t exciting to you, that boredom is going to show through in the book.

Yes, the chances are, you do know something interesting.  Or maybe there’s some subject you’d love to explore.  Throw yourself into it, no matter how obscure it may be.  Learn hieroglyphics.  Read up on tree rings.  If you find these subjects exciting, the chances are, you can make them exciting in a novel as well.

Just leave out the boring stuff.