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Recently, I read an article describing a study that confirmed something I’m quite certain I knew intuitively.
A Stanford University study indicated that walking on a treadmill at “an easy, self-selected pace” while facing a blank wall, helped generate sixty percent more innovative ideas when the subjects were tested psychologically for creative thinking. These results were reported to have applied to almost every student tested.
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I was intrigued by an article in the British publication the Telegraph which seemed quite extraordinary. The piece was entitled, “Scientists Find Secret to Writing a Best-selling Novel.”
For a writer, what could be more arresting than such a headline?
Among other things, the article said: “Computer scientists have developed an algorithm which can predict with 84 percent accuracy whether a book will be a commercial success — and the secret is to avoid clichés and excessive use of verbs.”
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We’ve all heard the old dictum: “Write what you know.”
In a very general sense, that’s probably true, but there’s much more to writing novels than sticking with those areas with which you are familiar by virtue of training or education.
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I’m often asked how I made a transition from psychiatry to writing fiction. As residents in training, we had to present case histories. To me, each case seemed like a mini-biography or short story. Some were stranger than fiction, and it struck me that psychiatry–of all medical specialties– emphasized the human dimension of living life. Each patient has a compelling story. It’s unique, but taps into a shared commonality. Really, we’re all different and we’re all somewhat the same, aren’t we?
Above all, psychiatry appealed to me because it aligned itself with creativity and the arts.
When I co-authored nonfiction medical books, we illustrated issues with case histories. This took some creativity, whether a story was about a man who broke down because he’d had a heart attack, or a woman was struggling with breast cancer, or a young girl was jealous of her newborn brother.
But once I began writing fiction, I could use imagination.
So, in a sense, I was always telling stories, whether they were psychiatric, medical or pure fiction. (Is there any pure fiction?)
The freedom to make stuff up provides a strange feeling of pleasure. There’s little to match the exhiliration when a patient suddenly “gets it” (that ah ha moment) or the incredible sensation you get when a novel’s plot twist suddenly falls into place, and the story assumes a life of its own.
It’s really an exploration followed by discovery and may mean finding the hidden clues within one’s self. Some psychiatrists would say it’s the revelation of the unconscious or the getting of wisdom.
When all is said and done, the very process of writing fiction is really a bit of a mystery to me. But the transition to fiction came easily.
Over the years, I’ve co-authored five non-fiction medical books for the lay reader. Now that I’m writing fiction, I’ve been asked to compare fiction and non-fiction.
I’ve been lucky in a very real way. When writing non-fiction as a physician, I often had to write case histories of patients (without revealing their identities, of course). These were always fun to do because each person is unique, and in dealing with psychologic issues, each has a unique story to tell. So, there was some inventive license in describing case histories to illustrate various points.
But one thing was certain in non-fiction: its purpose was to convey information about a specific topic (heart disease, breast cancer, psychotherapy, or child-rearing) in an informative, readable and reasonably entertaining way. So, the creative freedom was limited.
Fiction, on the other hand, involves a synthesis of experience with what the author knows of life, along with wholesale flights of imagination.
You just know when reading a novel that the author knows a great deal about certain subjects ( For instance, in Peter Heller’s “The Dog Stars,” he obviously knows plenty about flying an airplane, fishing, hunting and hiking, among other things). But he engages in wholesale flights of imagination that take the reading to another level of knowledge and beauty.
It’s that soaring imagination that propels the novel, and it’s much more difficult to capture those chimerical flights of ideas and fantasy on paper than it is to write effectively about a non-fiction topic.
Writing fiction is far more satisfying to me that non-fiction, after all, making stuff up is pure fun. Kids do it all the time.
To paraphrase what Saul Bellow once said, “When I was a child I was called a liar. Now, I’m called a writer.”