Your Next Best Book

One of the great delights about book signings is talking to fellow readers. Sounds simple enough, but with the right crowd and in the right atmosphere, it can take unexpected turns. So it was that I found myself one early April evening in rural Alabama, half an hour from home in the oasis of a public library. This was a return engagement, having spoken there two years before. Now with the release of Control Group, I jumped at the invitation to return. The pleasantries and prepared remarks were familiar enough. Afterward, though, we sat around plates of homemade pimento cheese sandwiches liberated from their crusts and talked about our favorite books. We listed our favorite authors. Neil Diamond’s book came up. So did the Lee Childs series. Someone asked me to recommend their “next best book”. The question didn’t catch me off guard. I’ve had a steady intake of two-dozen books a year for almost a decade. There are plenty of to choose from. I’ve also encountered amazing books over the last year: beautifully crafted, lyrically written, creatively executed, and downright entertaining. I’ve also read some real duds, but why dwell on those. Nobody likes a hater. Here is my own “Top 10” Reading list over the last year, listed in no particular order and summarized at a glance:   Fiction: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid : a contemporary novel about refugees and migration from the war-torn middle east as seen through the eyes of young lovers. Setting Free the Kites by Alex George : a coming-of-age novel about two teenaged boys growing up in small town Maine. Painted against a backdrop of pain and loss, this book sings. Commonwealth by Anne Patchett : an epic tale of the impact on two families lives after an affair at a christening. Patchett could’ve been a therapist with her insight and ability to parse out emotions and serve them up to make readers blush with recognition. Before the Fall by Noah Hawley : a tale of loss and redemption after a plane crash, told in revere chronologic order. How can you know the ending 5 pages in and stay up late to find out how it all happened? Hawley is a master at suspense. The Whites by Richard Price : hard-boiled detective novel, with a twist. Trust no one. The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin : a delightfully gossipy novel looking at...
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Out of the Closet

In her 1965 award winning performance of The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews crooned to the Von Trapp children, “Let’s start at the very beginning.” Indeed, that’s a very good place to start if you’re singing a Rodgers and Hammerstein song. Or writing a novel. But what if you’re a first-time narrator, steering through the auditory straits of a sound booth? For me, Chapter 13 seemed a very good place to start. The extent of my acting career began and ended in high school. A supporting role in Carousel and then Guys & Dolls, followed by a part in the play My Three Angels, taught me how to lose my inhibitions in front of a crowd. By the time I graduated, though, my acting days had ended. Once I decided to narrate Control Group and completed my narration courses, I had to decide the best way to execute the task. I started with three immutable facts: I am not a trained voice talent. What I love most about reading aloud is creating characters. I had 42 characters that needed a voice. Where to begin? I soon realized that like any production, certain characters would take center stage. They would need fully realized voices and personalities. Mackie, of course, is the protagonist, and his voice—in my head and in my ear—was always going to be my own, even if his actions were not. Red Pescatelli, the antagonist, sounded like the Muppet’s “Rowlf the Dog” on a bad day: a little bit deeper, a little more gravely, and a lot more manipulative. Forty voices to go. My southern soul is steeped in the sweet sounds of an Alabama drawl, so I could tweak my mom’s accent or raise the pitch of voices I heard around town and call forth the words of Donnie and Loretta Sims, the Sheriff, and Earl, the night security guard. While I’m sure the dialect denizens would bust me on my west Texas interpretation of Douglas Schofield, I had so much fun playing the big man from BioloGen that his words rolled off my tongue. Several characters simply had to be different from the others in the scene. When Meredith and her sister, Frances, are talking over the oxygen tubing in the labor and delivery ward, one voice came out bright while the other sounded weary. No one would mistake me for a female, but their motivations...
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An Author’s Voice

What does it mean when teachers of writing talk about an author’s voice? Is it style? Word choice? Pacing or prose? And is that something that an author can easily define, or is it best defined by more objective readers? In the summer of 2005, with a stack of pages that comprised the first draft of Control Group, I flew across the country to the Santa Barbara Writer’s conference to find out. One voice I heard while there was that of Ron McLarty. Dubbed by Stephen King as “the best book you can’t read,” McLarty’s debut novel, The Memory of Running, reached its first audience not in print form but as an audiobook. Hearing McLarty tell his story in the rich baritone of his actor-turned-writer’s voice, I clearly remember thinking, “One day, I, too, want to share my stories in audio form.” After hearing him speak, I read his book. Then, I listened to him read it. I felt as if he represented every inflection and pause just as I’d imagined. Yes, one day I’d love to do that. First, though, I had to write the book. Fast forward ten years. In the fall of 2015, at a reception for the incomparable Doris Kearns-Goodwin before hearing her speak, a colleague from Children’s Hospital encouraged me to consider recording one of my books as an audiobook. Shortly after that, before a noontime medical lecture, another colleague at University Hospital said she consumed most of her fiction from audible.com, and if my work found its way onto an audiobook format, she’d love to hear it. Maybe these two had a point. I did love reading aloud to my kids. I did hear the voices of my characters when I wrote them. What would it look like to bring them to life in a recording booth? Finally, on Thanksgiving Day 2015, these disparate desires coalesced into opportunity. While dining with my cousin, a trained voice talent (who, ironically, has voiced the part of a doctor in commercials), I shared my desires to narrate my own work. From her own professional experience, she knew who to call. All I had to do was pick up the phone. I did. Twelve months later. Sol Stein’s book, Stein on Writing, has perhaps the best twelve pages on writing effective dialogue I have ever encountered. His comments on A Writer’s Voice are not bad either. According to...
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Pick Your Poison

I love drugs. They’re the currency with which I practice my profession. Not a day in the office goes by without completing at least one transaction that involves them. I’ve learned to field questions about the over-the-counter varieties (Which cough medicine do you recommend?). I’ve learned to negotiate the economic value others place them (If I get this one off the $4 list, will it work as well?). I’ve heard men in highly-polished shoes wax poetic about pills. I’ve seen doctors draw their ethical shades of objectivity when being paid to discuss them. I’ve laughed with late night comedians as they crack jokes about their potency. Magazines devote back covers to their potentials. Football games air commercials about them…often pairing grey-haired men with younger women. Dr. William Osler, master clinician at Johns Hopkins Hospital at the turn of the twentieth century, was onto something when he wrote that, “the desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.” Ever since my pharmacology class in medical school, much of my training has been devoted to learning the form and function of pharmaceuticals. Much less time has been devoted to their names. One creative joy of writing Control Group was building a pharmaceutical company that needed a medicine cabinet full of blockbuster drugs. BioloGen Pharmaceuticals is my fictional baby-biotech born in the pastoral beauty of southwest Ohio, founded on the idea that more perfect drugs can be created by mechanizing the process of research and development. Rather than testing for side effects in rats and humans, the founders of BioloGen developed an Automated Device to Acquire Molecule, affectionately called ADAM. This machine runs potential chemicals through a battery of tests to see if they will be harmful in humans. When promising “hits” are discovered, ADAM can then test these compounds against computer-simulated biologic systems to see if side effects will develop. Never underestimate the hubris of a human with a good idea. The story takes place in 1993, ten years before completion of the human genome project, yet the founders of BioloGen have unparalleled faith that their machine has enough information to bypass the traditional regulatory process of drug development to offer safe medicines quickly. My research for the pharmaceutical industry initially came in the form of drug detailers, a.k.a. pharmaceutical representatives, coming to the office or hospital to educate physicians about their goods. I had...
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A Rose by Any Other Name

A friend of mine won a contest in which the grand prize was to be killed by Lee Child. For fellow fans of the Jack Reacher series, this was just about as good as it gets. I met Andrew Peterson at the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference in June 2008, months before Dorchester Publishing published his debut novel, First to Kill. Apparently Lee Child held a character-naming auction in which he chose three names to be included in a forthcoming novel. Who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to have their namesake rendered in the mind of the most prolific thriller writer today? Sure enough, when Delacorte Press published 61 Hours in 2010, my friend found himself as a cop on the Boston beat. It didn’t turn out so well for him. SPOILER ALERT: He gets nailed on page 283. “Peterson was sprawled across the front seats, dead from a gunshot wound to the head.” For me, my characters’ names come not from contests but from context and the world around me. Indeed, in the 13 years since completing the first draft of Control Group, most of my character names have undergone a metamorphosis. As I take stock of this current cast, here’s a rundown of some of the characters in the final version of Control Group—and how their names crept into the story. Interestingly, only one made if from first to final draft: Karen Kiley At BioloGen – Karen Kiley : She made it into the sixth page, chapter one of the first draft in the fall of 2004 (under the working title Big Pharma). “After their first interview, Carter [sic] had left with the impression that Karen Kiley was the consummate marketing executive: she had the boldness to ask for what she wanted and the charm to get it.” I saw the last name Kiley on a relator sign in our neighborhood while walking the dog. Knowing she had a hard edge under her soft smile, I thought I’d add a similar hard “kuh” sound to her first name. Douglas Schofield : He started as Douglas Kay for the first 5 years of the novel, based on a fellow physician’s last name. I later realized, though, that I needed some visual and aural differentiation of the character names to set him apart from Kiley and the then-protagonist Carter. During the 2013 dismantling re-write, while reading a Civil War history,...
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