Fictionalizing Your Day Job: Turning a Pathologist Into a Crime Writer

“Write about what you know.” That’s the age-old advice doled out to would-be authors. If you’ve built a successful career in any area, you undoubtedly possess more knowledge and experience of your subject than most. So, taking your professional life as a starting point is likely to be a good first step on your writing path.

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Certainly there are many authors who have done just that. Like her title character Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë was a governess. Franz Kafka, who excelled in writing about the nightmarish world of bureaucracy, spent his days working in a soulless Czech insurance office. And Agatha Christie was able to draw upon her experience as a pharmacist’s assistant during the First World War when she was choosing the poisons her characters used to commit murder.

These authors are among the many who have successfully mined their own work experience to inform their fiction, and in every case, I think their books are the better for it. But why should that be?

While the broad sweep of a story woven on a weft of personal experience will go a long way towards achieving a sense of realism in your work, I find that it is often the small details that the author includes that make all the difference. These are the kind of things well known to someone who has worked in the field, but which are rarely reported or even noticed by outsiders. And they will certainly be very hard to conjure from research alone.

With these authors in mind, all of whom used the fine detail of their jobs to inform their characters and their settings, I decided to do the same in my Dr. Jack Cuthbert mystery series. After working in medicine and pathology for my whole career, I decided to fulfil a long-held ambition and write fiction. To do so, I drew upon my own work experiences, but I knew from the outset that I needed to be careful.

If you have worked in a field where you had privileged access to sensitive information, it is important not to share those secrets. Working in medicine, I understood the importance of patient confidentiality, so I had to make sure that I never, even inadvertently, revealed anything I shouldn’t. And there was another challenge.

All writing is exposure, but writing about something you claim to know, is doubly so. I knew my skills as a writer would be in the spotlight, but so would be my professional reputation as a pathologist. It was clear to me that if I wrote about my specialty, even in a fictional context, I would be severely criticized if I got it wrong. Claiming, in my defense, that I was merely trying to make the subject accessible to non-expert readers wouldn’t cut it. “Surely,” I could hear them saying, “if you really understand something, you can make it intelligible to anyone.” So, I had to make sure I got it right.

It was only when I started writing that I discovered the biggest challenge of all in using your professional experience to inform your fiction. How much detail do you include, and how do you choose what to leave out? With a wealth of what you consider as fascinating detail at your fingertips, there is a temptation to tell your reader everything you know about a subject. But when you’ve spent a lifetime studying and honing that subject, that’s never going to work. This is a novel you are writing, not a textbook.

First drafts are often heavy with technical detail and unnecessary explanations, and good editing is essential. After a while you realize there is a sweet spot between two extremes. On the one hand, there can be an excess of information and explanation that bores and overwhelms the reader, while slowing down the narrative. And on the other, a dearth of any interesting detail that would help paint the characters and the story as authentic. So, you must aim for some midpoint, while realizing that it’s not an easy target. It takes effort and it takes time, and most of all it takes the honest opinions of those who are kind enough to read your manuscript. Opinions that you must listen to and act upon.

When it works, though, it can work very well. It is an approach that can create a completely credible story peopled by three-dimensional characters in a believable setting. And it will be more than merely plausible—it will be a work written with the authority of one who has been there and seen it and knows how it smells. I think readers like that kind of assurance—I know I do. They like knowing they are in safe hands and that what they are reading is as authentic as possible.

In conclusion, the advice to write about what you know has certainly helped me. But I offer other would-be writers some additional advice—yes, write about what you know but also write about what you love. Many people feel passionate about their careers, and if you loved your job, you may be able to write about it with the same enthusiasm that you felt when you worked it. If so, then your stories will be even more engaging.

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