David Waters
Forget Your Expertise

You are a writer, but you likely have another career or important interest, and it is natural that you would want to write about that, or include an aspect of that in your story or poem. Your expertise can add color and authenticity to your work. For instance, I am a cardiologist, and I often include physicians or patients, or even medical students in my fiction. Or suppose your passion is fishing, and you want to incorporate that into your work. Authors have succeeded in doing that in a broad variety of ways; look at Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea), Norman Maclean (A River Runs Through It) and even Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America). But there’s something important to note about writing fiction that centers on your professional field.

I would like to give you a piece of advice that works for fishing and cardiology and most anything else. That is, don’t let your particular interest interfere with the relationships, emotions and other important components of your story. Personally, I spent my career jabbering away in medical jargon, and easily slip into that mode when writing a story, instead of writing about people and how disease affects them. I should strive to show the physical, emotional, and social effects of illness—how patients, their friends, and their families react and adapt. Or show the effects of providing healthcare on the provider.

Some of my stories are based on true events, but improve dramatically if I fictionalize or omit details. When the emotional mood of my piece is grief or loss, as is often the case when I write about sickness, I try to create a tone that is lighter, that draws the reader in.

You are not writing a treatise about fishing techniques. You are not writing a case report for a medical journal. You are writing about characters and what they yearn for and feel. Fishing and cardiology can enrich your work, but they are not the core of it.

David Waters is a semi-retired cardiologist who lives in San Francisco with his wife Bobbi and Kerry Blue terrier Trey. His short stories have appeared in the San Antonio Review, 34th Parallel, the Dillydoun Review, Flash Fiction, Beyond Words, Amarillo Bay, Marrow, Umbrella Factory, The MacGuffin, and Cleaver.