Hello everyone! It is the first of September, which marks the end of summer for most of us here in...
Hello everyone! It is the first of September, which marks the end of summer for most of us here in the northern hemisphere. Normally such a situation makes me rather melancholy with the need to exchange those warm days of summer lasting to past 8:00pm with cold days of winter with darkness beginning at 5:00pm or earlier. But this year I find myself rather chipper and the reason is that the response to CHARLATANS has been so positive. In my last post I admitted that I was worried that you, my readers, might not like the book as well as I liked it. Well, it seems that my worries were not necessary as there have been many very positive comments including a number that said that the book was ‘difficult to put down.’ As you can well imagine, such a comment is ‘music’ to a thriller writer’s ears. It means that the story was so engaging that the reader had to continue even if it was, say, past midnight and that they knew they should have turned off the light by 10:30 the latest! Thank you to all of you that have taken the time to read the book, especially to those willing to make a comment, and I am hoping to hear more reaction after this post. I am going to take this positive response as an encouragement to write character heavy stories. Although such narratives are more difficult to write than action based stories, ultimately I like it better too since I get to live with these fleshed out characters over many months. Noah and Ava certainly became like friends over the past winter whereas Mason morphed into someone I would rather ignore! All three came to life for me over the months such that they would wake me up in the morning so they could come back to life!
Now that I am reasonably confident that you, my readers, have enjoyed CHARALANS, I’d like to ask if the novel has stimulated thoughts as to the direction of our culture with its progressive reliance on social media and the internet to the exclusion of more face-to-face contact with each other. COMA, my first big bestseller, ended up making people recognize the seriousness of going into a hospital where one had to give up autonomy and essentially control of one’s life. Hospitals are scary places when you are a patient, some more scary than others, especially in those where the bottom-line has become more important than patients’ lives. COMA made people realize that hospitals were places best to be avoided unless seriously needed and even then it is best to have an ombudsman. I have a sense that CHARLATANS is going to do the same for peoples’ reaction to doctors. There are great doctors but there are bad ones too and those who inflate their expertise. Unfortunately the medical profession has done a relatively crummy job of policing itself in this regard. At any rate, my question for those who have enjoyed CHARLATANS, has reading the book influenced your thinking and possibly altered your thoughts about how we train doctors. Also, what are your feelings about concurrent surgery after reading the story. Do you think concurrent surgery is appropriate? Personally, I don’t like it, especially when patients are not told, but there are a number of people who think differently, particularly hospital administrators and those surgeons who like to maximize their productivity.
In the past I have included a few post about the writing process and explained my approach. From reading the comments that such posts evoked, I am tempted to go a bit further. I have mentioned in past posts that CHARLATANS will be produced as a major motion picture. All summer I have been working on a screenplay in cahoots with a very good friend. Originally I thought going from the book to the screenplay for CHARLATANS would be ‘a walk in the park’ since I had essentially outlined the story in a screenplay format. The narrative is already divided into the classic three act structure (they are appropriately called book I, II, and III). The story is also begun with a visually powerful prologue that I believe grabs the reader from page one. Just like a book, I believe a movie should grab the viewers attention from the very first scene. But as I seriously contemplated the screenplay, I realized I couldn’t just use the prologue as the movie’s beginning because it would not provide the personalities of the main characters, namely Dr. Ava London, Dr. “Wild Bill’ Mason, and finally Dr. Noah Rothauser. It wouldn’t even give you the reason the patient was beloved by the entire hospital staff, making his death such an agonizing event. My question here is whether you, my readers, can understand the difficulty moving from a novel to screenplay. Strangely enough, for those who have read the book, what I am proposing now is that the movie version shouldn’t start out in OR #8 with the death of Bruce Vincent like the book but rather should start out with the two FBI agents visiting the internet troll in Middletown, Connecticut with the shocking realization that by killing the man that they are not FBI agents but rather ‘charlatans’ pretending to be FBI agents. After this rather shocking beginning, the movie titles would appear, followed by the scene of Dr. Noah Rothauser manacled to a bed with his voice over explaining his confusion about where he is and why he had been abducted. In this form the story will evolve essentially as a flashback. So what do you people think of this approach and do you understand the dilemma? Books and movies are entirely different beasts, with books generally capable of being significantly richer since our imaginations via the written word with the benefit of the omniscient third person are more powerful than mere visual images even when buttressed by appropriate dialogue. In an ironic sense, a visual image is almost limiting when compared with our own imaginations.
Once again I have made my post much too long, but as I have pointed out in the past, I am a novelist not a journalist. I look forward to reading the comments this post engenders as well as more reactions to CHARLATANS, the book. Warm wishes to all, Robin Cook
PS I just asked Primo if he agrees with all I have said. He's not sure!?!? lol
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Now that I am reasonably confident that you, my readers, have enjoyed CHARALANS, I’d like to ask if the novel has stimulated thoughts as to the direction of our culture with its progressive reliance on social media and the internet to the exclusion of more face-to-face contact with each other. COMA, my first big bestseller, ended up making people recognize the seriousness of going into a hospital where one had to give up autonomy and essentially control of one’s life. Hospitals are scary places when you are a patient, some more scary than others, especially in those where the bottom-line has become more important than patients’ lives. COMA made people realize that hospitals were places best to be avoided unless seriously needed and even then it is best to have an ombudsman. I have a sense that CHARLATANS is going to do the same for peoples’ reaction to doctors. There are great doctors but there are bad ones too and those who inflate their expertise. Unfortunately the medical profession has done a relatively crummy job of policing itself in this regard. At any rate, my question for those who have enjoyed CHARLATANS, has reading the book influenced your thinking and possibly altered your thoughts about how we train doctors. Also, what are your feelings about concurrent surgery after reading the story. Do you think concurrent surgery is appropriate? Personally, I don’t like it, especially when patients are not told, but there are a number of people who think differently, particularly hospital administrators and those surgeons who like to maximize their productivity.
In the past I have included a few post about the writing process and explained my approach. From reading the comments that such posts evoked, I am tempted to go a bit further. I have mentioned in past posts that CHARLATANS will be produced as a major motion picture. All summer I have been working on a screenplay in cahoots with a very good friend. Originally I thought going from the book to the screenplay for CHARLATANS would be ‘a walk in the park’ since I had essentially outlined the story in a screenplay format. The narrative is already divided into the classic three act structure (they are appropriately called book I, II, and III). The story is also begun with a visually powerful prologue that I believe grabs the reader from page one. Just like a book, I believe a movie should grab the viewers attention from the very first scene. But as I seriously contemplated the screenplay, I realized I couldn’t just use the prologue as the movie’s beginning because it would not provide the personalities of the main characters, namely Dr. Ava London, Dr. “Wild Bill’ Mason, and finally Dr. Noah Rothauser. It wouldn’t even give you the reason the patient was beloved by the entire hospital staff, making his death such an agonizing event. My question here is whether you, my readers, can understand the difficulty moving from a novel to screenplay. Strangely enough, for those who have read the book, what I am proposing now is that the movie version shouldn’t start out in OR #8 with the death of Bruce Vincent like the book but rather should start out with the two FBI agents visiting the internet troll in Middletown, Connecticut with the shocking realization that by killing the man that they are not FBI agents but rather ‘charlatans’ pretending to be FBI agents. After this rather shocking beginning, the movie titles would appear, followed by the scene of Dr. Noah Rothauser manacled to a bed with his voice over explaining his confusion about where he is and why he had been abducted. In this form the story will evolve essentially as a flashback. So what do you people think of this approach and do you understand the dilemma? Books and movies are entirely different beasts, with books generally capable of being significantly richer since our imaginations via the written word with the benefit of the omniscient third person are more powerful than mere visual images even when buttressed by appropriate dialogue. In an ironic sense, a visual image is almost limiting when compared with our own imaginations.
Once again I have made my post much too long, but as I have pointed out in the past, I am a novelist not a journalist. I look forward to reading the comments this post engenders as well as more reactions to CHARLATANS, the book. Warm wishes to all, Robin Cook
PS I just asked Primo if he agrees with all I have said. He's not sure!?!? lol
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