Not Traditional Enough:

The journey to fiction writing

By the author, on flickr.

The experience of the past

As an academic doc and researcher, I’ve published numerous journal articles, chapters, and books, with major publishers.

I’ve written (and continue to write) subject matter expert tomes with the publisher names that line medical library shelves and academic CVs. I know what that process looks like: the various editorial committees and reviewers, the revision cycles and edits, the long timelines, and of course, the contracts in which we as authors give away our ideas and work for minimal compensation.

I’ve also published independently through Kindle — first with Dharma Drops and Brain Doc, and now with a novel.

The difference isn’t just logistical. It’s about voice.

Tacit understanding

Many doctors have written books outside of academic pursuits. Some about an aspect of practice, others about their own journeys. And many of them, if you look closely, were written with others — ghostwriters, “collaborators”, with editors who shape the narrative toward something marketable. The angle is often the same: a disadvantaged background overcome, or a niche no one else ostensibly occupies. Something unique about that individual or perspective; a kind of hook.

That wasn’t what I was interested in.

I had a specific rationale to start writing on Medium in the first place. I wanted others to know I wrote the pieces under my byline. Not a polished version filtered through someone else’s idea of what would be popular, or sell — or worse, because someone was too lazy to do it themselves. Something that, for good or for bad, was my articulation, from my mind’s eye — not an interview formulated into the first person by a second and sometimes non-attributed author.

That impulse led to Dharma Drops and Brain Doc — two books I published independently. Dharma Drops is a collection of short reflections on Buddhist wisdom, written after years of conversations with others in my sangha. Brain Doc includes stories from a neurologist’s clinic — real people with real lessons focused not on the doctor, but on the lives of the patient, their struggles, and what they taught. These contexts mattered more to me than anything else, and it’s not something a secondary writer would be able to accomplish with one afternoon session and a tape recorder.

When I explored traditional publishing for those books, an agent told me they weren’t “traditional” enough. A traditional book, he said, had more selling power than a collection of short pieces. When I explained that the form was the point — brief meditations you could pick up and put down, not linear narratives to plow through, or stories from individual patient encounters for others to experience — he replied that it still wasn’t traditional enough.

He certainly wasn’t wrong about the market. But certainly, and without question, he’d missed the point entirely.

A choice for all of us

This isn’t a criticism of the agent-publisher path. It’s a legitimate choice, and for many authors it’s the right one. But it is a choice — one each writer needs to make based on their own experiences and what they want to accomplish. Just like whether to put a semicolon or a period at the end of a thought. Both can be correct. They just do different things.

For me, publishing Dharma Drops and Brain Doc myself was a relief — not in the sense of escaping difficulty, but in the sense of breathing after holding a breath too long. It would be my pacing; my structure; my choices. And no one demanding into which category it might fit. And to what “audience” it would sell.

That experience gave me permission to try something harder: fiction.

An unfamiliar land

Fiction is a different animal entirely. In nonfiction, as authors we lean on facts, on structure, on the presumed authority of expertise. The scaffolding holds up both the text and context. In fiction, there’s nothing but the voice. We’re not explaining or arguing — we’re *inhabiting;* it’s creating people who don’t exist and making readers care what happens to them. It’s building a world sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, and hoping fervently it holds together.

The voice has to carry all of it. And if that voice is borrowed or compromised — shaped by a faceless editor, smoothed by a secondary collaborator, pitched toward marketability — the reader will feel it. It’s an inconsistency; a lack of conjoint properties; a sense of artificiality. It’s been described as the story being “thin”. The characters ring hollow. The story doesn’t quite coalesce the way it should.

Now, poor writing can do the same. But I didn’t want thin nor hollow, at least based on a change in the story or writing characteristics; if it were thin and hollow because of my own inadequacies — mea culpa. But I wanted to write the story the way I wanted to write it — with all its rough edges, its uncomfortable moments, its self-reflection and refusal to make the narrator more likable than he actually is.

Hence, the novel. The Education of Charlie Aiken is about a physician who leaves medicine searching for something more meaningful — and finds himself inside a private equity firm where the hypocrisy is different but no less corrosive; it’s about the grooves we walk in because everyone else is doing the same.

I wrote this under a pseudonym to distinguish it from my academic writings, and because fiction often has a way of revealing truths that facts sometimes just can’t.

My naiveté and mine alone

I didn’t query agents. I didn’t pitch acquisition editors. I didn’t want to journey on that pathway. I wanted to tell a compelling story, and I wanted to tell it my way.

So, perhaps (and almost for certain) naively, I did it myself — writing, formatting, cover, distribution, all of it. The learning curve was steep, but every decision was mine. It took a very long time to complete — and I sincerely appreciate the beta readers of whom I inflicted this upon. But when I closed the file for the last time, having re-read and edited the draft too many times to imagine, and held the finished book, it was the book I meant to write.

To me, that’s worth more than a logo on the spine.

You can read Chapter Three here.