Just Tidying Up
These are my initial Notes now transferred here. I’ll post a new Note for today in a bit.
Starting today I’ll be posting daily updates on my push to finish my book manuscript by the due date of March 15. I think it’s possible that the posts might help other writers in the same situation finish their own manuscript or article or whatever. The book is a historical non-fiction book about the Doctors' Riot of 1788, a deadly protest against anatomy students stealing bodies that changed the face of medicine and medical education. I’ve written to this point about 75,000 words, and I need another roughly 10,000. I’ll try to explain in upcoming notes the kinds of singular issues that can arise at the end of a book, especially with a solid deadline approaching.
Hope you like what I write. Entry #1 coming tomorrow!
So I’m trying to finish what I think will be the next to last chapter, and it has been oozing out with great pain. I know where I want to go and what I want to say, but I’ve struggled to find suitable references. To better understand, let me lay out the basic vision for the book.
The book uses a roughly chronological approach to the riot, providing a historical context to the concept of dissection for anatomy education. The riot in 1788 was the public rising up against physicians and medical students stealing bodies and dissecting them. So I cover the history of anatomy and anatomy education, body snatching, dissection, conventional medicine, and the overall tenor of the times. Then the riot and its aftermath.
The current chapter deals with laws created after the riot, burking in the UK (nationalgeographic.com/…), and embalming developed during the Civil War. That’s where I am now, trying to finish up after the embalming section.
This last section covers the rise of alternative medicines to show the rather pathetic state of medicine, but it seems like it might be too much of a detour. I don’t know. It might be okay because it helps explain how far traditional medicine had to come to reach its lofty heights today. But maybe not. Anyway, I’ve been trying to find detailed information on the public’s perception of medicine in the mid- to late-1800s and am finding it hard to come by.
So that’s today, digging more into that research. Might end up ditching the whole section, though. Ugh. If it takes me too long to finish the manuscript the book might not publish this year, and we really want to publish in the fall, certainly for Christmas.
Okay, let’s get to it. See you tomorrow.
Well, I figured it out. I let my “muse” ruminate on it yesterday while I was busy doing other things, and by the time I got back to my keyboard it had hit me. I had decided, finally, that the chapter was essentially finished, that I was struggling with where to go next when the answer was nowhere. The end of the chapter was leading to a place I didn’t realize, to a topic I knew I would cover but didn’t know when — consent. So I ended that chapter and have started digging more into consent-related issues, which puts me squarely into the 1900s and gets me closer to the creation of the Anatomical Gift Act of 1968, a key point in anatomical education today.
I’m also cognizant, as is anyone who writes, of the mechanics of plot. Where in the story do I want to place the climax? How long should the falling action section be? I’ve known from the beginning that because the Doctors’ Riot occurred so long ago that the climax, if the riot truly is the climax, would occur in roughly the second act of a three act story. There would be a good bit of content following the riot, so how will I keep the reader interested enough to finish to the end? Challenging, but doable.
Perhaps I’ll discuss that issue in a bit.