How A Metal Rod Through the Brain Is Inspiring

Authors never know what's going to lead to a novel. A dream. Something we see from the corner of our eye. A random question, or an overheard conversation in a coffee shop. Or... in the case of A Madness So Discreet, a story about someone's front lobe being punctured by a tamping iron.

I'm fascinated by the human brain. Deeply, deeply fascinated. Our understanding of the rest of our bodies is pretty thorough, but the organ that makes us US, that commands our speech and movement, our personalities and intelligence we're still drawing a pretty big blank on. Yes, we're learning. We're mapping our brains and using the technology at our fingertips to make strides, but one of the larger steps toward knowing more about our brains came in 1848.

Phineas Gage was a railroad worker whose job involved setting blasts to make way through rock for the new lines. He used a tamping iron - a metal rod three feet long - to tamp charges down before igniting them. On September 13, 1848 someone messed up. A hole had been bored into the rock, the powder had gone in, and (Gage thought) so had the sand that his tamping iron packs. But the sand wasn't there, and when Gage struck the gunpowder it ignited, sending his tamping iron through his skull. It entered below his left eye socket and exited through the top of his head.

Yep, that's gross.

Gage is famous not because he had a tamping iron blown through his head. He's famous because he lived even though part of his frontal lobe exited along with the tamping iron. Gage not only lived, but was walking and speaking right after the accident. His workmen carted him to the town doctor, to whom he supposedly said, "Here's work enough for you, doctor."

Yes, he even had a sense of humor about it all.

But, not for long. Though Gage lived through the accident, his personality showed damage long after the physical healing was finished. Gage had been a hard worker, an intelligent foreman and a pleasant person. Post-accident Gage was a shadow of his former self. The doctor who treated him initially, Dr. John Martin, followed Gage's progress with interest and documented the personality change:

The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was 'no longer Gage.'

While Phineas' accident was life-changing in a bad way, it led to tremendous gains in the emerging science of neurology. Scientists were just beginning to understand that different areas of the brain served different purposes, and while they didn't quite grasp how this worked (enjoy this amusing early phrenology chart), Gage's trauma taught them that the frontal cortex was heavily involved in personality and social reasoning.

Gage died during an epileptic fit thirteen years after the tamping rod accident. His skull and tamping iron are in the Harvard University School of Medicine, if you want to go see them.

Gage's story is both sad and amazing, one that's always captured my attention. That a iron rod can pass through the human brain and that brain continue to function might sound like fiction, but it's not.

It's just science.

Reading about Phineas Gage got me interested in brain science, which led me to reading about lobotomies, which led me to reading about treatment of the insane, which led me to learning more about The Athens Lunatic Asylum, where A Madness So Discreet is set.

An amalgamation of different ideas and subjects came together to create A Madness So Discreet, but Phineas Gage ignited that spark.

Please tell me you get the joke (and forgive me, Phineas).

I like Phineas so much, I consider him my historical boyfriend. Watch the video to learn why.

The Ever Rising Bar of Success in Publishing

I remember being in the query trenches while in the agent hunt - for 10 years - and thinking that if I could just get an agent, I would feel validated. Once I'd landed an agent, it looked like the book I hooked her with - Not A Drop to Drink - might not sell. All that validation evaporated over the six months it took to get picked up. And then it sold, in a two book deal - and hooray! I'm a successful writer.

Except... my sales weren't that great.

(Oh, to be that naive debut author again. My opening sales week for Not A Drop to Drink were my highest ever. My subsequent titles haven't come close).

That's okay though, because I had full confidence in the sequel, In A Handful of Dust. While Not A Drop to Drink didn't blow any doors off their hinges on its opening week, it had steady sales, and I assumed readers who were finding it now would look forward to picking up the sequel when it came out.

(Oh, again to be that naive. Readership drops off drastically for sequels, sometimes as much as 40%).

I can take you through the hills and the valleys for every title I've published, but I won't. Mostly because I'm very aware that this blog is for pre-published writers, and what I'm saying can easily come across as whining. I remember reading posts like this when the only thing I wanted in the world was an agent, and thinking that the author ought to count their blessings.

And I do, every day. I get to write for a living. That's an amazing gift. But the truth is that as in all aspects of life, there is always something more to aspire to.

I recently did a signing with a New York Times bestselling author who consistently hits the list with every release. She told me she's jealous of my Edgar Allan Poe award. I told her I'm jealous of her sales.

That's how it goes. No matter what you attain there is always something more that you see on the horizon. Something that makes you say - That. If I had that I would finally be happy.

I recently blogged about 6 Ways To Support Writers Without Spending A Dime. One of the noted ways on that post is to reach out and tell the author what their book has meant to you. It doesn't have to a life-changer, or a watershed moment. Did you like it? Did it pass a hot afternoon for you? That's awesome - and it's one of the things that never gets old in a writer's life.

Tweets, emails and comments from readers (positive ones, anyway), are one of the things in an author's life that has no bar, no greater aspiration - because it is the top. These messages remind me of why I write - so that people can read my books.

Recycle Or Trash It? Reworking An Old Manuscript

Opening an old manuscript feels a bit like glancing at your own diary. There are things in there you'd forgotten about that you're delighted to see again, but that's probably outweighed by the blushing and embarrassment.

We grow as writers over time and our skills develop by small measures, something we don't notice in the day to day, but are readily apparent when we look at a manuscript from years (or even months) ago.

People are often surprised when I tell them that The Female of the Species is the first book I ever wrote. It was, but the version that I banged out in my college dorm room in 1999 has absolutely nothing in common with the manuscript that sold fifteen years later, apart from the title and a few character names.

That manuscript went through multiple revisions in the intervening years, some with me laboring over already existing pages, and two entirely from scratch. Yet it wasn't until 2014 that I considered opening it again and taking another crack. Once more, I glanced through a few pages and knew there was nothing salvageable.

File> New Document, here I come.

It is intimidating, definitely. I had hundreds of pages of existing words that had been revised multiple times. They served their own purpose on the journey towards creating the publishable manuscript, but those words were more like speed bumps on that highway. If I chose that route I'd have to hit every single one of them, consider it, rephrase it, re-work it, or - yes - delete it and rewrite it with my newly acquired skill set before I could move on to the next paragraph and begin the analysis anew.

It's slow work, and hard.

I didn't even consider this approach when re-drafting The Female of the Species because of a single element.

Voice.

In itself, voice is a tricky element of a manuscript, one that is ephemeral and hard to describe, even for the author. The original version of The Female of the Species was an adult thriller, not a YA. I knew that the whole thing needed to be scrapped in order to change the voice so that it was appropriate for the age category, and that's something that's very difficult - I would almost argue impossible - to insert through a line-by-line breakdown.

Here are some things to consider when you're trying to decide whether to revise that old manuscript, or start fresh with the concept.

1. Voice - as I said before, voice is embedded in the manuscript, and trying to force it into each line through a broken and slow process can be extremely difficult. If you're going for a new voice on this revision, I'd recommend a fresh start.

2. Characters - who are these people? Did you think your female was hilarious a few years ago, but now you find her annoying and sarcastic? You've probably changed as a person, and the lens you're looking at through her now is adjusted. Is she way off from what you were trying to portray, or can you take that edge off her by adjusting some dialogue?

3. Setting - This is one of the hardest things (in my opinion) that a new writer struggles with. Is place important to what you were writing, or is it a story that could happen just about anywhere? If you took a whack at writing something deeply connected to a physical location as a young writer, take a look and see if you played that hand a little too heavily - or too light - and consider whether or not the struggle of drawing those connections can be inserted between the lines, or if you need to start fresh.

4. Dialogue & Tech - Does it talk like a human? Great! Or maybe it talks like a human stuck in the 90s? If your book is heavy with pop culture references or depends on technology for plot twists, definitely do a serious consideration of whether or not it's something that you can scrub, or if the simple presence of a cell phone makes your entire plot pointless.

Don't be afraid to mix and match. You may have huge swaths of pages that only need a little tweaking, and then a really bad run of a hundred or so that have got to go. That's fine. Always save multiple copies of your work, with titles that tell you exactly what it is so that you don't have to go digging through files to find that one working version of your novel where the paranormal angle stayed in.

Also, don't assume that seasoned writers have it all figured out. I started a new manuscript this week and currently have six different operating versions while I try to figure out POV, tense, and where the story is going to begin.

Lastly, as always, once you've got something you think might be workable, find a reader. Critique partners are how you improve. Find one that won't be afraid to tell you that using AIM to have your teens talk to each other isn't viable anymore.