Friday, March 18, 2022

Physician turned thriller writer, William Maz on THE BUCHAREST DOSSIER

 

HALLIE EPHRON: So many authors take a circuitous path to publishing their first novel. I went from teaching elementary school to college teaching to writing for high tech to freelance copywriting before selling my first novel, FINALLY!, ten years after I decided to try my hand at writing fiction.

Crime fiction authordom is littered with formers - in Jungle Red alone we have a former attorney, a former psychologist, and a former librarian.

Today's guest William Maz, with his debut novel THE BUCHAREST DOSSIER (applause!), has had a full career as a physician before stepping off the deep end and joining us. Today he's here to talk about the how and why of it.

WILLIAM MAZ: I was a practicing physician before I retired early to devote my full time to writing. But I have been a writer since high school, and have continued to write during my medical career. You can say that I’ve always been a writer who took a twenty-five-year off-and-on sabbatical to practice medicine.

Did being a doctor help me to write fiction? Studying medicine does develop talents that are useful in many aspects of life, including writing. It teaches you to do proper research, and to observe the people around you—how they walk, talk, move their hands, show their emotions, laugh, and cry. It teaches you how to think critically, how to follow the consequences of one action upon another, and how to understand a person’s often subconscious reasons for his or her actions.

Medicine also teaches you to listen to people’s stories. Everyone looks at the world, and their own lives, through stories they create. Creating stories is so universal that it may be a hard-wired part of our brains, an evolved method of making sense of our lives. Understanding the structure of a story, which is very different from “real life,” is key. Life is a continuous flow of events, most of which have no obvious connection to each other. Some questions get resolved decades later, or after the people have passed away. Others never do.

The story is different. It is a compact “retelling” of the events, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It includes motivations, causal links between events, a climactic “Aha!” moment, and a resolution, most of which real life doesn’t offer. Creating a story out of life’s seemingly random events thus brings a form of understanding.

But which story do you tell? Medicine teaches you to “do no harm,” to relieve suffering, to save lives. You also learn that there is little difference between humans and the other forms of life around us – just a few DNA changes. Seeing anything suffer or die has become abhorrent to me. I have seen too much of it.

That can be a problem if you’re writing a spy thriller. I have never liked thrillers with a lot of killing. I am a great Le Carré fan partly because there is very little violence. The thrill is in getting into the minds of the spies, discovering their motivations, and figuring out the puzzles.

In my early drafts, I subconsciously avoided writing scenes with violence, even with direct confrontation. But since my novel takes place during Romania’s bloody revolution, a country in which I was born, I realized I had to include some scenes of what actually occurred. What I eventually chose to tell is a love story inside a spy thriller inside a historical novel. At the pinnacle lies the love story, the ultimate subject of the novel.

Medicine doesn’t help you write a novel. Writing does. And reading. They call it a craft, but it is more than that. It is a passion, at least for me. They say that there are two kinds of writers: those who like to write, and those who like to have written. I am the former.

HALLIE: "[Fill-in-the-blank] doesn't help you write a novel. Writing does." Here, here!

But having lived does sometimes give you something to say... and it sounds like medicine was a fertile ground.

How does who you were "before today" affect what material you choose to read (or write)?

ABOUT THE BUCHAREST DOSSIER
The triumph of love during years of atrocity and depravation is brought hauntingly to life in THE BUCHAREST DOSSIER (Oceanview Publishing; March 15, 2022) by William Maz—a love story within a spy thriller within a historical novel. Maz shows how love can survive even under the direst of circumstances, in this case the brutality of Romania’s bloody revolution, and the miserable and debilitating years under Communist regime.

CIA analyst Bill Hefflin is a disillusioned Romanian expat who has lost his sense of community, his core identity, his language and his sense of home. He arrives in Bucharest on the eve of the 1989 Romanian rebellion at the insistence of his KGB asset, whom he code-named Boris. As Hefflin becomes embroiled in an uprising that turns into a brutal revolution, nothing is as it seems, including his search for his childhood love, Pusha, a ghost from his past in Bucharest, which has taken on mythical proportions.

With the bloody events unfolding at breakneck speed, Hefflin realizes the revolution is being manipulated by outside forces, including his own CIA and Boris—the puppeteer who seems to be pulling all the strings in Hefflin’s life.

Can Hefflin find the answers before he’s swept away in the bloody tidal wave of revolution?


WILLIAM MAZ was born in Bucharest, Romania, of Greek parents and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. He is a graduate of Harvard University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Yale residency. During his high school and undergraduate years, he developed a passion for writing fiction. He studied writing at Harvard, the New School, The Writer’s Studio in New York City, and with Gordon Lish, and is now writing full time. The Bucharest Dossier is his debut novel.

46 comments:

  1. Congratulations, William, on your debut novel . . . your story sounds amazing! I'm looking forward to reading your book.

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  2. WILLIAM: Congratulations on your debut novel! I love your statement that you've always been a writer who took a twenty-five-year off-and-on sabbatical to practice medicine. I am glad you figured out a way to include the appropriate scenes in your book which at first contradicted your "do no harm" oath and training as a doctor.

    I used to work in climate change research in my day job for almost 30 years (now retired). Reading mystery fiction has been a nice change from days spent reading and writing jargon-filled scientific journal articles and reports. My reading preferences within the mystery genre has changed over the past decades but I will certainly look up your book.

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    1. Grace, I hope climate change has a happy ending... something we can usually engineer in a mystery.

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  3. The book sounds fabulous, William. I so agree about story.

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    1. ... said the woman with a checkered past herself. It's all grist for the fiction machine, isn't it?

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    2. What? You're onto me, Hallie! LOL. I do have not only a varied past but a checkered on, as well. ;^)

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  4. Congratulations, William - love the description of the book.

    " doesn't help you write a novel. Writing does." Love it.

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    1. Completely agree... when someone asks me 'what's the hardest part about writing' I always say "Writing."

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    2. Someday I will remember that Blogger doesn't like the angle brackets (<) and strips them from comments. I think it's a code thing.

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  5. This sounds fabulous, William! Really interesting! I am currently going back and reading some of Le Carré as I really enjoy his work (and he was totally charming and funny and passionately political the one time I heard him speak). The early ones are satisfying but very sexist.

    Hey JRW, I can't seem to get back on the email list. I keep rejoining but haven't received any more emails (Yes, I checked spam) Hope I didn't say the wrong thing!

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    1. It's astonishing how many novels (and plays and movies) I once loved turn out, in the glare of the present, to be very sexist. Tricky times.

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  6. Hi everyone, thanks for having me on. The Bucharest Dossier is first and foremost a love story, couched inside a spy thriller, inside a historical novel. The initial inspiration for the book was a girl I left behind in Bucharest when I was young and who became the muse for the book.

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    1. That is so sweet! Got to ask, have you kept in touch? Does she know about the book?

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    2. I was never able to find her again, unfortunately, which has caused her mythical stature to continue in my life.

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  7. Welcome to JRW, William, and congratulations on your debut book. I love love stories and spy stories, too. Your book is going into my TBR list.

    Your own story sounds fascinating. How did your parents find themselves in Romania and how old were you when you came to the US? One more question, which state did you settle in? Please, tell us more about you.

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  8. Romania during the years between the two world wars was a constitutional monarchy, with a king and parliament, something like England. And it was quite a wealthy country, with oil, minerals, and vast, fertile fields. My grandparents from both sides went to Bucharest from Greece to start restaurants and make their fortune. My father studied medicine in Bucharest, then met my mother and they married.

    After the War, Romania was invaded by the Soviet Union and they were not allowed to leave, even though they were Greek citizens. Finally, after decades, our family was allowed to emigrate when I was six years old. We spent two years in a refugee camp in Athens, then came to the US when I was eight. We settled in Worcester, MA where some of our relatives had settled. You will find some of these details in the book, though a bit changed.

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    1. Wow! Thank you for telling us part of your story. It is so interesting!

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    2. Wow, William. I mostly heard about the hundreds (more?) of orphaned babies who languished, some with permanent damage, in institutional settings.

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  9. This sounds amazing-and incredibly timely ! And congratulations. And as a physician, you must also be looking for answers, don’t you think? Everything happens because of something else… just life in a novel.

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    1. Except in medicine, it's usually that most likely thing that it turns out to be... in our books, (we hope) it's the thing you least expect. (The old adage: "Doctors are taught 'when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras")

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    2. Yes, part of what I do in the book is provide a solution to the question Romanians still ask to this day: was it a popular revolution or a coup? I provide a plausible answer, one not expected or obvious.

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  10. Part of the reason I wrote the book was to show what life was like under a totalitarian regime. We thought the Cold War was over. I never did. It just takes different forms. We are no longer fighting communism but totalitarianism. But it's really the same thing. Communism was just a patina. In one of the scenes in the book, which actually happened to me, a famous actor tells the protagonist that there are more communists in New York City than in all of Romania, including the leadership. No one believed in communism. It was just a way of controlling the people.

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  11. Congratulations on your debut! You've already answered my question: do friends and family appear in your book?

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    1. Yes, and no. I use some characters from real life, but simply as starting points for the characters I need for the book, very much changed. I don't want to fall into the trap of having to be loyal to real people rather than to the story I'm trying to create.

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  12. What a remarkable life story you've had, William. Don't you feel a positive burning to use your own life experience to write fictional stories?

    I'll have to recommend your book to my daughter and son-in-law. They just visited Bucharest for the first time over the holidays. From the photos it looks like a very beautiful place, Romania.

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    1. Unless one writes a memoir, writing about real events in one's life can be a trap. The writer feels a loyalty to the "truth" of events as they happened and experiences guilt if those events are altered to fit a story that tries to tell a larger truth. I used my real life experiences to portray life under communism, not as the main part of the novel.

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  13. Sorry, the unknown is me.

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  14. (I added this to a comment higher up, but am adding it again here to be sure you see it.)
    I mostly heard about the hundreds (more?) of orphaned babies in Romania who languished, some with permanent damage, in institutional settings. Do you think you'll ever address that in fiction?

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    1. The situation with the Romanian orphans is a tragedy. Many were infected with HIV when they were transfused blood in the hope of increasing their ability to survive in those institutions. The problem is that the blood came from merchant sailors when they disembarked at the port of Constanta. There were thousands of orphans brought up in horrible conditions, then let loose without much education or skills. I address that issue in the sequel, but nothing can do it justice.

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  15. The Ukrainian invasion today by the authoritarian regime of Putin is a reminder that the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism is ongoing. I believe we should all be keenly aware of what life under such a regime looks and feels like. Today in Russia you can be put in jail for fifteen years for demonstrating against the government. There is no longer any independent press, only the propaganda from state-owned media. Most Russians don't know or don't believe what is really happening in Ukraine. This is no different than the propaganda and secret police during the Ceausescu days in Romania. Despots use the same methods, the same playbook.

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  16. Congratulations on your debut! Medicine may not help you write novels, but I would suspect that medicine does give you a great background for solving mysteries.

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    1. Medicine trains you to do many useful things: to spend countless hours/months conducting research; to closely observe how people talk and act; to know how to interview people to get to the answers; to have the patience to listen to people's stories as they tell you about their lives; and to use logic to arrive at conclusions. Solving mysteries is certainly part of that training.

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  17. I was a lawyer (briefly!) before becoming an author, and the law seems to be a profession that is filled with writers, would-be writers, and future writers. I suspect because many of us go to law school because we have much loved humanities degrees, and can't think of any other way to make a good living.

    Also, congratulations on the amazingly fortuitous timing of THE BUCHAREST DOSSIER. A novel about the violent struggle of a small former Soviet dependency to free itself is literally ripped from the headlines.

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    1. Yes, many lawyers become writers, but some have told me that their law training has hampered their style of writing. Depending on the type of law one practices, some lawyers do nothing but write documents all day in a very lawyerly style. The good thing about medicine is that most of the work does not involve writing, nor does it try to change your style to fit any standard, other than create bad penmanship. :)

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  18. Congratulations on your debut book, William! So many interesting aspects to it. I've always held an image of Romania of passionate people, whether in love or for a cause. The time setting of it, too, is fascinating. As Julia said above, the publication timing of your book, in view of Ukraine's struggles, is spot on.

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    1. Yes, the timing is something else. I want to make it clear, however, that I had nothing to do with Putin's invasion of Ukraine in time for my book's publication. :)

      I do believe, however, that it is important for us to know the enemy of freedom around the world, since that enemy can also rear its ugly head among us.

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  19. The Ukrainian people of 2022 don't want to become the Romanian people of 1989. Totalitarianism doesn't work. It is not an accident that people in Romania were starving, that corruption was endemic. None of those totalitarian countries produced anything that could compete in the West. They could only sell oil, minerals and grain. There are no Microsofts or Apples in Russia today, no competitive IT or biotech industries, no competitive fashion or automobile industries. Today Russia has been called a gas station with nuclear weapons.

    Corruption is also part of the communist and totalitarian systems. In Romania, everyone in the government stole from the country's coffers, or demanded bribes for their services. Today Putin is finding out that his military has been hollowed out by those working below him who have diverted billions in military funds to finance their lavish lifestyles. The corruption in the people's psyche doesn't change overnight. Romania is ranked third from the bottom in honesty in government in the EU. Ukraine was somewhere close to it. That is a remnant of the old system in which corruption was part of daily business.

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  20. Congratulations, William. This is a very timely spy/thriller and I can't wait to read it. I'm the former librarian and it definitely taught me to observe people but also to be an active listener - sounds like medicine taught you the same.

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  21. Thank you, Jenn. I hope you enjoy it. Allow a touch of magic realism to color your reading of the ending.

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  22. Congratulations on your first book, and it is one I will order. Romania has always seemed like a complicated place to me; the names and borders kept changing. The grandfather I knew best emigrated from that region in his teens,before World War 1. His mother and little sisters were trapped there by the war. It was part of the Russian Empire then. It was Romania,tightly Communist world and extremely corrupt when I was growing up. And of course a kingdom in between with a flamboyant royal family. Plus, my grandfather said his region was really Bessarabia (!!!) ...and it is now Moldava. Hence confusion. Certainly an excellent background for a tale full of mystery.

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  23. Moldova is now in the crosshairs of Putin. It is an independent country now, but it has both Romanians and Russians living in it because it kept going back and forth between the two nations depending on the outcome of wars. Because of the Ukraine invasion, Moldova may now elect to become part of Romania in order to become part of NATO, which Romania is. Otherwise, it will be left dangling in the wind, like Ukraine.

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  24. Thank you for your good wishes and comments. I'm off to dinner to celebrate. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss the book and the issues it brings up, which are facing us today. Good evening.

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  25. William Maz, welcome to Jungle Reds and congratulations on your novel! Your spy thriller sounds great!

    There is a question about geography. Is BERSCHAD in Romania or Ukraine?

    Diana

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  26. Congratulations on your book! This sounds like a really good read. Thanks.

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