How Getting Hepatitis Can Help Your Writing
Topic: research
I’d worked for five or six years as a screenwriter before deciding to write a book. Knowing I didn’t know enough, I enrolled in Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Fiction Program in the Fall of 2002. The first semester was great. In December I came down with a 103-degree fever. Not all that bad though. But after six days I still had it. So I went to the MD for a WTF. Turned out I’d contracted hepatitis A. How? Bad burrito. The result?

“You’ll have to spend six to eight weeks in bed,” said the doctor.

Two of my favorite things in life are sleeping in and reading. How often do you get to spend two solid months doing nothing but? I was delighted. My family and both of my friends took it as delirium. The only significant downside was I could keep only toast down for the first month or so, and suffered haunting, recurring dreams of cheeseburgers. Also, I wouldn’t be able to return to Stanford.

I wanted to continue with the pirate story I’d begun though. While in bed, I read about 50 maritime books, mostly non-fiction. Ships are complicated, and I didn’t know my elbow from my poop deck. Several chapters of my novel Pirates of Pensacola involve a pitched cannon battle between a superyacht and a clipper sailed by a bunch of pirates who hide in plain sight in the Caribbean posing as a “troope o’ pyrat reenactors.” To write it properly, I needed to know how a clipper is rigged and sailed, and about most every part, because about most every part is blown sky-high at some point. If I didn’t have that time in bed, I don’t know when I could possibly have done all the research.

Would I recommend hep A to all aspiring novelists? Absolutely. Just follow doctors’ orders very closely or you could wind up getting published by Davy Jones.