Tess Gerristen on Writing and Anthropology

Haegwan Kim (HK); Today I’m going to talk with Tess Gerritsen, who is an internationally renowned best selling author. Thank you so much for your time.

Tess Gerristen (TG); Thank you for having me.

HK: You have an unusual career path to be a writer; wearing a hat as a doctor, and having an undergrad degree of anthropology. Can I ask at first how these knowledge helped your writing career?

TG; My writing career is very successful because I write about a woman doctor who is a medical examiner. I couldn’t do that if I weren’t a doctor and if I didn’t know what it was like to do an autopsy and to be in the operating room. It really, really makes my job easier. I have been there. I can describe it more clearly than other authors could.

HK; Many authors who don’t have experience as a doctor also write about those stories. But you still think to be in medicine as professional is different from just studying about medicine from outside?

TG; I think it is. I think that I can come up with some plots which maybe somebody who is not a doctor couldn’t come up with and I can describe what it’s like to cut open a body. To smell what the smells are like and to be in the operating room. Those are experiences that really translate well to the page.

HK; How about anthropology? What kind of knowledge of anthropology helps your writing activity?

TG; Well, anthropology was just something I’m interested in, and it all has to do with people and culture and understanding behavior, and I think that comes in handy when you’re talking about characters and you are trying to describe interaction between people. Anthropology was more of a personal interest but I was never able to make a job out of that because there’s no money in it.

HK; You have published many books, can I ask where your creativity comes from?

TG; I have always been a storyteller. Since I was a kid I have always enjoyed telling stories and I also have always enjoyed reading a lot, so I think that that background of having read books means a lot to me. That’s where I get the training, I think, from knowing so many stories that other people have written.

HK: I’ve heard of that you travel a lot to get ideas.

TG; I do because I love to travel. I enjoy traveling.

HK; Where do you go?

TG; I have been to the Middle East a number of times. I have been to Hawaii and I have been to Europe. The only place I haven’t seen enough of is the Far East. I have only been to Vietnam and Taiwan so that’s my next plan.

HK; Is that for your writing activity?

TG; Yes, it does include my writing activity. I travel pretty frequently for my books. I go to Germany and England for book tours and I go all over the United States for book tours.

HK; Is there any difference to promote your works among nations?

TG; The only place I go overseas to promote my work is Europe because of the language. Because they almost all speak English and, if they don’t understand me, there is no point in me going there. I find that promoting overseas is really useful because people really love it when an author comes to visit.

HK: For you, what is the most effective way to promote your books?

TG; That’s a good question. I don’t think people really know that. We try all kinds of different ways and we all want to have our books sell well, but we don’t really know how to sell and I think the best way is people telling their friends to read your books. How can you make them do that? That’s called word of mouth. Somehow you have to keep them interested. I think right now because of the television show, Rizzoli and Isles, that’s really helping a lot. People are watching the show and they watch the show and they’re curious about the books that are behind the show.

HK; As more and more people are on the web, do you consider the Internet is a place you can promote well?

TG; Yes, I have a Facebook page. I am on Twitter, and right now I am doing an experiment with Facebook Ad to see whether that brings any new outcome. But I don’t know yet how it’s going to work.

HK; I notice that your background as an immigrant from China. Is there any difficulty?

TG; My mother is an immigrant. I was born in the United States. I think the difficulty is that when I grew up there weren’t many Chinese in my school. I was the only one. The difficulty is being a minority and learning to be accepted. People still look at me and they still tell me that my English is really good. I keep telling them I was born here.

HK; Haha. My research is on the law of success, so I am wondering what your definition of success is?

TG; That’s a really hard question. I guess just achieving your goals. If you set very high goals and you don’t reach them then you are not going to feel successful. If you set low goals and just say, well, I just want to sell the book and I don’t care how well it sells, and you reach that goal, then you are successful. So it really depends on your internal motivation of what you want to achieve.

HK; Do you measure how successful your work by how many copies you sell?

TG; That is a way to do it and that’s in hard numbers. You can use real numbers for that and that’s an easy way to look at it. But I think, for me, I measure success on how good the books are and how well readers like them, and that may have nothing to do with how many copies sell.

HK; Is that your subjective measurement?

TG; The only objective response I can get is if people write to me and say I love this book or I have really good ratings for Amazon because book sales are so… they’re hard to predict. They’re hard to understand why they happen to work, and it’s hard to know why one particular book sells well and another one doesn’t when you think that they are both equally good.

HK; That’s interesting. What is the strongest motivation of you to keep on your writing activity because I thought you could live as a doctor, or possibly as a scholar of anthropology, but why did you choose writing?

TG; Because I really like it. Because I wanted to do it since I was a little kid. I was seven years old when I knew I wanted to be a writer.

HK; Haha, that’s really yang.

TG; Even if I didn’t get paid for it I would probably still be writing books.

HK; I think that’s one of important elements to be a good writer. As a final question I would ask your advice to be successful or to achieve success in general life.

TG; Know what you want and do what it takes to get there. Let’s say if you want to be an astronaut, you have to find out what it takes to be an astronaut. You have to study. You have to achieve your goals. You have to try and make yourself the right person to be chosen. I think it’s really all a matter of choosing your goals and finding out what you need to achieve those goals.