The Donostia University Hospital has become the epicenter of a series of impossible deaths. A nurse and a retired military doctor guard secrets that arouse the suspicions of the Ertzaintza, and both have their own reasons for investigating what caused those deaths.
In this making-of Martín Torres explains how he wrote The Nurse (NdeNovela).
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Troubles are my thing. I am an emergency physician, and I devote myself to solving them. That defines you; it teaches you to see the world differently and it loads you with a weight that isn’t yours. The weight of lives that cross your path, the weight of decisions made in a fraction of a second that could have been different, or the scars of a system that is sustained only by the voluntarism of a team that does everything it can with what it has. Your team, your people, the tribe you belong to. People you admire in some cases and whom you always respect, because they are the ones who save you when everything goes wrong.
Now I also create problems. I invent them, though not entirely.
I have written my first novel, The Nurse, a thriller with a noir soul.
Everything began with the same patient the story starts with. She had another name and another tattoo, but she too was harmed by some very bad men. Because the crime plot is fiction, but all the medical cases that appear in the book are real and I have treated them myself or have been present when my colleagues did. On occasion I have had to soften them, because reality, often, surpasses fiction.
In emergencies anything can happen to anyone, at any time. It’s a place where pressure changes everything, and you can’t allow the obvious to distract you from the hidden. You trust your training, but you know it isn’t enough. One must adapt, make quick decisions, and endure whatever comes. Above all, endure. Without complaint, setting the right tone and getting the work done.
This is how I wrote this novel: treating the process as a shift on duty and the mystery as the diagnosis of a critically ill patient.
The first draft —which is not the novel, because a novel is something far more complex than an initial version— was fourteen weeks of exhaustive typing sessions, locked away in a dark office, pushing through nights until dawn.
I didn’t drink whiskey or smoke with one eye half-closed from the smoke while muttering the dialogues on the screen, but I must have had a similar expression. A baby woke up every little while, several cups of coffee on the desk, and post-its scattered along the side of the computer with the key concepts for the upcoming chapters. Only this: papers stained with coffee over the next shocking scene.
And that is how I wrote the first version of The Nurse. Repeating this exhausting and frenetically monotonous routine for three and a half months. Every day.
Then came my editors, who with their work and talent made the book into something better. And the editing phase was a somewhat more sober process.
But a book is still more than that. Now you have to reach people, offer them the excitement they are seeking this summer. One tries to explain what The Nurse is, but now you—dear readers—are the owners of this story. The last page of this making-of belongs to you: you give the novel its meaning, you draw conclusions from corners the writer hadn’t even foreseen, and above all, you are what makes the adventures of Sophie Boussignac and Víctor Viso go further. I will keep trying to make you feel the emotion of the next page.
You don’t need extraordinary experiences to be a writer, but they’ve helped me. Just as knowing what blood smells like or how broken the tiles are in Box 3 of the trauma corridor. Because the important thing about The Nurse is the intrigue, the pace, the action, but showing the unknown reality of how an emergency department operates gives it a realism that, at the same time, reveals our secrets.
Everyone casts a quick glance as they slow down when passing a traffic accident. Here I invite you to look, but you’ll have to hold on tight because the novel hits you on the first page and won’t stop shaking you in every scene until the end.
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Author: Martín Torres. Title: The Nurse. Publisher: NdeNovela. Available at: Todostuslibros.