Melissa R. Collings

Before Melissa Collings started writing women’s fiction and romantic comedies, she worked as a surgical physician associate in Nashville, where one of her favorite procedures was reconstructing a lower-lumbar tattoo after a back surgery. Her stories, like her, are always a mix: light and dark, laughter and tears, outlandish and grounded, beautiful and ugly, glitter and charcoal smears. Her interests are way too varied; her imagination never fails to get her into trouble; and she lives by her life philosophy: nothing is impossible, and everything is better with glitter—except surgical wounds.

Collings's new novel is The Love Operation.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Quite a bit, although it took us a while to get there.

My original title was Operating on the Past, which I loved because it worked on two levels. Cordelia is a spine surgeon who approaches problems as things to diagnose and fix, and she’s also operating on information from her past.

But my publisher wanted a title that put the romance more front and center. This led to a lot of back-and-forth.

Eventually, I proposed The Love Operation, which was close to one of the ideas my editor had suggested but still gave me the double meaning I wanted. Cord is essentially performing an operation on her love life, but an “operation” can also be a mission, and she definitely treats it like one.

I think it does a pretty good job of telling readers what they’re getting. Cord approaches her love life much the way she approaches surgery: identify the problem, gather the information, make a plan, fix it. Unfortunately for her, people are significantly less cooperative than spines.

What's in a name?

A lot. I think hard about character names—how they sound when I say them, how they feel on the page, and whether they seem to belong to the person I’m creating.

Cordelia Wren came together almost backward. I knew I wanted everyone to call her Cord, because she’s a spine surgeon and I couldn’t resist the spinal cord connection. From there came Cordelia, which felt strong enough for her but still had some softness to it.

Wren is my daughter’s middle name. I’ve always loved it, and once I put Cordelia and Wren together, magic.

That’s usually when I know I’ve found the right name. I can spend an unreasonable amount of time trying different ones, but eventually there’s one that starts to feel less like something I chose and more like that character could never have been called anything else.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Equally hard. And I rewrite both. A lot.

I generally know where I want a story to begin and where I want it to end, but the execution of both goes through an unreasonable amount of revision because they’re asking the reader to make two very different decisions.

The beginning asks: Do I want to spend time with this story? Is there a question I need answered? Do I like the voice, the atmosphere, the people enough to keep going?

The ending asks something even scarier: Was it worth it? Did everything pay off? Do I feel satisfied? And, ideally: Do I love this enough to go looking for whatever else this author has written?

With The Love Operation, I knew where Cord needed to begin emotionally and where I wanted her to end up, but I rewrote both ends repeatedly trying to get those feelings exactly right.

So I don’t think I could choose one as harder. I rewrite both until I can picture a reader giddy and ravenous at the beginning and hungry for more at the end.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Probably more than I should admit.

I relate to Cordelia's instinct to fix things. And, if I’m being especially honest, to fix people. I spent a long time thinking that if I could just understand what someone needed, I could help them become happier, healthier, better. One of the lessons Cord has to learn is one I’ve had to learn too: other people are not projects. They are responsible for themselves, and the person I actually have control over is me.

Where we differ is that Cord has much more boss energy than I do. She takes up space. She says what she thinks. She goes after what she wants with very little apology. I loved getting to live vicariously through that part of her.

So she isn’t me, but there’s enough of me in her that I understand exactly why she makes the mistakes she makes, which is probably why I also have so much affection for her while she’s making them.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Medicine, without question. I spent years working in neurosurgery and spine care, and hospitals are full of the things I’m most interested in writing about: fear, hope, power, vulnerability, dark humor, and people trying to maintain some illusion of control when life has other plans.

I’m also endlessly inspired by people—the things they say, the things they don’t say, and all the strange ways we try to understand one another.

Visit Melissa R. Collings's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Love Operation.

--Marshal Zeringue