The Learning Curve II

Cleaning out my basement filing cabinet, I found some writings of a famous bestselling author that were penned in his early years before he became a serious writer. Ok, so I’m not famous or even published yet, but….

There is nothing like mentoring someone to learn the boundaries of what you know and what you don’t know. I just finished hosting a bright, intelligent third year medical student for her University of Washington family practice rotation. I am sure she learned a great deal, but I think I learned even more.

I learned that I need to work to memorize the generic names of medications instead of the brand names that the drug reps have been throwing at me for years. I learned that I need to accept the medical record technology that is here to stay. I learned how far I have come professionally, how much I have absorbed over the years of practice without really being consciously aware of the process.

But most importantly, I learned that I really care about the people who trust their lives to me and what a gift it is to be involved in what amounts to a huge family. In short, I rediscovered why I became a physician.

Now I want to be a writer. I want to write with the same depth of knowledge, elements of skill and artistic soul that I bring to my medical career. I want to teach without the reader knowing, I want to inspire when the reader faces a similar quandary as my protagonist. Most importantly, I want to know that when the reader closes the book after that last page, her life will be better, healed in some way from the wounds of life’s fickle thorns.

As I revealed in my last blog, at times I feel years from the skill I need, at other times, vibrant with literary power and ability. The truth probably lies somewhere in between and I am not the one to decide where I am on that path…the readers will oblige for me.

But back to my old writings: Reading them again is something akin to finding an old baseball and remembering for the first time in years that this was the one that you hit over the fence in little league….or, more to the point, remembering you could even hit a ball that hard back then.

As I leafed through the file labeled ‘Writing Ideas’ I found several works in progress, one or two ‘finished’ (if that can ever be the case). There was the story of a physician on his last fishing outing, the day before he was to have a high risk surgery for a cancer that threatened his dreams of old age and teaching his grandchildren to fish. Another was a piece about an elderly man who mourns his wife and the child they never had.

I even found the first synopsis and three or four chapters of my current novel in progress. The core precept and characters are the same but the story is in completely different order and it is set in the Pacific Northwest instead of the desert Southwest and Nevada.

How did they strike me after all these years? Well, it was a mixed bag, like looking through an old scrapbook,  the amused horror at the clothing and hairstyles one wore in the past, the sorrow at the lost loves. I found passive verbs and strings of adjectives. I read page after page of backstory written as story, squat paragraphs of dense prose without dialogue. It was a good thing that I did not have a red pen handy.

But  then there was also the recall of sweet memories, the vision of old friends and small victories of youth. The inspiration of innocent art, the threads of instinctive understanding of the heart of storytelling that run through the works. It reminded me of watching my medical  student struggle to connect the pathology lessons with the living patient, knowing that this kid would make it because she has the soul of a physician.

After an hour or so of perusing the files, I put them back into the drawer. Someday, I will look at them again, and I will compare them to what I write now. They will remind me how far I have come, yet bring me back to the reasons that I write. As I slid the file cabinet shut, I thought of an experience even further back.

In high school, I wrote a short story about a rebellious android who died in battle for the rights of sentient robots. I had never read Isaac Asimov’s novel and I did not see the movie I Robot until half a decade ago. To me it was an original idea and I proudly read it to my Senior Honors English class.

Afterward, one of my fellow students came up to me and said that he thought the story was stupid…my first negative review. I guess he had not read Asimov’s work either. I like to think that my seminal critic is somewhere in New York, a burned out copy editor with several of his own novels in a drawer. Or better, the twelfth and last editor to reject J K Rowling’s Harry Potter. Oh the glory of dramatic imagination!

In any case, it is a cycle that goes on. My medical student has made the commitment that I did, to practice medicine and in so doing, become a lifelong learner. So, looking back, and looking forward, to be a true writer, the journey must be the same. Just as I have worked to gain the skills to take care of my patients, I will work to gain the skills to take care of my readers. Both are great and humbling endeavors.

I will be gone the next and following week. Look forward to some great guest blogs from Kay and friends.

S