Diagnosis: Writer's Itch

I've just returned from a wonderful medical writing conference.  Intense and exhausting, but informative and inspiring too!

I met some amazing people there. I was privileged to be in a small workshop among talented writers who are also incredibly dedicated clinicians.  There's nothing like finding like minds who share your passion for something (and encourage your growth in that endeavor).  It's so much easier, moreover, to learn from others in an atmosphere of respect rather than an atmosphere of contempt.  We've agreed to continue trying to support each other's writing through a virtual writers' group.

I even got up the courage (despite my intense aversion to public speaking) to pitch an idea for a book in front of a ballroom full of people, mostly other doctors.  I figured if I could do a mock oral exam in public, I should be able to survive a 90-second pitch. It went surprisingly well (despite the fact that I actually signed up for the "pitch" activity without having originally planned to do so).

Writing is my true love, but I didn't have the courage when I was younger to try and pay the bills with it, so I applied to medical school.  Now that I've immersed myself in a conference that has allowed me to blend my love of writing with my love of medicine, I feel re-energized.  I want not only to keep writing but also to write more.  That's to be expected, of course, with any good retreat or conference; there's an initial surge of fervor in the afterglow.  Let's see if I can keep the pilot lit.

***

Here's a passage from Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends that recently took my breath away:

"I could adduce Kafka's formula: 'a book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.'  I could go down to the cafe at a local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler about the power of literature off a mug. But in the end - and here's my point - it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles." 

At first I wanted to say, Wait!  Entertainment and pleasure aren't everything!  What about insight?  Then I realized even insight is a reward once-removed:  insight brings exhilaration, which is, in the end, just another form of pleasure - which the language in Chabon's sentences definitely inspired.

Oh, to write like Chabon, or McEwan, or Kingsolver.  At the conference an idea was brought up about mastery: the idea that 10,000 hours of practice are required before a person can claim expertise at something.  Why do I have the feeling that good writing is different, somehow - a little more precarious?  I do think writing more makes you write better, but not necessarily with greater ease, if Hemingway's statement about sitting at a typewriter and bleeding is any indication! I guess that's what keeps people who love to write both challenged and inspired.  The quest for that "truest sentence" never really ends.