My Writing Journey

A surgeon and a writer

Willy wore only red track suits.

Velvet, fleece, burgundy or almost burnt orange, but they were red, and they were track suits. That’s the first thing he told my first year Creating Writing class as we sat at a round table. I can’t remember everyone else in that room (I hope they’re faring better than I), and I can’t remember everything he said, but he told us that his track suits were his signature. That’s what I remember.

He did tell us, at some point, ‘Write what you know’. We’d heard this in high school, of course, from our favorite teachers, who were, undoubtedly, our English teachers. But, at 18, freshly arrived in Bronxville, New York, on the idyllic campus of Sarah Lawrence College, I was intensely aware that what I knew, was possibly nothing.

Known to us as Willy, he was better known as William Melvin Kelley, not to be confused with William K. Kelley, a lawyer. Willy’s books include the notable ‘A Different Drummer’ and ‘Dem’. I have to admit that I did not read them back then, but only read them later as an adult and only then understood his unsung brilliance.

What I did know, though, was when I showed him my handful of self-published zines, he told me to keep them coming, because these somehow contained my true voice, outside of the artifice of my attempted short stories, mostly semi-biographical drivel about being in love with my best friend in high school.

He had a collection of my zines in his office when I saw him, years later, on a campus visit. I mailed him a few things in medical school but he died in 2017 of kidney failure and I, wrapped up in residency as I was, didn’t even find out until a year later.

Thinking now about my writing journey though, and why I write what I write the way I do, I keep thinking back to those days sitting in Willy’s office. It didn’t feel like learning, but I must’ve been, even if those lessons didn’t dawn on me until twenty years later. The most, most, most important lesson of all was: find your voice, and use it.

I had written ever since I could grasp a crayon and a scrap of paper. In middle school I wrote a prize-winning poem called ‘Candlelight’ (someone please dig that out of my boxes of stuff). I wrote for our literary magazine and the yearbook in high school, and kept up my zine, Flying Penguins, for over a decade, long after print was supposedly dead. But I didn’t know anything about writing, I just did it. I wrote down what was in my head. My sister used to say, ‘Why are you always thinking?’ I think that is what separates me, defines me as a writer, the thing they don’t always point out. To write stuff down, you have to have things going on in your head.

Throughout medical school and residency, I wrote research abstracts. Interesting, but a different kind of writing altogether. I would write poems in my phone after a particularly difficult night on call, or in those emotional moments as you sit on a plane, about to fly away from your family. I wrote journal entries, but I didn’t have time to formulate these into things that people would read.

In my last year of training, I took advantage of a supposed educational credit (though to this day, I haven’t gotten my money back), and registered for the Children’s Literature Fellow program at Stony Brook University. At first I was waitlisted. I figured that I didn’t have that strong of an application, not having a degree in English, or literature, or an MFA in Creative Writing or anything like that. (My degree is a Bachelor in Liberal Arts; while I started off focusing on Creative Writing, I eventually ended up concentrating on fine art). But, a week later, I got an email saying that I had a spot if I wanted it. I said yes immediately, not knowing for sure how I would juggle my demanding operating room schedule with writing a novel. I will tell you, the answer is: not well. At least not for the first six months, when I let my writing slide into corners of the nights and lunch breaks. I didn’t even write on weekends because I wanted that time to be spent with my partner, whom I rarely saw that year. In July, I attended the annual writing conference and my advisor there, Donna Freitas, said something very simple, “It’s not brain surgery or rocket science. Just write every day.” I had never known that it wasn’t enough to have talent or a good voice without some discipline — daily writing and working at your craft. After that, I wrote every morning at 5:30 before work. I finished a novel in a year.

Now I’m onto the next phase of my life, trying to juggle being a surgeon with writing fiction, non-fiction for my blog and research, and poetry. I feel like I have a lot of things to write, and not enough time to write them! I’m learning a lot from Medium about how to be a successful writer, but I feel like the biggest thing has been to read what other people are doing, and hope that they will read what you are writing. I’m still trying to develop my network. As a surgeon, we work as a team in the operating room, but otherwise I think that surgeons and writers have one thing in common: we feel like solitary creatures, ruminating privately so that we can express publicly. I sometimes worry that I give too much of myself away in my writing and have nothing left for my loved ones. But that’s the point, too, isn’t it? The trick for me now is to get out of my shell and share as much as possible, get feedback, and revise.

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