“If I wrote another book, who would read it?” I lamented.
“I would!” enthused my brother, perhaps echoing Kurt Vonnegut’s remark, “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
Over the years, commercial publishers had reliably dampened my enthusiasm by teaching me to ask two questions as soon as even the idea of another book crossed my mind. Who will sell my book? Who will read my book?
But my brother’s fireproof confidence in me fuelled me to pen a proposal that successfully wound its way through acquisitions until a contract landed in my inbox.
Overnight, the dream of writing another book was replaced with the dread of producing said book – a guide to writing engaging opinion and advocacy columns mixed with a personal account of being a physician exposed to a great variety of experiences.
Being a columnist had made me more observant, deepened my appreciation of medicine and honed my understanding of why every word we say (or write) matters. When I began to teach writing classes, I wanted to democratise what I knew.
Then, George Orwell made me quail. In his famous essay, he accused writers of being motivated by “sheer egoism”, calling them “more vain and self-centred than journalists, although less interested in money”.
Ouch. At least the last bit was true, although not by choice.
As I wrangled with the ego issue, the wonderful Annie Dillard rescued me with her prescient writing from back when I was a teenager.
“The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
She knew my reason to write.
High principles aside, it was on to the next two unglamorous years, starting with a blank document and progressing page by page, draft by draft. How I found the time is how every writer I know finds the time – by squeezing it from elsewhere.
I still haven’t watched Breaking Bad and only finished Succession when news of the final episode was everywhere.
Patient care came first. My notional “writing day” was inevitably taken up by the exigencies of family life, leaving spare nights and weekends to write. Being a writer is heady but doing the writing is painful. This got me wondering about how the writers I admired were so expert and fluent. What innate talent did they possess that I lacked?
Enter James Baldwin with his no-nonsense counsel: “I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
Now, there was a word I recognised from 15 years of medical training: endurance. The next two years of conversations went like this: “I thought you said you finished your book.”
“That was just the last draft.”
Having exhausted the generosity of the people who read my (numerous) drafts and nurtured my spirits, and feeling no more “done”, I ventured to AI for inspiration and distraction. It produced some nice suggestions but when it rewrote my manuscript, I found it stiff, formal and, frankly, dishonest.
The truth was I loved the act of rearranging the same 26 letters in so many ways and was in no rush to wrap up the book. On days that I lost a patient or made a patient cry over bad news, I couldn’t wait to escape to my perennially unfinished manuscript to calm my mind. Oliver Sacks knew exactly how I felt when he called the act of writing an indispensable form of talking to himself.
My explicit permission to dawdle came from Joan Didion. “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
Maybe, Orwell was right after all.
Nearing the end of his life and suffering from oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens remarked that an awareness of mortality was useful for a writer because it helped one avoid the fear of public opinion, sales, critics, or for that matter, friends.
What timely words to strengthen my resolve to publish the work I could no longer stand to read!
At this point, dare I imagine my ideal reader? As if eavesdropping on my thoughts, Joyce Carol Oates warned against it: “He/she may be reading someone else.”
Touché.
Then, just after I had hit “send”, Annie Dillard swung back into my life with a vengeance: “Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients … What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
Gulp.
I would be the first to say my terminally ill patients have better things to do than read my book. After all, what food for thought could I possibly offer to compete with the contemplation of mortality?
My book is out today. In an unexpected gesture, one of my terminally ill patients pre-ordered it so he could tell me in clinic that he looks forward to reading it. But, he added, beaming from ear to ear, if he doesn’t get to finish it, he will leave it to his granddaughter who wants to be a doctor and a writer.
This kind of generosity really does feel like sufficient reward.
• … Srivastava is an Australian oncologist, award-winning author and Fulbright scholar. Her latest book is Every Word Matters: Writing to Engage the Public (Simon & Schuster, A$24.99)
