Here are some notes I took at a talk by a General Surgeon on writing. It sounds absurd that I should listen to a doctor to blabber about writing, but when I followed him through, the ghost of my old self knocked.
1. Writing is a form of healing.
2. The ideal effect on a reader: Let words disappear into thought; let thought disappear into emotion.
3. Don't push things. Let the materials come to you.
4. Live with your materials: always debate about it with three or four friends.
5. Feelings are thoughts without words.
6. It's not the language; it is something from within that stirs us.
7. Don't censor yourself. Just write what you feel like.
8. Personal is universal. It is OK to put the self into writing.
9. It's a dreadful mistake to imitate the style of other writers.
10. Don't be afraid of being idiosyncratic if you are.
11. To whom does the story belong?
12. write with a pencil, not with keyboard.
13. Writing is about you, not about objectivity.
14. The unconscious is the royal road to semantic cohesion.
---"Writing Medicine: Another Way of Being a Doctor," talk by Sherwin Nuland, MD 1/18/07
He quoted Wordsworth, Shelly, Huxley, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and Bloom. He sounds like an old-fashioned teacher of creative writing. He is many things that my training kept questioning. But he conjured up the ghost I thought I already left behind. So I put his words down, like some good old song.
The Strip was a huge theme park where childhood fantasies were given material forms. I strolled with the crowds from one hotel to another, happily ignoring the traffic, the work and the future. My favorite? Bellagio. Look at the big pink flowers, the big red bug and the African crown crane who is acting out a Chinese idiom that I have been repeating to myself a zillion times in the past months.
If I do decide to gamble, this is going to be my seat.
