Renovations

One good thing about being a doctor was no need for self-motivation. The impetus of time being critical helped, too, that someone needed me, often immediately. 

That didn’t just add up to taking care of others. Helping solve a patient’s physical or emotional problem in a visit was instant validation for me, especially since I (mostly) loved my patients. It was why I worked nights to finish grad school and get into med school, dragged a pregnant belly on rounds, drove to the hospital in snowstorms.

Now I’m no longer practicing, I write novels. The only goal in writing fiction is to finish a story. Polishing it with an eye toward making the words add up to something that makes sense, entertains, and is meaningful. And that can mean a total of almost 100,000 words before you find out if it’s crap or not. 

It’s not like giving a patient an antibiotic for strep throat. There’s no way to tell what works and what doesn’t, and, anyway, nothing works for every reader. The goalpost is always moving. It’s not like my husband’s profession—if he programs a link for the user, he can check immediately if it takes them where he wants the to go.

The switch to writing from another profession is difficult. Time is open-ended, deadlines are often far off if they exist at all. And it’s solitary, even with a writing group. No one’s checking the daily progress or if what’s been done is any good. Sometimes your mind whispers, “It’s crap.” It’s hard not to listen to your mind when it’s the only thing in the room except for the cat, who obviously doesn’t care.

Thank goodness my coming novel Under Water had a story that seemed to write itself and characters with universal and timeless tales of longing for connection, dealing with grief, and healing. Readers of the advance copies are uniformly validating. Wasn’t instant—more like two years after starting, but I’ll take it!