On Being A Writer

About 18 months ago, I wrote a piece for bookworming (my other, occasionally updated, blog) after I attended a reading by Lauren Groff. During that reading, Groff asked the crowd if anyone was a writer, and I noticed that the majority of the people in the audience had raised their hands, although I had not. That got me started on what it would take for me to feel as if I could raise my hand in response to that question, and you can find some of my thoughts, if you’re interested, in the original post.

If you choose not to read it (and that’s fine by me) here’s the summary: I did not feel like a writer, but I was sure that I wanted to become one. I thought of myself in some limbo of becoming, but I was optimistic about that, planning to commit some time to the process, and reading Stephen’s King’s On Writing to help me get started.

I’m not all that ashamed to say that I didn’t find as much time as I had hoped. The pressures of medical school can be overwhelming, and Andrew moved here. I did write a couple of pieces last year, but I didn’t commit to it the way that I had intended to when I was writing that blog entry. Such is life. There’s nothing to do but move forward.

This past weekend, I did a whole bunch of moving forward. At the AMSA Writer’s Institute, I had that fire lit under my ass again. It’s a much more powerful flame this time because it came stoked by a community of other talented and inspired people who, like me, want to find a way to fit writing into a medical career. I was ready, once again, to commit to figuring it out, to think about becoming a writer. I wrote the beginnings of a couple pieces that I think might come to something. I had great conversations with a couple of physician writers about how they have made it work in their lives and how to develop my craft. I met some amazing colleagues whose writing I’m sure we’ll all be reading for years into the future. By the third full day, I was totally sold. I was inspired and excited and motivated as I have never been before. This was it, I thought, I am really going to become a writer.

Then there was a moment when Dr. Sayantani DasGupta challenged that idea of becoming. She stood in front of the room, beautiful and passionate, and told us all that we were already writers. I’m paraphrasing here, but she assured us that we were not baby writers, nor apprentice writers, not people that wanted to become writers at some point in the future, but writers. Certainly we could and should develop in the craft, but that development was the development of a writer, not the development into a writer. She told us that we had to claim the title, all the better to be able to use it.

It took me right back to that blog entry from so long ago, and it blew all those ideas about the process of becoming right out of my mind. And for the best I think, because now I have no more excuses. I have, as one of the other participants wrote in his blog on MedScape this week, crossed from “should” to “will.” There is no more, “If I want to be a writer I should find more time to work.” That sentence doesn’t make sense anymore. There is a new imperative.

I am a writer. There is nothing left to do but write.

And damn, doesn’t that feel good?