Why I help physicians write [PODCAST]

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“Physicians have a deep well of experiences to draw from in their writing. They witness dramatic episodes of heroism, cures, disappointments, and failures. They see unforgettable scenes, hear devastating words, make difficult decisions, and observe people at crucial moments in their lives. Most importantly, they witness the power of cause and effect – one action producing a resulting action – a building block of fiction, nonfiction, and poetical narratives. Great writing comes out of these experiences.

The stresses of the COVID pandemic intensified the need for my students to creatively express themselves. There is more to medicine than science, and physician-writers can feel their doctoring strengthen as they synthesize and imagine experiences and explore on the page what it means to be observant, compassionate, and curious. They regain their original purpose in pursuing medicine as a profession. Complementing their grounding in science, they reclaim their grounding in humanity.”

Jack El-Hai is a writer and creative writing coach.

He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, “Why I help physicians write.”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Rate and review the show at KevinMD.com/rate. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/follow. Today on the show, we have Jack El-Hai. He is an author and a creative writing teacher. He wrote the KevinMD article, “Why I help physicians write.” Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack El-Hai: Thanks for having me here. It’s great to talk about all this.

Kevin Pho: We’ll get into the article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and journey to where you are today?

Jack El-Hai: Yes. For a large number of years now, I’ve been a practicing nonfiction writer, journalist, and book author, and many of my topics have been related to medicine. It’s through that writing about medicine, as a journalist and a nonfiction writer but not as a physician, that I’ve been brought into contact with physicians who are interested in writing, and that’s really what my essay is about. I’ve been teaching for a number of years. I enjoy teaching, but I also enjoy writing, and I enjoy the contact with individuals, with physicians, that writing coaching and teaching gives me.

Kevin Pho: I’ve talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of physicians, and they all have varying skill levels in terms of writing. Some have undergraduate degrees in English, and some don’t. But from your experience as a writing coach, what’s the general writing level of physicians today?

Jack El-Hai: Better than average. But in a way, the writing skill isn’t the point, at least of what I’m teaching, because I think the benefits of writing for physicians come to them regardless of how well they write and regardless of whether or not they choose to publish their work. The benefits come from something that anyone can gain from writing, and those are things like piquing your curiosity, becoming more observant, and becoming more interested in the stories of other people. Writing gives you all of that whether or not you’re a tremendously skilled writer, although I have to say that many of the physicians I’ve worked with are quite fine writers.

Kevin Pho: So can you tell me a story or an anecdote of a physician writer that you’ve coached or come across where writing has made a difference in their professional lives?

Jack El-Hai: Yes. I’ve recently been working with a doctor in Canada who is nearing the end of his career now and is doing a lot of reflecting. I find this is often the case with people who are nearing retirement, or physicians who have already retired: They want to look back and see what they’ve learned, or how they’ve changed, or how being a physician has affected them in some way. Through the time that I’ve been working with him, he has decided to focus his writing on childhood abuse he suffered through a religious leader who he was in contact with when he was a kid, and on going through that process of just getting it down. That’s something that I like to emphasize in my teaching: At first, just get it down. Don’t worry about it being perfect. Don’t worry about it even being very coherent.

But he has made a lot of sense out of not just how he responded as a child to what he went through, but why he went into medicine, how he worked with his patients, and how he can work better with his patients, because he’s not yet retired. And it’s happened in a really short amount of time. That’s one of the things I like about creative writing for physicians. Any kind of creative expression is great, I think, for doctors and other medical professionals, whether it’s musicianship or dancing or painting, whatever it is. But the thing about writing is that it’s so accessible. All you need is a pen and a notebook, and it helps you focus and think about yourself and observe what’s going on in you and in others. I think this student I had in Canada really exemplifies how that can be of a great deal of benefit.

Kevin Pho: All right, let’s transition into the KevinMD article that you wrote. It’s titled “Why I help physicians write.” Now, for those of you who get a chance to read your article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Jack El-Hai: This essay is about what got me onto the track of being a writing teacher and coach for physicians, and it describes how it all happened at a particular moment, probably about 15 years ago, at a conference that I was speaking at in San Diego. It was a medical conference, and I was speaking about one of my books, which was on a medical topic. It tells how, after my talk, a neurosurgeon came up to me and told me that he was interested in writing a book similar to mine. My initial response, I have to admit, was not very generous. Not my initial response, but my initial impulse, was to say, “So, Mr. Neurosurgeon, you want to be a writer? Well, I would like to be a brain surgeon, but I don’t expect that to happen.”

But then, fortunately, I didn’t say that, and I reflected on what he was really asking me about. He was telling me he wanted to express himself. He was looking for tips and pointers. So I eventually did get back to him by email and gave him what I could. But it got me thinking, as I met other doctors while I was promoting this book who also wanted to write: Was there something more organized and more professional that I could do for physicians to help them take advantage of writing? So I eventually set up some workshops in person and have done the virtual coaching.

So the essay really explains how I got onto the track, and the question of why I teach physicians to write is really about how it benefits them through the qualities that I’ve mentioned already. It helps them be better doctors, if they’re still practicing, by becoming better able to relate with their patients and colleagues and just more curious and observant about what they’re seeing in front of them.

Kevin Pho: So what are some of your highest-impact writing tips that you can give to some of my clinicians who may be listening to this podcast?

Jack El-Hai: Well, number one is that writing and publishing are completely separate activities, and nearly all of the benefits that come to physicians from writing, I believe, come from the writing part of it and not from the publishing part. It’s a little hard for me to say, because I’m a professional writer and I certainly get benefits from publishing. But for the kinds of benefits that I’m hoping to lead doctors to, it doesn’t matter whether you publish or not.

Another lesson that I tell everybody who I’m in contact with is that you can write in tiny chunks of time. One of the questions I hear most often is, “How in the world do I find time to write when my own schedule is so hectic and uncontrolled?” I like to tell those people the story of William Carlos Williams, a physician and also a renowned poet of the past, who wrote in 10-minute chunks of time. When he had a spare moment, he would take notes or sit down at a typewriter in his office, close the door, and do whatever he could in the amount of time he had available. From that, he built a quite big and admirable writing career. So it doesn’t take long stretches of time for physicians to take advantage of the benefits of writing.

Kevin Pho: Now, on the flip side, what are some red flags? What are some common mistakes you see physicians make when attempting to write?

Jack El-Hai: Wanting to write for the glory and the fame of it. That can happen, and it’s fantastic when that happens, but it’s not how to gain the most from writing, because when you’re trying to write a bestseller, you’re not following your natural impulses. You’re following what the market might be, or what’s best, modeling after other bestsellers. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about following your own inclinations, exploring your own questions, and trying to learn about what’s around you. Whether you’re writing essays, memoir, short stories, novels, poetry, whatever, it’s about following what’s inside of you. So that’s a red flag, I would say.

Also, trying to become a writer without reading, and especially reading like a writer. To read like a writer means to look at a work that you’re reading to see what works and what doesn’t. I give my physician students a lot of examples that they can learn from. In fact, one thing that I think is most important in my interactions with them is to ask them a lot of questions about their writing. I’m not telling them what to do. I’m asking them why they have done what they have done and whether they think it worked.

Kevin Pho: Now, a creative writing coach for physicians is relatively uncommon. I haven’t heard of very many of them before I came across your article. So what kind of questions should a physician ask himself or herself when they want to take that next step and consider hiring a coach to help them write?

Jack El-Hai: One is how they learn best. Do they learn best in group settings? Well, then individual coaching may not be the answer. But for a lot of physicians, group workshops are difficult, because they mean you have to be there at a particular time. Sometimes writers, like the doctor in Canada who I mentioned earlier, are writing about very personal things and don’t want to expose that to a group. I think that individual coaching is a good way to get past those barriers and to really get individual attention in your writing. That’s important because writing is an individual process. There are things you can learn from the writing of other students, but you can learn a lot from somebody who is reading attentively what you’ve written, making suggestions, giving you models, and asking questions about what you have written.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Jack El-Hai. He is an author and a creative writing teacher. He wrote the KevinMD article, “Why I help physicians write.” Jack, I get a lot of questions from physicians, and they simply say, “Kevin, I want to start writing a book.” It could be a memoir. It could be on our health care system. It could be on just any topic that they have expertise in. Tell me what the immediate next step should be once they get that inclination that they want to write a book.

Jack El-Hai: Saying that you want to write a book, and I’ve written about 15 of them, is a little like saying, “I want to live a life.” It’s a gigantic process. So one of the first things to do is to break that process down into tiny steps, and some of these tiny steps can be accomplished in small chunks of time. Some take longer. But what you want to do is to understand the questions that you wish to ask in your book. That’s one thing I always try to do when I begin a book, whether it’s on a medical topic or not: to narrow the scope down to two or three questions that not only I want to ask, but that I am the best person to ask.

Then there are all kinds of additional steps related to research, if it’s a book that needs to be researched, and writing a book proposal. It’s a huge topic, and I get into all of that with my writing students who want to get into it. But writing a book is like a military campaign, and it needs to be planned out in small, tiny steps.

Kevin Pho: My final question: What are some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Jack El-Hai: Well, the most important take-home message is that I think physicians can gain, and do gain, from any kind of expressive activity, but writing is perfect for a lot of physicians, for a number of reasons. One is that the process by which you learn how to become a good writer is, I think, a lot like the process in which you learn how to become a good physician. It’s all about reading and study. It’s about imitating. It’s about observing and then practicing. For a physician to become a writer is, I think, a lot like going through medical school. A plus is that writing is accessible to anyone, with very small demands in materials.

But another take-home message is that this process of becoming a writer for physicians helps others as well as helping yourself. It helps your patients. It helps your family, colleagues, and co-workers, because it enlarges your world. You move from being a physician who may feel overburdened or severely focused on the work at hand to becoming somebody who is more aware of what’s going on around them and more interested in what’s going on. All of that can only help you become a better doctor.

Kevin Pho: Jack, thank you so much for sharing your story, time, and insight. Thanks again for being on the show.

Jack El-Hai: My pleasure. Thank you, Kevin.

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