Making time to write

Being a physician is full-time work, but some physicians think of themselves as writers.

William Carlos Williams was one of the most famous American poets. He also practiced medicine in Rutherford, N.J. He had a typewriter in his office and worked on his poetry between patients. He sometimes wrote between house calls, waiting for a baby to arrive.

In The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967), he wrote: “I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write. Was I not interested in man? There the thing was, right in front of me.”

Richard Seltzer, a professor of surgery at Yale, wrote essays and fiction while teaching and seeing patients. He had an unusual routine. He went to bed around 8:30 p.m., got up at 1 a.m., wrote for a couple of hours and then went back to bed until 6 a.m. Both of these physicians were mentioned in an article “Making Time to Write” by another physician, Dr. Lucy M. Candib (Annals of Family Medicine, July 2005; 3(4): 365-366).

Candib discussed the different strategies that busy people use to cultivate their interests. She mentions these classes of writers:

• Deck-clearers, those who get other work done so they have uninterrupted time.

• Wedgers, those who “wedge it in,” as Williams did between patients.

• Schedulers such as Dr. Seltzer. I think I’m part wedger, part scheduler. But the point is not how you do it, but that you do it. People who find ways to cultivate their interests tend to be happy and contented, and those who do not tend to be frustrated.

When I was a newspaper editor, one of the real pleasures of the job was reading a weekly column by Dr. Melvyn Schreiber, a professor at the medical school in Galveston. He would rotate topics. He wrote mostly on books. He wrote one column a month on opera. But my favorites were the personal essays, those he wrote about himself and his own view of life. I have no idea how he found the time to do it, but he did. The readers of a newspaper in a little city in Texas were better for it.