Writerly resolutions for 2018: say hello to the rest of our lives

(This post is a reprint. The writer will return to regular schedule January 2, 2018.)

For this final entry about writers’ resolutions for 2018, I want to write about something besides writing. Notice, this isn’t about quitting. It’s about expanding, about having a life outside of writing that nourishes the craft emotionally as well as physically.

It’s often said that most writers can’t support themselves solely as writers. And that’s not a bad thing. History (and literature) are full of examples of authors whose “outside” job actually led to their writing. Or informed it. Or just made them better writers by broadening their experience and sympathy.

image: pixabay

Take doctors, for instance. Medicine may hardly seem like a profession for those with a literary bent (although for several years I’ve attended a local Literature + Medicine conference aimed at using literature to aid medical workers.) But medicine is among the professions which have historically produced major literary figures. And not just by writing about medicine.

Consider the careers of Anton Chekov. Or Abraham Verghese. Even Arthur Conan Doyle. (Where would his Sherlock Holmes have been without Dr. Watson?)

Or consider the late Oliver Sacks, who was still in active medical practice nearly forty years after his first bestseller, Awakenings, was turned into a popular film. After a further string of popular and critically-acclaimed books, Sacks could probably have afforded financially to drop his medical career. But he knew the value of having a day job.

I’ve thought of making a list of all the doctors who maintained practices while writing. Or all the dentists, lawyers, teachers, civil servants, business people and others who continued to write, and write well, while practicing their “day jobs.” But it would fill all the room in all my posts for the rest of this year. 

For now, I’ll just urge all of us to seize the advantages a day job offers for enhancing writing in the coming year.

I trained and worked for several years as a journalist, then spent nearly twenty-five years of my working life in customer service work because my family needed the regular hours a nonwriting job provided. But even as a journalist I’d never have learned the breadth of information I did as a customer service rep. In the course of talking about their financial issues, callers gave me a wealth of information about their personal lives, ways of speaking and making a living I couldn’t have learned in a lifetime of reading research articles.

How else would I have known what it’s like to be a welfare mom, a truck driver, an accountant, a prisoner, an immigrant student? Heard how many dialects there are among Southerners, Midwesterners, New Englanders? Or what it’s like to be very old or disabled or just plain furious at life?

Since retiring from the bureaucracy of a large government agency with the (fulfilled) intention of writing more, I’ve volunteered at a nonprofit organization that provides therapy through horsemanship. It reconnects me with a love of horses developed from early life on a working cattle ranch. And it’s opened even more possibilities for characters and settings.

For 2018, let’s embrace our “day jobs,” whatever working hours those entail, both for themselves and their application to our writing. And consider volunteering or pursuing a hobby outside of writing. Who knows where it may lead? 

Adventure classics -- Witnesses to catastrophe

Awakenings

by Oliver Sacks

#

London-born Oliver Sacks was the son of two doctors, come to the United States to do neurological research. But “I was always dropping things or breaking things,” he confessed to a medical audience, “and eventually they said: ‘Get out! Go work with patients. They’re less important.’”

The line got sardonic laughter from the Dr. Sacks’ audience of doctors, editor/author Wendy Lesser reported in her review of the documentary film based on Sacks’ most startling medical discovery.

His 1973 book, Awakenings, drawn from his experiences with post-encephalitic patients, received two film treatments. The first was the documentary Lesser viewed in 2001 at the New York University School of Medicine with Sacks present. This is also the film he refers to in later editions of his book, references that puzzled me at first, since I knew only the later commercial film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.

Fortunately, Sacks includes still photos from the documentary in the book’s later editions. But avidly though I studied them, they were almost irrelevant. I already knew these people, had fallen in love with them -- Frances D., Rose R., Leonard L., and others whose lives Sacks documented after his banishment from laboratory work to the chronic care hospital Beth Abraham, housing victims of a strange sleeping sickness epidemic of the 1920’s.

All patients had symptoms of Parkinsonism, but they were unusual in developing the disease at relatively young ages after recovering from a post-World War I viral form of encephalitis. Their version of Parkinson’s was also abnormally severe -- a “decades-long ‘sleep’ which closed over their heads and in the 1930’s and thereafter,” Sacks reports in his introduction to life at the hospital he gave the pseudonym “Mount Carmel.”

“One thing, and one alone, was (usually) spared amid the ravages of this otherwise engulfing disease: the ‘higher faculties’ -- intelligence, imagination, judgement, and humour,” Sacks wrote.

But in 1967, a doctor working with similar patients in England reported benefits from the use of the drug L-DOPA. With some of his patients who were able to communicate clamoring for the drug, Sacks began trials at Beth Abraham. The effects seemed at first miraculous, as patients who had been immobile, in some cases catatonic, for decades awoke as if resurrected.

Euphoria soon gave way to dismay as side effects proliferated, sometimes leaving patients more disabled even than before the drug trials. Still, the “awakened” patients urged Sacks to chronicle their stories, not simply as case histories but as individuals whose fate “was to become unique witnesses to a unique catastrophe.”

After decades of additional drug trials, one patient, Lillian, who appeared in the documentary was still well enough to act as on-set adviser for the 1990 Hollywood movie. Unfortunately, the single scene in which she appeared, with star DeNiro, was cut. (“I guess they thought real patients weren’t authentic enough,” Sacks remarked.) The last survivor of the original patients, Lillian died in 1992.

For more about Sacks and his writings, including additional books, see
www.oliversacks.com/.

For Wendy Lesser’s complete review of the Awakenings documentary, see “Seeing ‘Awakenings’ With Its Real-Life Cast,” at www.nytimes.com/.

　

#

(Next Wednesday -- I’d hoped to follow this Adventure classics’ post with a discussion of Dr. Sacks’ acquaintance, Dr. Temple Grandin, and her memoir of her own life with autism. But it looks like the Dallas Public Library won’t have her book in time for me to renew my memory of it. So I’ll go with a possibly even stranger real life tale by British-Soviet mole Kim Philby, My Silent War.)

Wordcraft -- Resolution IV: do something else

This is the final entry in writing resolutions for 2013. Before you throw in the towel -- or your notebook -- I’m not talking about quitting as a writer, but about doing something in addition to writing.

It’s a topic more than usually on my mind because the adventure classics discussion Wednesday will be about a physician-writer who’s never given up his nonwriting job. Dr. Oliver Sacks is still in active medical practice nearly forty years after his first literary bestseller, Awakenings, turned into a popular film.

In another post (“The importance of being employed,” January 18, 2012) I noted that most writers can’t support themselves solely as writers. After a string of popular and critically-acclaimed books, Dr. Sacks probably could afford to drop his medical career. But he knows the value of having a day job as well.

I considered making a list of all the doctors who maintained practices while writing. Or all the dentists, lawyers, teachers, civil servants, business people and others who continued to write, and write well, while practicing their “day jobs.” But it would fill all the room in all my posts for the coming year.

For now, I’ll just hope you’ll seize all the advantages your day job offers for your writing in the coming year.

I trained and worked for several years as a journalist, then spent nearly twenty-five years of my working life in customer service work because my family needed the regular hours a nonwriting job provided. But even as a journalist I’d never have learned the breadth of information I did as a customer service rep. In the course of talking about their financial issues, callers gave me a wealth of information about their personal lives, ways of speaking and making a living I couldn’t have learned in a lifetime of researching articles.

How else would I have known what it’s like to be a welfare mom, a truck driver, an accountant, a prisoner, an immigrant student? Heard how many dialects there are among Southerners, Midwesterners, New Englanders? Or what it’s like to be very old or disabled?

Since retiring from the bureaucracy of a large government agency with the (fulfilled) intention of writing more, I’ve volunteered at a nonprofit organization that provides therapy through horsemanship. It reconnects me with a love of horses developed from early life on a working cattle ranch. And it’s opened even more possibilities for characters and settings.

For 2013, embrace your “day job,” whatever working hours it entails, for itself and its applications to your writing. And consider volunteering or pursuing a hobby outside of writing. You never know where it may lead.

(Need more -- or different -- writing resolutions? See my previous year’s list, “Resolution 1: subscribe,” “Resolution number 2: Join other writers,” “Resolution 3: Get out there!” and “Resolution 4: Pay it forward,” from 2011.)

#

I can’t end another year of blogging without acknowledging readers from dozens of countries on six continents who have viewed these posts more than 10,000 times, including the ten brave souls who read my first post in August 2010. Thanks!