Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Atul Gawande is a Boston-based surgeon and writer. At the end of his 2007 book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance (which is excellent, excellent, excellent, and you should read it, or at least try some of his many articles), he offers some thoughts on writing.  He says:

It makes no difference whether you write five paragraphs for a blog, a paper for a professioanl journal, or a poem for a reading group…You should not underestimate the effect of your contribution, however modest…You should also not underestimate the power of the act of writing itself…Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.

Most of all, by offering your reflections to an audience, even a small one, you make yourself part of a larger world.

Writing is hard. Gawande once remarked that in his opinion, writing an article is harder than performing surgery. I’m no surgeon, but I understand what he’s saying. Putting together sentences is hard, and doing so in a way that properly communicates what you’re trying to say is even harder (it is, after all, the goal of all good writing). It’s not uncommon for me to rewrite the first sentence of a post three or four times before I move on, flying, as I do, without an outline. Sometimes I’ll get halfway through a post and realize that I’m writing a different post from the one I thought I was going to write. Sometimes that means I hit the Delete key a lot, and sometimes that means I run with it.

You’d be amazed at how long it takes me to write some of the shorter posts on my site. I don’t even want to guess at the amount of time I spent writing that trio of comic book posts in July. Were you to lay them out in a word processor in standard 12-point Times New Roman, they would come to 3,424 words, or six full pages of text, single-spaced, without images. The kicker is that I still like those posts a month later, which is a good sign.

I’m constantly torn by my desire to write more substantative pieces and the urge to treat this like a more casual–God help me–blog. In any event, I write, and I do so for all the reasons that Gawande outlined.