Atul Gawande Explains The Writing Process In Exquisitely Accurate Detail
Today's Times offers a profile of Atul Gawande, surgeon and New Yorker contributor, which coincides with the arrival of his second essay collection, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance. Gawande—in spite of the fact that he listens to The Killers—is clearly a genius (he's got the MacArthur grant to prove it). But how did he get his start as a writer?
He began contributing little pieces to Slate about 10 years ago, while still a resident, he said, even though he thought he had no particular aptitude and had never written for publication before. He took one writing course in college, and the instructor told him that he could write a sentence but had nothing to say. "Slate was perfect for me," he explained, "because it enabled me to fly under the radar. It was just like going through surgical residency. I did 30 columns for them, and it was like doing 30 gallbladders. Then I had to learn how to get comfortable with 4,000-word and then 8,000-word essays for The New Yorker."
God, we thought it was just the readers who compared Slate to gallbladder surgery. Nice to know the writers see it the same way.
