My publicist asked me recently, \u201cWhy do so many doctors turn to writing?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Which gave me pause.\u00a0\u00a0 Until I saw that my life, my brain, had become so packed with \u201cback stories,\u201d enough of them exceedingly dramatic and interesting, that I could almost do no other than struggle to deal with them, to assimilate them, in some productive and creative manner.\u00a0 Otherwise, I think the \u201csubtexts\u201d of my existence were going to script themselves into my day-to-day living in some unhealthy and dysfunctional manner.\u00a0 The more vital past events were looming larger and pushing to the foreground in my life, demanding an accounting.\u00a0 This reality, and no other that I can see, is the origin for THE COST OF DREAMS.<\/p>\n
William Faulkner said it best, \u201cThe past is not dead.\u00a0 It\u2019s not even passed!\u201d<\/p>\n
The following two subtexts demanded an especial mental and emotional reckoning in working up my first novel:<\/p>\n
Firstly, I attended a young foreign-born woman in my hospital\u2019s emergency department a number of years ago.\u00a0 She had been shot and dreadfully wounded in her neck and face by her cocaine-dealing brother-in-law in southern Arizona.\u00a0 Her husband had driven her and their two small children to the northern Midwest some months later, where I found her to be very ill from her inadequately treated, infected and unhealed injuries.\u00a0 She was totally disabled.\u00a0 After several surgeries and sufficient treatment, she required placement in a skilled nursing facility, while her husband dropped the children off at another relative\u2019s home.\u00a0 \u00a0He then drove away and abandoned them all.<\/p>\n
I directed her care for a protracted time, until she drifted away to another nursing facility in another city, I know not where.\u00a0 I always felt very badly for her and the fate she suffered.<\/p>\n
Secondly, I had traveled to Central America on a medical education trip many years ago, and came home to read that a young engineer from California had been murdered not so far from the region where I\u2019d resided. \u00a0Travel mates of mine in San Francisco attended his memorial service at a large public auditorium, which I was informed was filled to standing room only by well-wishers, his friends, and his family.\u00a0 He had been working on a project to bring electricity to a remote village, only to be brutally murdered by that country\u2019s military.\u00a0 A US national news magazine published all the horrifying and gruesome details.<\/p>\n
Some had said to me, \u201cwell, he just threw his life away,\u201d or \u201cwhat a waste.\u201d\u00a0 To which I could only reply, \u201cComplete nonsense!!\u00a0 That young person\u2019s wonderful life was stolen, unlawfully taken from him, while he attempted to elevate the standard of living for highland villagers.\u201d\u00a0 I could not permit the notion that the young man was to be blamed for his own murder.<\/p>\n
These two aforementioned \u201cback stories,\u201d and the genuine human beings living them, I have never forgotten.\u00a0 And now, everywhere I go, I have begun to see stories that I want to write.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My publicist asked me recently, \u201cWhy do so many doctors turn to writing?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Which gave me pause.\u00a0\u00a0 Until I saw that my life, my brain, had become so packed with \u201cback stories,\u201d enough of them exceedingly dramatic and interesting, that I could almost do no other than struggle to deal with them, to assimilate them, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}