Dr. Rosenfield had wanted to be a poet for as long as he could remember. During his freshman year of college at Brandeis University, he entered 86 poetry contests but never earned recognition.
Years later, finding time to write the books and juggle personal and professional obligations was an ongoing challenge, but it got easier with each book. The first book took 18 years to write. The second took 2 years and the third took less than a year, he said.
"What I had to do was have protected time where I could not be interrupted," said Dr. Rosenfield, who is also a professor of neurology at Cornell University, New York. "The best place for that is first class on a plane, because you cannot be interrupted. I learned the hard way that I could not dictate [the book]. That was a disaster."
To write effectively, "I have to have 46 hours and be alone. I will block out a day. I will get someone to cover for me that day. Then I will go to the office and no one's allowed in. The door is shut. I put on jeans and a T-shirt and my secretary understands 'I am not here. Pretend I'm in Dallas.'"
When asked how much of Dr. Swept's life is based on his own, he replied: "If he ever was, he isn't now."
He went on to explain that during a recent family trip, he was convinced that the airline had lost their luggage on a return flight home. Once he arrived at the airport's baggage carousel, his wife said to him: "Let's just go home. They'll find the luggage and send it."
Dr. Rosenfield refused. He wanted to stay until the luggage surfaced.
"What would Swept do?" his wife asked.
He thought about this. Then Dr. Rosenfield realized he'd been standing at the wrong baggage carousel the entire time.
"Swept would never be at the wrong carousel," he said.
The Speaking Heart
Other physician writers take a more personal approach to their work. Dr. Mimi Guarneri drew from a combination of scientific research, her own experiences, and stories about her patients to create "The Heart Speaks: A Cardiologist Reveals the Secret Language of Healing" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
She describes the book as a personal journal that explores the emotional, spiritual, and mental aspects of the heart. "I want people to look at the heart as more than a physical pump," said Dr. Guarneri, a cardiologist who is the founder and medical director of the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine in La Jolla, Calif. "When we think about heart disease, we have to look beyond cholesterol … at whether or not someone is depressed or hostile or isolatedall of these other things that go into how well someone does, not only for the heart but for health in general."
She credits her patients for teaching her that good care for the heart goes well beyond medicine and biomechanics. "I have evolved because of my patients," she said. "I never came out of cardiology training thinking about the heart as an emotional organ. I never really thought about broken heart syndrome until I started talking to patients and they told me about the death of their child, or their arrythmia began when X amount of stressful things happened. That's where the book came from. The hope for the book is that when you read someone else's story, you'll look at your own life through a different lens. From there, you can start to make change."
Dr. Guarneri, who majored in English literature as an undergraduate at New York University, New York, started collecting patient stories on her personal computer. "It was in spurts, because there would be a moving story from the day, but not every day," she said. "I would go home, think about those things, and then I would write what happened. I would also write my reaction to it: what kind of effect was this having on me personally as a physician."
Dr. Guarneri advises aspiring physician writers to keep a journal. "Start to put your thoughts down, even if it's a little bit every day," she said. "Take what your passion is and write from there. Don't write for anyone else but you. I wrote this [book] for me. I never intended to publish it. I was amazed how Simon & Schuster bought this book in less than a week, because it never occurred to me that a physician had not done anything like this before."