Type of Teaching Material: Writing How-Tos

Creative writing as a medical instrument

"Writing stories can create better doctors." Baruch is convinced that narrative medicine - focusing on close reading - isn't enough to prepare physicians to deal with ambiguities, confusions and conflicts inherent in medical practice. He urges teaching them to write stories so they can hear their patients' stories better. References and describes courses he has taught (one with an MFA creative writer) to teach medical students about characters, conflict, selecting key details ... storytelling elements often emphasized in creative writing. The goal is to encourage them to struggle with words on the screen (or page) to prepare to more deeply understand the fragmented, often confusing stories presented by patients. Good preparation for a teacher contemplating a narrative assignment; maybe less so for the students themselves.

Haiku Rules of the Road

The online publication Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine provides this brief set of instructions for writing haiku. The Pulse site also includes many examples of haiku. These instructions (and examples from the site) could be used in a variety of settings. For example, the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative teaches a session on writing haiku as part of it's narrative scribe training, a workshop dedicated to developing the skills of listening closely to a story, and then offering it back to the teller. Just as medical record keeping often distills a detailed patient narrative into the forms required for diagnosis and health record keeping, so too haiku can be used to distill a narrative into a gist. The contrast between what details might make it into an electronic health record and what details a haiku might focus upon can prompt discussion of what is left out of many clinical interactions. Writing haiku can also be a useful exercise in college courses. It is an accessible form of poetry to teach as one example and can prompt discussion of what constitutes a narrative.

Fifty-five word stories: “Small jewels” for personal reflection and teaching

Fifty-five word stories are brief pieces of creative writing that use elements of poetry, prose, or both to encapsulate key experiences in health care. In this article, family physician Colleen Fogarty describes how she has used 55-word stories in a seminar she led at the 2009 annual meeting of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM). The article includes a table with instructions on how to write a 55-word story, a description of her seminar and tips on how she taught it, and examples of writing and reactions from the faculty in family medicine residency programs who participated in her seminar. The article is available free of charge in PubMed.