Urologist, author discusses process behind latest book

In this video, urologist and author Martha Boone, MD, discusses the process of writing her new book “The Unfettered Urologist.”

Transcription:

I'm a member of an organization called the Atlanta Writers Club. It is an incredibly good writing club. I would go there about once a month, and I would take writing classes and I would read books about writing. I've been doing that for years, because I'm just fascinated by books and writing. But for this particular book, I used things that I did every single day. I would jot down the questions that people asked me most frequently. And I would look at what I was doing that maybe was a little bit different than what other people were doing. I've been a very disciplined person; I think the field of surgery causes you to be that way, because you have to get up and go operate no matter how you feel. If someone's got a cancer, it doesn't matter if you don't feel like doing it that day; you have to do it. If you're in the operating room and somebody stops bleeding, you don't have the option of going, "I'm hungry, I want to go to lunch." You just have to keep doing what you're doing. The world of surgery makes a person quite disciplined. When I was still working, I would get up at 4:00 in the morning and write for an hour and then begin my day as a urologist. Once I was retired, I was able to sleep into the late hour of 5am. So I would get up at 5 am and write from about 5:00 to 7:00 while I would have my coffee. "The Unfettered Urologist" only took me 3 months to write. The hard part is the editing, to get another person to understand what you're thinking. It's very easy to think of all these ideas in your own head, but to get them into a format where another person can see what you're what you're trying to explain, that's where it gets dicey. And when you're trying to explain scientific information, and you're trying to make sure it's on the level that patients, nurse practitioners, PAs, and primary care providers can understand, that's a little bit more of a challenge. So I hired this great editor. His name is Dave Swan; he works right here in Atlanta. He does exclusively nonfiction. And so he had done a bunch of medical books. Even though he has no medical training, he was able to help me get it into a shape where it was more readable for the average person. That was probably a 6-month process of going back and forth and going back and forth. That's the painful part of it. And then it's time to seek out a publisher.

This transcript was edited for clarity.