Creative and reflective writing
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Creative and reflective writing gives medical experience, medicine’s history and colleagues’ lives a personal or literary form. The parts divide by form, following a guide to choosing a form and an outlet: essays and creative nonfiction, poetry, humour and satire, and medical history and biography. Regular public-facing blogs and columns, health journalism, and journal editorials and commentary belong to neighbouring concerns.
- Choosing a reflective form and an outlet — finding and studying an outlet, and choosing among practice essays, personal narratives, medical history, image quizzes, film reviews and other literary forms
- Essays and creative nonfiction — truthful autobiographical writing, reflection through scenes, anecdotes and relationships, professional boundaries, and literary or discursive argument
- Poetry from clinical experience — why clinicians write poems, where they publish them, and how prose poems and rhymed stanzas carry their meaning
- Humour and satire that readers recognise — preserving a joke’s context when it is reused and labelling invented names and references
- Medical history and biography — an anatomical museum as a subject and a tribute that makes a colleague’s convictions and work concrete