It was especially challenging to carry the story through the present and write a book that addresses many of the major anxieties of today's health care world. The overriding difficulty in writing the book was deciding how it should be organized. There were so many subjects to discuss, most of which were interrelated. Eventually, I would have epiphanies, large and small how seemingly separate events related, whether a particular topic belonged in chapter 2 or chapter 3, how a given chapter should be organized, and most important, how to organize the book as a whole. I worked especially hard to create appropriate titles for the chapters and sections.
Good writing requires more than organizing subjects and ideas in a logical fashion.
The best history books have a pulse and a flow, the result of vigorous prose and of telling a story with people in it. To make Time to Heal readable, I pounded every unnecessary word, quotation, and footnote out of the text, eventually reducing a first draft of 1000 typed pages to a final version of under 600. I wanted to recreate the experience of each of these groups, both to tell a more engrossing story and to leave a legacy for posterity. Among my most gratifying moments now are when readers tell me they found the book absorbing, or that they saw themselves in it, or that it captured the spirit of their era exactly. Although Time to Heal was driven by a commitment to preserving quality in medical education and practice, I made every attempt to steer it away from presenting a particular ideology.