It’s not fair. How can one person be so good at two things?

Abraham Verghese is a doctor and a writer. As a doctor, he’s good enough to be a professor at Stanford’s medical school. As a writer, he’s good enough to have had essays published in The New Yorker and penned two well-received nonfiction books. Then there’s the novel that’s made him famous, Cutting for Stone, his semi-autobiographical account of an Indian boy growing up in Addis Abbaba in the 1950s and 1960s before coming to the United States for his medical residency.

I heard Verghese speak last night at Portland’s Literary Arts author lecture series. He’s as captivating in person as he is on the page. You can tell he’s a teacher: he spoke extemporaneously for more than an hour and walked around the stage instead of hiding behind the podium. He recited lines from Of Human Bondage and William Carlos Williams. He told stories about growing up in Ethiopia to Indian parents, working with AIDS patients as a young doctor in Tennessee, leaving medicine briefly to attend the famous Iowa Writers Workshop, and getting a job at a hospital in El Paso, Texas, that would give him room to write.

I guess that makes three things he’s good at: medicine, writing and speaking.

He spoke a lot about writing. I’m saving some of what he shared for another post. But here’s a taste.

• On fiction: “Fiction is a great lie that tells the truth about how the world is.” Want an example: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “It ended slavery in this country, that’s how important fiction is.”
• On nonfiction: “Nonfiction outsells fiction 10 to 1. What nonfiction has going for it is that it’s really happened, and readers are interested in that. With fiction, you have to work 20 times harder to make it believable.”
• On how he fits writing into his schedule: “There’s something absolutely holy about work, it’s my inspiration to write.”
• On how long it takes him to write: “It took me eight years to write Cutting for Stone. Joyce Carol Oates has probably written two books since breakfast.”

Verghese is working on his next book, which he says will be set in the Christian area of Kerala in southern India where his parents were born. But don’t ask him exactly what it’s going to be about, or when it’ll be finished. When people ask about his next book – which happens a lot – he says his first reaction is, “What about the last one?”

Other writing instruction and inspiration from this week:

Roy Peter Clark

The April issue of the American Society of Journalists and Authors newsletter features a Q&A with the Poynter Institute writing instructor, who’s been helping students since 1979. Clark has written more than two dozen books, many of them on writing, and writes the organization’s weekly Writing Tools newsletter (which is worth reading, sign up!).

I won’t crib too much from Clark’s interview – ASJA would probably frown on revealing more than a few lines from what’s supposed to be a members’ only newsletter. However, I wanted to share a few of his writing tips that I found to be especially relevant:

• On teaching student writers and old pros: “The student and the master both worry about their work. They both struggle to find things to write about. They both procrastinate. They both have a hard time with the research. They both resist editing and criticism.”
• On improving your writing: “Go on a diet! Get some exercise! Get out of the chair and move! It may sound like I’m kidding, but I’m not. I’m stuck in the chair so often that I’ve got pains in my neck, shoulders, lower back, wrists, you name it. Those physical ailments take a toll on your writing.”
• On endings: “I always look at my last paragraph and ask myself: ‘What would happen if you cut this?’ In journalism, we often talk about burying or hiding the lead of the story, but we can also bury the ending. I’m always looking for a natural ending place, and these days I look for it earlier and earlier.”

Gay Talese

The literary journalism pioneer spoke as part of the Harvard’s Writers at Work series recently and some of his remarks were reprinted in the spring 2012 volume of the school’s Nieman Reports. Here are the bits I loved best, because they show that even a famous writer struggles with the frustrations that dog the rest of us:

• On the writing process: “In one way I can say I waste a lot of time; it’s part of my occupation; I’m an occupational time waster because so much of what you do doesn’t immediately measure up.”
• On getting better with experience: “I don’t think I’ve learned anything in terms of technique. It’s as hard now as it was for me then.”

News University, the e-learning program run by Poynter Institute, is creating a series of writing webinars and wants input from the freelance community on what they should cover.

Any writer who takes the survey will receive a 50 percent discount on any News U. writing webinar when the program launches next year – how’s that for a sweet deal?

Howard Finberg, Poynter’s director of interactive learning, reached out to WordCount to help promote participation in the survey among the freelance community, saying “This is an attempt to reach independent writers with quality training.”

I was more than happy to oblige. With more journalists working as free agents, whether by circumstance or choice, it benefits everyone when they’re as up to speed on the latest research, reporting and writing techniques as staff reporters and editors.

If you’re interested in participating in the News U. survey, you’ll find it here. Once you’ve completed the survey, you’ll receive a promo code you can use to receive a discount on the webinars when they’re available.

But wait – as they say in the TV commercials – there’s more. Finberg is also offering $10 off a News U. class on fighting writers block that takes place on Thursday, Sept. 16, at 2 p.m. Eastern. The class, which regularly costs $24.95, will be taught by Roy Peter Clark, Poynter’s vice president and senior scholar. To receive the discount, use promo code: PWRDHLP10.

It’s not easy. But it is possible, as a handful of writers have shown, including some with no previous business reporting experience.

I’ve written before about not needing to be serious to write about serious topics, like the hip hop YouTube video that humorously but succinctly explained the Large Hadron Collider.

Lately, the piece on the financial crisis that I keep hearing people talk about for its elegantly simple take on the whole mess is one that first aired last May on the radio show This American Life called The Giant Pool of Money. Alex Blumberg, a producer at This American Life, and Adam Davidson, a National Public Radio business reporter, got together to explain the connection between fancy new forms of debt like collateralized debt obligations and people losing their homes because they couldn’t pay their mortgages.

It was an instant, and timely, hit. The New York Times has written about the story and the pair, who now have a blog and podcast devoted to writing about the crisis called Planet Money.

Making it easy for readers to understand hard stuff is the kind of thing that’s taught in Journalism 101. But after spending years on a beat you sometimes lose sight of who your readers are and what their grasp of the information is, or isn’t. Roy Peter Clark, a writing instructor with the Poynter Institute, reminded writers of that point in his Writing Tools column this week. He also referred to a column he penned back in 2001 explaining how to make stories on even the driest or most complex subjects “engaging and comprehensive.” Some of his advice:

Tell it to a friend. When you tell your story to a single person, your voice changes and your language becomes more simple and direct.

Think graphics. Informational graphics are reaching new levels of excellence in American newspapers. Our ability to explain complex issues in words and then illustrate them in pictures provides valuable reinforcement for the reader.

Read the entire column here.

This has sparked a tremendous debate within the newspaper business. While one side argues that there’s no way something as connected to local language, geography, history and cultural knowledge can be handled from half a world away, the other side maintains that companies have successfully outsourced all types of business operations to India, there’s no reason newspapers can’t do the same by using highly competent Indian business partners, and people who think otherwise are being xenophobic.

In his weekly column on Poynter Online, noted Poynter writing coach Roy Peter Clark puts himself squarely in the anti-outsourcing camp. In the column, From Rim Editor to Ram the Editor, St. Petersburg, Florida, based Clark claims that while Indian editors may be very good at what they do, copy editors need to be part of the local fabric of the community to do their jobs well. He writes:

I need copy editors to know that Eva Longoria is not the wife of Tampa Bay Rays baseball phenom Evan Longoria. I need them to know that a Florida cracker is not something you eat, and that it may or may not be offensive to some readers. I need a Rhode Island copy editor to know that you don’t dig for clams; you dig for quahogs, a word of Indian origin — American Indian. I need copy editors who know that Jim Morrison of The Doors went to St. Pete Junior College, that beat writer Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Fla., but is buried in Lowell, Mass. I want them to know that Lakewood High School is different from Lakewood Ranch High School. I want them to know that 54th Avenue North in St. Petersburg is 108 blocks north of 54th Avenue South.

Clark’s column is based in part on a recent interview he did on a radio show called The Takeaway on WNYC in New York City with hosts John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji. Listen to the entire broadcast here.