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For his debut book, a collection of 12 linked stories about aspiring physicians called Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, Vincent Lam became the youngest winner of Canada's prestigious Giller Prize. And talk about writing what you know: Lam, now 33, completed the book between shifts at Toronto East General Hospital, where he works as an E.R. doctor and is working on Cholon, Near Forgotten, a novel set in Saigon during the Vietnam War, due next fall. Fred McKindra spoke to Lam about his dual careers.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Would you consider yourself a doctor who writes, or a writer who heals?
VINCENT LAM: That totally depends on what I'm doing right then. When I'm in the hospital, I'm a doctor. And when I'm writing, the writer side comes to the fore. So I've thought about this exact question, in terms of what to do going forward, and I really have not been able to say that one wins out over the other. It's funny, the way I became interested in medicine was kind of tangential, and the first thing I wanted to do was I wanted to write.
So you decided to be a writer first?
I decided to be a writer first, so you would think that the writer stays primary. But I got the idea of doing medicine. And I thought a lot of the writers who I admire have gone out into the world and done stuff. And so I want to emulate them. I don't really want to go fight in a war. I'm not interested in violence and guns, and any of that sort of thing. I don't mind blood. Maybe the best to do would be to become a doctor. But what I realized very, very quickly was that it wasn't going to work out exactly as I planned. It's not that simple. I really felt taken by the whole enterprise of doing medicine and helping people. The thing about leaning medicine is that if you learn it the way it's meant to be learned, you immerse yourself in it, you throw yourself into it, then it changes you.
What's the change?
Before I became a doctor, before I started spending a lot of time with really tragic things, there were a lot of things I took for granted. It would never have occurred to me that it's so great just to be walking down the street. You see that bad things can happen really suddenly, and healthy people can suddenly find themselves in the midst of all sorts of health problems.
Tell me about the role of a doctor as storyteller.
The reason that someone comes to the emergency room in the first place, is that they have had a plot twist. Their life is going along in such a such direction, and then boom, something happens. And that's when they come to me. And so basically what they're looking for is an interpretation of that plot twist. As well as treatment, some way to make it better.
Tell me about your process.
When I'm drafting, I give myself total license, and I overwrite and try to be as uncritical as possible, and I usually come out with 40 pages of crap.
Typed?
Typed. Then I look at it, and the sentences are horrible. I have a weakness for run-on sentences when I draft. I change verb tense with no conceivable explanation. I start off using one name at the beginning of the story and end up using a different name by the end. But then I take a hard critical look, and I'm ruthless when I edit. I think, ''Okay, you had your chance to be free, so now get out the old scalpel and snip, snip, snip.'' I always take this particular brand of blue pen that I like, and I draw arrows and I'll cut out part of the paragraph, and then think, ''Oh, that should go up here.'' It looks like a war zone after I'm done.
NEXT PAGE: A chat with Chelsea Cain, Oregon denizen and author of the thriller Heartsick
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