Creative

Writing is never easy. One good writing tool is Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. 

If you want another toolbox, I suggest the collection of witty tips from Elizabeth McCracken's A Long Game. 

At the end of reading her book, you might not recall a gospel to follow, but will definitely glean insights from the originality of her metaphors. 

Here are two examples.

If you're asking for the best timing and setting to write, her advice is to follow your own rules. Her passage teaches us the difference between clichés and creativity: We are all dogs. What works for an Australian shepherd would kill a corgi. A greyhound needs different discipline than a clumber spaniel, though they both have work to do. You have to figure out what will make you heel, sit, stay, be it other people or running out the clock on the day's distraction. 

If you switch points of view all the time, whenever a new character talks or moves, it can be like skipping a stone over the surface of a lake: the stone will travel a geat distance without ever getting deep.

Error

I don't think there's anything we can joke about high-stakes medicine in hospital, though we can think about dark joke. The medical drama novel Monday Mornings by Sanjay Gupta turns out to be a fast-paced one with a bomb ticking on each page. 

A dark joke is the Morbidity and Mortality conference, often known as M&M, that haunts surgeons in a fictional hospital. There are all sorts of behind-the-curtain errors being unmasked during M&M. One surgeon missed to take a family history and missed a diagnosis of inherited bleeding disorder before cutting open the brain of an eleven-year-old boy. The boy died from uncontrollable bleeding on the surgery table, sooner than he would have died from his brain tumour.

The second doctor, much more junior than the first one, was being sued after she accidentally nicked the olfactory nerve of a chef during removal of the patient's meningioma. The hospital chief decided to terminate the contract of the young doctor, effective immediately. Alas, the boss insisted to do so, even when the colleagues were erupting with anger. "Hospitals are supposed to protect their people, not toss them when there are problems." 

That's no joke. Medicine is a human profession. The medical errors are always there, waiting for the moment, waiting for human frailty. Doctors – everyone, really – make mistakes. The darkest joke from the novel happened when everything seemed to be going well in the prestigious hospital. Little did the hospital chief know that he was about to make the most improbable mistake of cutting open the brain of a patient on the wrong side. He did.

Mistakes are a fact of life, I want to say. It is the response to the error that counts, the American educator Nikki Giovanni commented.

Teacher

Almost forty years ago, Phillip Done started his teaching job at elementary school. It was a time when I chose to study medicine; many of our classmates received long service award at the public hospital recently.

As a recipient of the Charles Schwab Distinguished Teacher Award, Phil have written The Art of Teaching Children, an insightful teaching bible. His book celebrates the most teachable moments from the three decades of working with kids. 

The art of teaching, according to Phil, cannot be learned in Teacher School. The art of teaching is learned the first period on Monday morning when you're faced with a room full of sleepy children and the last period on Friday when you push through your final lesson.

In case you wish to take a peek at Phil's résumé, his would be like this: "Experience: thirty-three years. Special skills: singing 'Happy Birthday,' opening juice boxes, reading upside down,and cutting construction paper hearts for valentines so that both sides match. References: a thousand nine-year-olds."

Skeleton

The creepy experience of reading James McBirde's The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store begins with the finding of a skeleton with unknown identity in the first paragraph. 

I can't say which have scared me more, a potential murder scene buried in an old farmer's well or the clues from a belt buckle, a pendant and a mezuza, but those cliffhangers are enough to generate the whodunit suspense. 

There are many breakable rules in McBride's novel. One good example is weaving between a puff of smoke in a town of Black and Jewish population. Readers like me might wish to ask how many characters appear to be too many. McBride's novel gave the impression of door-knocking overload from too many strangers on Halloween. One new character after another visited the grocery store, most of them with their own peculiar life. It's easy to get lost. I got lost multiple times, much more frequently than you would have encountered in the maze of Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions.  

Near the end of novel, I have forgotten the skeleton. The way we lose the gold coins placed by McBride is as mysterious as finding the Pompeii skeleton.

Fox

One evening, a fox started learning English by eavesdropping on a human family's bedtime stories. 

Fox 8, an eponymous protagonist in the story by George Saunders, doesn't write perfect. He makes a lot of spelling mistakes, and is barely able to speak "Yuman" after hiding in the bushes outside a human's house. 

Fox 8 thinks the "Yuman" voice sounds great, and is particularly drawn to the human bedtime stories. The most difficult thing for him, however, is to listen to the story of The Hen and the Fox. Oh, the fox is depicted as a sly villain tricking chickens. None of this is true according to Fox 8.

Witnessing human's cruelty is just another piece of evidence that fox is not sly, not as mean as the human worker who killed his companion fox who ventured into a human mall's food court.   

What's the moral of this story? I think the dark joke should be from the last piece of advice from Fox 8: "I know you Yumans like your stories to end happy. If you want your stories to end happy, try being nicer."

War

Mention the genre of historical fiction, story setting of wars will come to mind. Tolstoy's War and Peace is just one contemporary example.

As mentioned in the moving fiction, The Mountains Sing, wars have the power to turn graceful and cultured people into monsters.

The father of the protagonist, Diệu Lan, was unlucky to meet one of those monsters. He was decapitated and murdered by Japanese soldiers when he was travelling to Hanoi to sell his family's potato crop. 

If you think wars can only strip away people's conscience, Diệu Lan would have sneered at your condescension. Wars unmask human courage and grace too. The Great Famine in 1945 forced Diệu Lan to flee to Hanoi as a beggar with five of her children. She could find nothing to keep the children alive, and ended up offering them the banana stalk. 

"But that's pig's food," said her son.

"If pigs can eat it, so can we," Diệu Lan smiled and bit into the stalk. Juicy and crunchy.

Her daughter took a bite and nodded. "Delicious."

Her son then gave in, biting down the banana stalk. His face softened as he ate. 

Their family endured the famine and made it.

Chasing

Whatever the limits and travails we face, many of us want to run faster. This is the very marrow being runners. Sebastian Sawe of Kenya has just become the first human to run a marathon in under two hours six months ago.

Any ambitious runner will tell you – I'm one – that years after the end of school sports day, it isn't the youngest runners who are still obsessed with their pacing, it's the most bullheaded. I'm one of those, too. 

I recently heard about the story of Annemari Sandell, a Finnish long-distance runner who spent six weeks training in the Rift Valley of Kenya before winning the world cross-country championships. Next, I read about Adharanand Finn, a British journalist who moved with his family to Kenya, running side by side with Olympic champions, giving up burgers and pizzas, switching to Kenyan staple dish known as ugali. He even woke up at five to do hill workouts with the Kenyans. Considering the altitude and thick jungle air, it's a commendable effort.

And at the end of it all, Adharanand Finn conquered the marathon in 2 hours 51 minutes to fulfil his sub-3-hour dream.