A Thinking Man’s Guide to Writing a Book About Knee Pain

After a Washington Post reporter wrote an article quoting me about my recovery from knee pain, I saw a predictable bump in sales of Saving My Knees.

A lot of people were motivated to buy the book, it turns out. A small number returned it, realizing it wasn’t quite what they wanted. (In the front, I now explicitly warn people that it’s NOT a book full of exercises, but rather my personal story.)

By the way, I love Amazon’s no-hassle policy on returns. I think it keeps merchants honest and careful about quality control. I’ve used it many times myself. I don’t have a problem if someone buys Saving My Knees, then decides, “Eh, it’s not really what I was looking for” and returns it.

Some people do find the book annoying, because it’s a story, as opposed to a pared-down, just-the-basics manual on fixing bad knees. This is something I didn’t initially realize would be an issue. Rather naively, I thought, “People will want to read the whole story, because the outcome is incredible, and this is a book I myself would’ve paid $100 for.”

I suppose every author is self-delusional to some degree. Otherwise, why go to all the effort of writing, rewriting, rewriting again, and rewriting some more, when for all you know your book may sell all of 20 copies? It’s a rather masochistic exercise that does little but feed the ravenous ego, I suppose.

So anyway, I remember at first being surprised by comments in reviews about people skimming through it to get to the "good parts," or complaining it was full of “filler.” But I understand now. If you have bad knees, you just want to know, “What should I do? Tell me. My knees are hurting, dammit.”

You probably don’t care about some of the little details I dropped in there about my own life, or my athletic life before I had bad knees. In my mind, I was telling a story that had a dramatic arc, and a character (me), and I wanted to flesh these things out. But in actuality, I totally understand the mindset of that impatient reader: “How did you do it? Hurry up!”

I’ve sometimes wondered if maybe a better title would have been something like, A Thinking Man’s Guide to Beating Knee Pain.

But I do think there are some advantages to telling a fuller story, and this is partly what I wanted to convey today:

(1) Those little setbacks I had – whether from carrying a fan up a few flights of stairs, or a full backpack for a fairly short distance – may seem unrelated, but they’re very ordinary, everyday events, and every knee pain sufferer will have to recognize that these things will happen, and be prepared to deal with them.

(2) I know I’ve said this before, but negativity takes a big toll on you. And there was a period in Hong Kong, nursing my bad knees, when I was just a ball of intense negativity. So all those little things I mentioned that got me depressed, yes, I did blow them out of proportion, but this is what it’s like being in such a negative state. You do tend to hold a lot of one-person pity parties. And to get on the healing track, you need to move beyond that.

(3) I wanted to show the frustration leading up to the discovery of what eventually healed my knees. I wanted to because so many people go through this prolonged state of trying so many things, with one thing after another failing. This is part of the experience, committing mistakes and chasing dead ends, but still trying again and again.

(4) I wanted to explain what I learned about how knees work, because this helps explain why the solution I came upon makes sense. Again, I’m a logical, rational guy. I don’t want for someone to just tell me something works. I want to know why it works.

(5) And then – I like learning stuff! And I wanted to share the many things I learned. I suppose that’s the inner journalist in me talking.

What if I wrote the book really short? I suppose the ultimate condensation would be something like:

I hurt my knees.

I walked a lot.

I got better.

But that only scratches the surface of the story that was important to tell. So I told that story. But no, I don’t disagree with any reader who thinks the book does include a bunch of non-knee detail (especially at the beginning, where I’m setting a scene). Feel free to fast-forward!

Cheers, and I hope everyone's enjoying the approach of Christmas. Less than two weeks away!