I don’t doubt you’ve had enough of my knee adventure this winter but it was, as you can imagine, a major change to the body and one that echoes out into the future as the healing continues. It was not, I admit, so much as the surgery and the immediate aftermath that interested me—the painkillers took care of that—but what went on in the slow regaining of function and movement until the joint could move more or less normally.

The standard advice is that it can take a year or more for a knee surgery victim—er, patient—to feel “normal.” So, in essence, the real healing taking place is not so much the closing of the incision, the massage of the scar, the exercises and physical therapy designed to break up scar tissue but the long slow almost imperceptible improvements: walking up and down stairs, the absence of pain, swimming, lifting weights. And finding the balance between doing enough to improve without exhausting the knee and the body is a challenge.

Because I’m always thinking about writing, I realize how much this process reminds me of writing a novel. It’s way too dramatic to talk about cutting yourself open to find the beginning of a book, but in essence, you are opening yourself up, exposing something: a can of worms, a belief, an idea, a character, a setting. At the beginning, a novel can feel vulnerable, too open an incision.

As you write forward and you start to see what you’re writing about, how the book is going to look, that openness tends to close up. You have a better idea what you’re doing, how you’re going to do it. You don’t know everything about it but it feels wholer. And then, after your first draft is done comes the slogging: revision, rerevision, restructuring, editing, copyediting, and so on. The physical therapy, the repetitive exercises, the near-boredom of daily introspection, i.e., how am I doing?

And because you’re never satisfied, every improvement in the book is incremental and feels gained by great effort and attention, like being able to bend your knee 10 degrees more than you could the day before.

And this is the gift of long-term attention, the opportunity to make your book (and your knee) as healthy as it can be, through repetitive and sometimes boring effort. It’s not about the milestones any more—being able to go upstairs, walk out to the mailbox, survive a long PT session—but the minute ongoing efforts that improve things. And it’s this labor that separates the serious work from the trivial.

OK, done with knee. But talk to me in a year. I may have another idea.