“I didn’t know I enjoyed thinking so much,” says science writer Roxanne Khamsi when asked what surprised her most about writing her first book Beyond Inheritance. “I thought I enjoyed interviewing people and reading research papers and the process of finding the right verb in a sentence. What’s hard for me is once I get into that thinking space, I can’t let go of it.” In this episode we talk about how she made the leap from writing articles to writing a book—and why they are so different. We talk about creating an arc for a book of essays, what to do when the structure for your book isn’t working, letting go of a project once its over, meeting our self critic, the role of obsession in writing a book, the art of going for “the big idea” and how to carry that in a nonfiction book, how writing reflects the author’s personality.
Roxanne Khamsi is the author of Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Healthand a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her articles on genetics have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature magazine and Wired. Roxanne served as chief news editor for the international research journal Nature Medicine for more than a decade. She is based in Montreal.
Author photos credit: Brian Friedman
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