About this episode

Roxanne Khamsi discusses her transition from writing articles to authoring her first book, exploring the joys and challenges of the writing process.

“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 Health and 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…

People in this episode

Host: Christie Aschwanden

Guest: Roxanne Khamsi

Topics covered

• writing
• book publishing
• science writing
• creativity
• nonfiction
• author personality

Keywords

• Roxanne Khamsi
• Beyond Inheritance
• writing process
• book structure
• science writing
• creativity
• nonfiction

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Atlantic, Nature Medicine, The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature magazine, Wired

Books & works: Beyond Inheritance

Places: Montreal

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