This Was Out Of My Comfort Zone

A conversation I almost said no to.

Writing gives me luxuries that conversation doesn’t. I can stop. Rewrite. Delete the sentence that sounded much better in my head. I can spend ten minutes looking for the exact word and nobody has to sit across from me while I do it.

Put a microphone in front of me and suddenly all of those escape hatches disappear.

My brain tends to run several exits ahead of my mouth, especially when I care about getting something right. Add the fact that my voice is not always a perfectly cooperative piece of equipment, and interviews can require considerably more bandwidth than they appear to from the outside. Sometimes I sound confident while internally trying to manage seventeen things at once. A surprisingly large percentage of adulthood seems to involve hoping nobody notices the control room is on fire.

So when Tim Trott invited me onto the Author to Author podcast, part of me was excited.

Another part was already drafting an extremely reasonable excuse. I said yes.

We talked about The Helix Chronicles, how I went from corporate strategy to writing full-time, and why I seem constitutionally incapable of leaving technologies such as gene editing and artificial intelligence alone once I start asking what humans might do with them. We got into how Broken Code became, among other things, a love letter to Memphis wrapped inside a biotech conspiracy, why I created ThoughtCraft Publishing, my cautiously enthusiastic relationship with AI, finding readers as a new author, and even the highly scientific process by which I ended up writing under the name Monica Chase.

You can listen to the conversation here.

What I remember most, though, is not any particular answer. It’s the experience of having to let the answers arrive without polishing them first.

That is harder for me than it sounds.

When I write, I can keep worrying at an idea until I understand what I mean. In conversation, clarity sometimes shows up halfway through the answer. I start in one place, follow the thought, double back when necessary, and eventually find the sentence I was looking for. For years I assumed this was something I should get better at hiding.

I’m less interested in hiding it now.

That doesn’t mean I suddenly enjoy feeling on the spot. I would still happily accept a transcript, three revision passes, and twenty-four hours to reconsider every adjective before participating in most conversations. But I’m learning that an imperfect answer can still be a thoughtful one. Sometimes the interesting part is hearing someone work their way toward what they actually think.

One of those moments in the interview came when we talked about writing complicated science without making the reader feel as though they accidentally enrolled in a graduate seminar.

I use something I think of as a layman’s echo. When a character with deep technical knowledge explains something complicated, another character may translate the implication into normal human language. Not by repeating the exposition with smaller words, but by reacting to what it actually means.

If the scientist says the system can alter gene expression across a population, somebody else may essentially ask, So you can change people without asking them?

Now we have a story again.

That little technique has become useful to me because the science in my books matters, but understanding every mechanism usually isn’t the point. The reader needs enough information to grasp the stakes and then needs to stay emotionally inside the scene. The second character gives them somewhere to stand.

Which, come to think of it, may be what I was doing in the interview too. Thinking out loud. Translating. Finding the part that mattered.

I nearly said no because I knew I wouldn’t be able to control every sentence before it left my mouth. I’m glad I didn’t.

Not because I conquered some great fear or emerged as Monica 2.0, now available for spontaneous public speaking engagements. Let’s remain reasonable.

I’m glad because I had a good conversation. Sometimes that is enough.

I’ll see you in the bookstores,

Monica

🎧 Listen to the interview here: Author to Author Podcast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaQl-2IQTpc