: How much science/medical detail is too much? I am a former Molecular Biologist and also worked for years as an ICU nurse. I personally liked Crichton's style of writing about science/medical

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I think a better example of "what the people want" would be Tom Clancy. His research, whether it be military, medical, or engineering is meticulous, and its presentation is thorough. He's not afraid to spend thousands of words on intro explanation. But he's Tom Clancy.

My suggestion is to start with too much detail and use beta readers to help edit out the superfluous or simply too technical.

Check out a season of ER or House. They use a lot of jargon. The audience is either medical professionals who get it or lay fans who do their best to keep up. These writers won Emmys year after year.

And what about Melville's Moby Dick? At least a 100 pages of sailing, ship building, and whaling industry jargon included in what is still considered a classic. Technical can work; it just has to be done well.

Minimize the use of drug names. Unless you're saying something bad about the drug, use brand names—with certain exceptions: lithium, digoxin, maybe a few others.

Good writing!

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To a certain extent it will depend on your audience, but I think the answer is not "worry about too much detail" but "worry about making it comprehensible to the lay person."

If your story is dependent on real, critical medical details, then you have to include them and make them realistic. But if the story is also dependent on high-level medical jargon which people who aren't trained won't understand, then the first thing you have to do is explain it to the rest of us.

Right now I'm reading The Imitation Game, the Alan Turing bio by Andrew Hodges. What Turing and Bletchey's boffins did to break the Nazis' coded messages by beating the Engima machines took some of the most brilliant mathematical minds of the 20th century. Hodges stops the biography to spend 10 pages or so slowly, carefuly explaining, with lots of diagrams, how the Enigma machine worked and how the English codebreakers thought about it and unravelled it with their Bombes (derived from the Polish analysts who gave it to them). I'm not very mathematically inclined so I'm only getting about 85% of it, but that's 75% more than I would have grasped on my own.

And in any case, once Hodges lays out how the machines worked and how they were cracked, he moves on to summarizing. "The Nazis added a fourth rotor, meaning what was previously cracked in two hours now took a week." He doesn't have to go through all the jargon again; he just explains the problem.

This is what you should aim for in your medical book. If you have to invent a cabbagehead character for your initial explanation, that's fine. Once you've taught your lay audience what the jargon means, then you can have your scientists speaking pretty much in jargon.

If it's very advanced terminology, a glossary at the end wouldn't hurt either.

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