Why is jodi picoult a good writer

What if this parameter changed? Ultimately, the writing of a book for me is a way to ask myself why my beliefs are what they are about a given situation. I may not change my mind about an issue, but I will likely have a better sense of why I believe what I do. Can you talk about how your Princeton thesis adviser shaped your own writing and career trajectory?

I listened to an interview where you discussed the move from literary to commercial writing. Mind you, like most kids who get into Princeton, I was used to being pretty good at things … so on the first day of workshop when Mary was discussing my short story with the class, you can imagine how shocked I was when she gave me a glue stick, scissors, and construction paper and told me to sit on the floor in the center of student chairs, and to just do whatever was suggested. For the rest of the time my story was being workshopped, I cut and pasted and seethed.

I was so mad I edited that story and edited it and edited it until Mary suggested I send it somewhere. I was shocked — I mean, I was writing this for a class — but she told me to send it to Seventeen. I did, and three months later, an editor called me. It was my first published piece.

What really amazed me about Mary was that every time she offered me a suggestion, it was brilliant and perfect for my writing style.

Mary somehow managed to be both a phenomenal writer AND a remarkable, gifted teacher. We are still close friends, and I am immensely grateful to her for all she taught me.

I was taught to write in a literary vein, like most creative writing students. Because I was given a choice when I started publishing to be pushed toward either a commercial track or a literary one. I do believe that commercial fiction authors get pigeonholed. Unfortunately, the prevalent belief is that if a book is commercially successful it must be poorly written. If the aim of literary fiction is to explore the human condition, then frankly I think commercial fiction is able to reach the same goals, on occasion.

However, each moment we have used our wide readership to raise awareness about gender discrimination in publishing — and about the gap between literary and commercial fiction — we are roundly accused of being women who complain too much, or who just wish we had the same accolades that literary writers do. We are both very happy with the trajectory of our careers, our success, and our readership. What if you could take a course not just in poetry … but in writing young-adult fiction, or fantasy?

And why not consider the craft of creative writing in tandem with the practice of the career — why not invite in publishers, agents, editors to teach creative writing students how to navigate the narrow path between academia and creative writing, and financially successful creative writing?

As Picoult's career as an author took off, she and her husband sat down to have a transparent conversation about how they could move forward as a family. It's completely legitimate for you as a woman to also have that support," she said, adding that a woman shouldn't have to demand it.

She should get it because she deserves it. The author's latest novel, "The Book of Two Ways," tells the story about Dawn Edelstein, a Yale Egyptology graduate student who later becomes a death doula.

The story begins with Edelstein surviving a plane crash and seeing her life flash before her eyes. She moves forward, wondering what a well-lived life truly looks like and how she can recapture things she has lost. Picoult traveled to Egypt to work with Egyptologists who helped provide context and history for research around "The Book of Two Ways.

The novel is inspired by an ancient Egyptian guidebook of the same name about the afterlife. The ancient text is said to provide a departed soul a map through the afterlife to Rostau, the realm of Osiris who is the god of death. Archaeologists found the text in a coffin in , adding it might be the first illustrated book in history.

Picoult, inspired by the ancient guidebook, hopes her latest novel allows readers to explore untouched paths in their lives. View this post on Instagram. Jodi Picoult. Award-winning author Jodi Picoult is pictured at the age of one, wearing an outfit hand stitched by her grandmother.

Jodi Picoult is pictured at years-old holding her son Kyle while spending time on the beach. Up Next in Culture. There is a formula to a Picoult book: each takes a controversial ethical issue—"designer babies," high-school shootings, child abuse, the death penalty—and pits sympathetic characters, often family members or best friends, on either side of the debate. The mother learns she can sue her obstetrician for "wrongful birth" because the condition was diagnosable in utero, but that will mean swearing under oath that she would have aborted the fetus had she known about the disease.

Picoult, who has visited operating rooms, prisons and an Alaskan Eskimo home researching her novels, sneaks in quite a bit of information about her topics. On her Web site, a fan in remission from leukemia wrote that she learned a lot more about her disease reading "My Sister's Keeper" than the doctors ever told her. But it's reductive to lump Picoult in with all bestselling commercial writers.

Her prose is smooth and never gets in its own way. Stephen King recently singled her out as an example of a popular fiction writer who can actually write. Picoult sees herself more in the school of so-called literary writers such as Sue Miller, who also writes about domestic topics despite frequent downmarket comparisons, especially to "Twilight" author Stephenie Meyer.

I think technically I am maybe a cut above," she says. Picoult, who has a master's in education from Harvard, is grateful to Meyer for getting kids to read at all, and she says many of her fans come to her through the "Twilight" series. Yet in subscribing to this notion that all reading is inherently good for you—and that reading "bad" books leads to reading less-bad books—Picoult is complicit in her own ghettoization. In last year's "The Solitary Vice: Against Reading," writer Mikita Brottman challenges the accepted wisdom that reading is inherently uplifting, arguing that it turns us into antisocial misanthropes who would do better to be out in the world than home with a book.

It's an intentionally provocative argument, but equating reading—all reading, from the classics to the tabloids—with pleasure feels radical in this age of government-subsidized municipal book clubs.