The following is a special presentation.

Jodie Pico and the Writing Life More Than a Good Story.

A conversation from the 2023 annual Celebration of the Humanities presented by the Cambridge Trust Charitable Foundation.

We are so honored to thousand nine Q and A, You said.

I don't feel that I create characters.

I listen to them.

They come to me fully formed.

And this sounds a lot like what Michelangelo once said of sculpture.

Michelangelo said he listen to the marble.

He said the sculpture is already complete within the marble block Before I start my work, it's already there.

I have to chisel away the superfluous material.

How do you move from listening to character to writing about them?

That's probably one of the hardest questions that I could be asked.

I think it is.

I've long said that there's a very fine line between writing for a living and schizophrenia, and it's basically a paycheck, right?

Because I hear voices like all the time and these characters, they start people in my head and I really just listen to them and they begin to take an idea away from me.

And eventually, like, I guess I've been doing it long enough that I've learned to to let them take the reins.

That said, I kind of always know where my books are starting or where my books are ending.

I don't really ever know how I'm going to get there.

And it is the voices of the characters who are very, very real to me who who really get me from point A to point C. So I think the first published page of a writer is often like a fingerprint for their entire career if they have a long career.

And so in 1992, your first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, begins in the upper right hand.

Corner of the photo is a miniature airplane that looks as if it is flying right into my forehead.

And it's very tiny and steel blue, a long, bloated oval cut in the middle with its own wings.

It is the shape really, of the cross.

It's the first thing my mother noticed when we received the photo in Massachusetts.

You see, Rebecca, she said, it's a sign.

What do you think of your first paragraph as tea leaves for your career?

All I can think is I sort of edited that.

But, you know, I've got to give myself a little bit of grace because I was in my twenties, you know, But I think that when I think about the beginning of that book, that was an extremely complicated book.

The first draft of that was a thousand pages.

It was it told it had five narrative voices.

There were two women and three men, a mother and a daughter.

The daughter told the story in reverse.

The mother told the story.

Going forward, their narratives intersected in the middle of the country because it was a cross-country story in the middle of the narrative.

And then the three men who sort of circled in their lives were the three other sort of constant narrators.

And when I think about that book, I think, wow, I had so many more brain cells before I had kids, you know?

But I do think that that very first paragraph, I remember thinking about it like the very beginning of 100 Years of Solitude, you know, which has the most amazing first line ever.

It's I'm going to misquoted, but it's something like as Cruel Colonel.

Or really when Buendia faced the firing squad, he thought back to that afternoon when his father taught him or brought him to discover ice.

And then it's like you're like, Wait, what?

What about the scar?

And then you go back into this flashback and this photograph is very, very important that you cited in that first paragraph, but you're not going to know about it until the very end of the book.

MM Okay.

So what was the biggest professional or personal advice you've ever received that you initially rejected and why?

So I'll actually tell you a story because it's more like it was more like a lesson than it was particular advice.

I told you that I got to go to Princeton and I got to study with these amazing authors.

And my mentor was a woman named Mary Morris, who, if you haven't read her, you should.

She's incredible.

But I was a straight-A student in high school, Never really had to work that hard.

I got to college and I was doing fine.

And I managed to get into the creative writing program, which you had to apply for.

And the day that we were supposed to workshop my first story, I came in thinking, I got this and Mary made me sit down on the floor in front of all these other students, and she gave me a ballistic and scissors and construction paper.

And she said, You can't say anything.

Just do what everyone else says.

And so the first question she asked was, where does Jodi's story really start?

And some poor soul went page three, and she went, yes, that's right.

Four, three pages over her shoulder.

And for the next like hour and a half, I had to sit there while they dissected my story.

And I went out of there like I was shaking, you know, by the time I left.

And it took me a day to get myself together.

And I went to her office hours and I said, Why did you do that to me?

And she said, Because you needed it and you can take it.

And I was so angry that I edited that story and I ended that story.

And finally she said to me, You need to do something with this.

And I was like, What do you mean?

I mean, I was writing it for a class.

And she said, You should send it to 17 Magazine.

And I did.

I was a poor college student.

I didn't even buy the magazine.

I just went to like a news stand.

They copied down the address from Method and I sent it off.

And a few months later, there was a message on my answering machine because back then, friends, we had answered and and they were like, We'd like to pay you for your story.

And and I was like, Who's putting me?

I thought for sure it was a friend.

And I when I realized it actually was 70 and I thought, wow, I mean, I would have paid them to take my short story.

And that work, that wound up being the first thing that I ever had published.

Wow.

That's a wonderful story.

Yeah, it's a really writers in the room.

We should really take heart to that story.

Do you ever reread your own books like 50,000 times in the process of writing them, you know?

I mean, that's what editing is all about, you know, because not only do you do massive overhauls before it ever goes off to your editor, but then you get an editorial letter back and you make structural changes based on that.

Then there's a line at it, then there's a copy edit, then there's first past pages, then second past pages.

So I mean, I've read a book about ten times before it comes out.

Do I pick up a book once at a shelf?

Very rarely, Usually because I have a character coming back in, you know, from a previous book into a new one.

And I don't remember how old they are.

It's very practical.

So now we're going to move on to the part of some wonderful conversation we're having that's about Jodi's writing process.

You're such a prolific writer that you've worn the letters off of two keyboards.

How do you feel Creativity.

And did you keep those keyboards?

No, I recycle them like you're supposed to.

No, I. I think that I actually function better when I can write.

If I get into a time of life where I'm busy or I'm not home or I have some some idea brewing, but I'm not able to get to my desk and write, I am very unpleasant to live with.

So I'm actually much better off, you know, being able to get that that outlet out.

Creativity is not always a good thing.

It doesn't always feel good.

I use I say that sometimes, like at the end of a book, it's like a monkey on your back just going, you know?

And there are times when I will stay up all night for a couple of nights because I know I'm close to the end of the book and I have to finish it.

So I don't know that.

I don't know that I feel creativity.

I think creativity might fuel me.

Yeah.

How do you define success as a writer?

That's a really hard question because it's a moving target.

And, you know, I have been very fortunate in my career, but I've also worked my tail off and I acknowledge both of those things.

But success looks different when you're 20 than it does when you're, you know, 57.

At first it was just getting a publishing contract and then it was somewhat other than my mother reading the book, you know, And then it was, you know, could I, could I get a follow up contract?

Would I ever land on the new York Times list?

Can I be number one on The New York Times list?

Well, I really want to be on Good Morning America.

Like, I mean, there's always there's always something you don't have.

Right.

And even for someone who has had a great deal of success, like I think I have, there are still things that I'm like, oh, I could be nice.

So, you know, but I'm not greedy that way, too.

I also feel like I recognize the great fortune that I've had.

To me, success really looks like a letter from a kid who read one of my books and said I was suicidal.

But I read this book and I realized I'm not the only person who feels this way.

And I'm telling someone today, you know, that's an amazing feeling.

You are a remarkable collaborator.

Most recently in 2022 with Jennifer Finney Bolin and Matt Honey.

And that's not counting all the collaborations in the theater world.

What's it like for you to collaborate on creative projects versus writing solo?

Okay, so let me tell you this.

I had the most interesting experience working with Jenny.

Jenny.

Jenny Boylan is an incredible writer herself, someone I admired for a long time.

I did not know her when she literally reached out on Twitter.

She had a dream that we were writing a book together and that that would be.

That became that honey and.

I, I there's this weird bias against books that have two authors on them.

An American I blame James Patterson because he like I read he's actually, I'm sure a very lovely guy but I imagine him walking through a stable of authors going right right, right.

Because he has like all these people writing with him.

And I think people think, oh, she coauthored the book.

She didn't really write it.

Well, I can tell you that coauthoring a book is twice as hard as it is to write alone, because we literally had to plot the entire mystery out.

We had to figure out who was writing, what part.

For Jenny, I kind of forced her to write her section in reverse, which is really hard.

You know, so I think that and then we also we would write swap chapters and edit each other's chapters heavily, which is why it sounds, I think, like one voice instead of two.

But that's twice the work literally, you are doing twice the work even though you think you're writing half of it.

And so if you see a book that's got two authors on it, instead of assuming that the author decided to phone it in, maybe give him the benefit of the doubt and think, Oh, they worked really, really hard to make this really good for you.

A related question, but perhaps a selfish question.

How did you keep writing such an attractive profession with your children?

You ought to have the front row seats.

The pressures of writing and the publishing way.

What lessons about the writing career do you think you bestowed on your children?

I always say that I think my kids definitely got their heart from their dad and their work ethic from me because they saw me working a lot all the time.

But you know what?

I have flown like 40 straight hours from South Africa in order to be home in time to see my son in a school play.

And I have always made sure that I'm there at the moments that I most need to be.

And I was very fortunate to have a partner, a spouse who was there for the day to day things that I couldn't be there for.

So first of all, let me just say that any author who makes it look easy has help.

And, you know, whether that is a spouse or a nanny or someone, there's someone out there picking up all the pieces so you can make it look like you're not paddling frantically underwater all the time, which you are.

So my kids, I think I think they learned that.

I think they learned that that if you work hard, you can you can get results.

I think they also learned that it's okay to shoot for the moon because I have a really unlikely career.

But if you don't try it, you'll never know if you can do it.

And and the other thing that I think was interesting is that they they learned pretty quickly when they were young that there was like mom and then there was public.

Right.

So, like, I still remember writing a reading once in Arizona and my Jake was there.

I assume my other kids were, too.

But Jake, who's my middle son, was there.

He was pretty little.

He was probably like, I don't know, maybe seven.

And well, through this, the reading and I look out and he's just like, he's fast asleep in a chair.

And I was like, Oh, that was his bedtime story today.

That's nice.

And there was another event that I think I did in New Hampshire at one point, and my kids were in the audience and they were doing a roaming mike.

And I didn't know who was going to get the mic.

And all of a sudden I knew this question.

Yes, I'm wondering which child you love the most.

And so there was always like that, that sense that I was also a public figure in some way.

But they also they got really, really good at like taking people's phones to take pictures and stuff.

And they've been very gracious that way.

I'm very lucky.

But the other thing that's sometimes really weird is as they got older and they start reading my books, I have very distinct memories of going downstairs and being in the kitchen and my kids having a very spirited discussion about my book with my husband as if I'm not there, like talking about like what the author could have done better.

Oh, yeah.

And it's like, I'm like, Oh, yeah, I'm right here, you know?

And it's not even like, morning.

So yeah, that's the caveat in your day to day life in Hanover.

Yeah.

Do people recognize you in the grocery store or the gas station?

And what's the most surprising reaction somebody ever had?

Well, let me just say yes, people like know who I am, but a lot of people are just friends of mine, too.

I mean, but if I run into a fan, you can bet it's the day I haven't taken the shower.

And, you know, I'm wearing like sweats or whatever.

I also often will hike with friends in the morning.

So sometimes I'm like, still decked out in all my hiking gear, you know, I think if they if anything, people probably look at me and go, wow, shoes looks a lot better on their jacket.

But but what I found is, honestly, that I don't think I've ever had an interaction that wasn't really lovely.

You know, I think if someone comes up to you in the grocery store or like in a movie theater, as I really like your last book, I mean, who is it getting like that, right?

I mean, it's it's a very lovely side benefit.

I think, of this.

You heard.

So which of your books feels like it's the most situated in New Hampshire?

Hmm.

It's funny that Honey is set in New Hampshire.

So I do think that's definitely a New Hampshire story.

And I could even like, I could tell you what roads, you know, run through that town.

But to me, the the book that is most situated in New Hampshire is The Pact.

And I'm sorry, not the pact.

90 minutes.

I'm sorry.

The pact also was in New Hampshire, But 90 minutes is the one I think about.

And it's because 90 minutes is about a school shooting in a small town.

And right after it was written, we had several schools that were given 100 free copies of the book so that they could read it as part of their curriculum.

And my son's local high school.

Wound up there was a parent who was freaking out convinced that that the book was going to cause a school shooting, basically.

And then they hadn't read the book because it hadn't been published yet.

But they then found all these things in the book that they thought were coded for Hanover High.

They were not.

They actually were taken from Columbine and the school out there.

But the fact that they could see themselves in the book was exactly the reason I wrote it and the fact that it could happen.

And does happen in any community and is still happening.

And it all blew over and it was totally fine.

But because I thought about that book and how it could happen in your own backyard, and then I had this very bizarre reaction to the publication.

I always think of that book as being New Hampshire based.

Jody, what brings you joy in 2023?

Hello.

Man, this the hard year for joy, huh?

You know what brings me joy is my family, my grandson, who is apparently walking as of tonight.

My my daughter is about to have my first granddaughter.

My friends, the the fact that I get to do something that I love, the fact that I am celebrating 34 years of marriage in a week and and really simple things, you know, like the fact that I, I can enjoy a really great swim.

My body is still in there enough for me to do that.

And and a delicious cup of coffee and chocolate.

You know I think I think that honestly that was one of my takeaways from COVID, which was a really scary time for all of us, that sometimes I'm moving so fast, I don't get to stop and see in the moment what is so glorious.

And I'm trying a little harder to do that.

Do you ever expect to retire from writing?

Did my husband write that question?

That's what I was actually on the internet saying.

Well, I don't know.

I don't I don't ever want to be the kind of writer who's turning out a book just because I have a deadline, I should stop writing before that moment because I don't want to phone it in.

I want you to feel how engaged I am with the topic.

If I'm I'm writing about it.

I got to believe that at some point I'm going to want to not write.

But as of right now, I at least I can tell you that I know what I'm going to write through 2026.

How's that?

And I will say, I know what you're currently working on and I can't wait for that book.

Okay, So.

Oh, that's not fair.

Look at the mob.

Oh, you want to know what's in the background here?

Okay, Tell them.

I don't know.

I'm like, I'm.

I'm numbers.

The backgrounds.

Yeah, go ahead.

All right.

So I'm very excited about this book.

It's going to come out in the fall.

It's called by Any Other Name.

And it is about gender discrimination in writing and particularly in theater and how it really hasn't changed in 400 years.

And I am going to convince you in this book through actual historical documents and with a real true historical person, that Shakespeare didn't write his plays, but a woman named Amelia Bassano just might have pink.

And as I told you, when we were having coffee a couple weeks ago, I know quite a few Shakespeare scholars who might be having heart attacks, but this one.

All right.

How would you like readers to remember your books?

My daughter and I have this running joke, actually, and I don't even remember how it came about, but we were talking about what's going to be on your gravestone.

And this.

And I remember saying, you know, I always really liked that quote, you know, from Charlotte's Web.

And she goes, Oh, good writer, better pig.

But you say, my brother, But that's not what I want to write for you to stop you.

And recently, she she wrote me because she had to write her bio for her own books.

And she said, What do you think I should say?

And I just wrote back, Good writer, better big.

It's it's really funny.

This is so morbid.

And I don't think I've ever said this out loud before.

But, you know, sometimes when a celebrity dies, like, you hear how they're remembered or what's said on the news.

And sometimes I think God is, well, what are you going to say about me when I'm gone?

And I really what I really just hope people say is that I engaged with controversial topics that opened up people's minds.

That would be like the best, best takeaway.

Do you all send some beautiful questions?

And I can't read all of them.

I'm going to read a few in our time here.

So Jean asks, After traveling to so many places in the world, are there spots you like to return to?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

There are definitely places I love being places I've gone on vacation with my family.

I had the best experience this summer in England because we were rehearsing our show in London and I got to live like in a neighborhood, live not just be a tourist, but live in a neighborhood.

And that was really, really cool.

I really enjoyed that and got I've had some amazing vacations everywhere from islands like the Galapagos to, you know, the Caribbean.

I think that I think I'm always looking for the next place that I really, you know, want to visit.

I know I want to go in Portugal because my son in law, his family is Portuguese, and when my little grandson's old enough, I want to go there with them and I am dying to go to the Maldives.

But I would have to drug and hog tie my husband because he does not do planes.

Well, and it's a very long flight room.

Pam wonders if you've ever experienced writer's block, and if so, how do you get over it?

I do not believe in writer's block, and I'll tell you why.

Okay.

All you guys remember when you were in school and you had an essay to do and you had writer's block?

Remember how miraculously that writer's block cleared up the night before the essay was due?

So writer's block is having too much time really to worry and that you're not going to get it right.

And what I have always found, because when I started writing, I had babies.

I mean, like I literally was writing when my kids, you know, were in nursery school and I was I was typing on a laptop in the pickup line or at swim practice or, you know, when Barney was on TV, any time I could, I had 5 minutes and I would sit down and write.

So when you don't have a lot of time, you just do the work.

And I always feel that I've said this many times, you can edit a bad page, but you cannot edit a blank page.

Write something and then fix it.

No, I love that.

Yeah, I love that.

I'm probably going to say that tomorrow in class.

You may not.

Can you speak about how you go about researching material for your books?

Sure.

That's actually a really interesting question.

In particular for Wish You Were Here, because that book was a book I was not supposed to write.

I did not have a contract for it.

I did not expect to be writing a book then, but it was during COVID and I was really, really scared during COVID because I have asthma and I really did not leave my house, you know, because I was terrified before we had vaccines.

And I had I came up with this this idea based on the story I heard about a man from Scotland who got stuck up sorry, It was a Japanese man who got stuck in Machu Picchu when all the borders closed during COVID.

And instead of like trying to find his way back home, he wound up becoming part of the community.

And he stayed for months in, you know, in the village closest to Machu Picchu.

He was teaching the martial arts to the kids there.

And finally the community petitioned the government to open up Machu Picchu for him so he could have his own private moment at this beautiful site.

And I was like, How?

What must it be like to be in, you know, the ultimate bucket list destination when the whole world has gone to hell?

And I've never been to Machu Picchu and I sure wasn't going during COVID.

So I was like, okay, where have I been?

That is a bucket list destination.

And years earlier, like a decade before, I had taken my family to the Galapagos, I went down, pulled out all of our photos so I could look back through them and see what I remembered, and I decided that's what I was going to wear.

I was to set this book and I knew that I wanted to find someone who had experienced that.

And I did a little digging.

And sure enough, I found a Scottish man who got stuck in the Galapagos for I think it was about seven or eight months before he was able to leave and tracked him down, did a whole bunch of interviews with him, all by Zoom, did interviews with with people who he had met, who he had lived with in the Galapagos.

And the entire book was basically written through a computer.

And he has a it.

Okay.

Our last question.

Do you have any advice for early career writers or people cause a political writing career?

How should they get started again?

I mean, I kind of touched on this earlier.

There are so many different avenues open to people nowadays.

I can only speak to the path that I took, which is traditional publishing and what that usually requires.

What it does require is for you to actually sit down and finish a product and then to use it to get an agent because in traditional publishing, if you send an unsolicited manuscript, meaning one without an agent to a publisher, it will go into a slush pile and likely will not be read.

So you have to have that agent who is going to be the one representing you and sending it out, connecting with editors and trying to get you that publishing contract.

A lot of people are shocked to hear that I had over 100 rejections from agents before I found mine, and the woman who became my agent, who 30 years later is still my agent, had never represented anyone before she was starting out.

And she's like, I think I can represent you.

And I was like, okay, right.

And let's build.

And she sold.

She did not sell my first book.

My first book was written as a thesis when I was at Princeton.

None of you should ever read it.

It's somewhere buried in a basement, in a library there.

But it taught me how to write a book, and because I couldn't sell that one, I was writing another book.

So that's what you do.

You just keep writing.

And she took that second book and sold it in about three months.

And so that is how my career started.

But I had, you know, a long list of queries that did not pan out very well.

And my favorite my favorite story about that is actually that when I first hit The New York Times list, I got a call from a publicist who said there was an agent who really wanted to speak to me and she wanted to fly me in to New York for the day to talk about representation.

And I said, well, you know, I'm really quite happy with my agent and my representation.

And I'm also quite sure she does not remember that she was the first agent to reject me.

So my advice to those who are starting out and who are querying and maybe are not having any luck yet is stick with it because karma is fantastic.

Really.

It's.

Thank you, everybody.

Beautiful.

This has been a special presentation.

Jodi Pico and the writing Life more than a good Story, A conversation from the 2023 annual Celebration of the Humanities presented by the Cambridge Trust Charitable Foundation.