5 reasons why Jodi Picoult will be the last author standing when AI takes over the world
A love letter to Hanover, New Hampshire
When AI takes over the world, my money’s on Jodi Picoult still being out there taking notes in a beehive.
With authors outsourcing research to a chatbot these days, Jodi Picoult is still standing in a bakery to see how bread actually rises before she’ll let a character knead a single loaf on the page.
AI can synthesize everything ever written about beekeeping but it cannot stand in an apiary or get stung. It cannot taste bread that was baked before the dough went from the fridge to room temperature. That gap is exactly why Jodi Picoult’s books will feel alive when almost-but-not-quite-actually-good AI-assisted fiction starts to run rampant, and it’s the reminder every author needs to stick with the elbow grease of real research.
I just finished Mad Honey (went to the top of the TBR pile as I am co-authoring my second novel and I wanted to learn from the best how it’s done) and it reminded me why I keep coming back to her:
The OG of multiple timelines and POV. I had her in the back of my mind constantly when switching from post WW2 London to 1950s Zanzibar and present-day Jerusalem. And if anyone can make me fall in love with an African American nurse at the same time that I go into the mind of a white supremacist, it’s Jodi Picoult (Small Great Things).
Plot twists. She still surprises me, even after I’ve read almost everything she’s written. While I did pick the killer in Mad Honey, I did not see the main twist coming even with all I knew about the authors (will not say more to avoid spoilers). Most authors with 25-plus books develop a formula you can spot a mile off.
Learning new tricks. Yes, Picoult has some conventions that repeat across her body of work (moral dilemma, multiple perspectives, court case often defended by Jordan McAfee) but I appreciate that she keeps challenging herself. Co-authoring (double the work, not half of it), writing timelines backwards etc. Despite finding the thing that works and sells, she keeps making things harder for herself.
Great metaphors and similes, which is harder than it sounds. It’s so easy to get these wrong, sound contrived or forced and overwritten. In Mad Honey, there was a heart fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird, a child clinging like a barnacle, the flesh of a plum splitting through its skin, something uncontained. I read lines like that and think, yes, now I feel it even more.
I wrote The Spoon and the Sea thinking about how Jodi Picoult structures her timelines and perspectives as they chop and change. It’s one of the pieces of feedback that means the most, because it’s easy to lose the reader from the grip of the story when you ask them to travel across the world in space and time.
So this is my thank you to an author who still gets her hands dirty and geeks out on cool facts about random things before spinning it into a story.
My favourites: The Pact, Small Great Things, Nineteen Minutes