And that's an important distinction because the reason I was able to get to this level was because of my husband, who gave up a lot so that he at one point became the primary stay-at-home dad.
But when my kids were very tiny and I was the primary caretaker, I would write in any 10-minute bursts I could find.
If Barney was on TV, if they were napping, I used to take my laptop to kindergarten, a nursery school pickup.
I go to my office, I take my coffee with me, which my husband makes, and then I go upstairs and I pull up whatever I've been writing and I edit my way through the chapter.
And when I get to the bottom of it, I start writing fresh.
Let's suppose you write for a couple days, and then do you ever show it to your husband, your children, anybody, your mother, anybody, and say, what do you think?
What I usually do, it depends on the book, but very often if I finish a section, if it's in three sections or something, I will send pages off to my agent, my long-term agent, she's the only agent I've ever had, and my mom, because they give me different kinds of feedback.
I also have a couple of friends who are writers who are beta readers for me, which is really helpful because sometimes you're so in a book that you lose clarity.
And it's important to get a bigger picture, I think, while you're writing it.
Now your books attract a fair amount of readers but they also attract a fair amount of commentary from people who don't like some of the things that you write.
So, you know, book bans have increased 1,100% since 2020.
They mostly started to increase because of parental rights laws that have been passed in some conservative states that have been misinterpreted so that parents believe that if they object to a certain book, it should be removed from a school shelf or a library shelf.
And, you know, it's one thing as a parent, I'm a parent, to monitor what your kids read.
It's another thing entirely to monitor what other people's kids read.
And that's kind of, therein lays the problem.
That's why we're seeing huge swaths of books being removed from these states.
You know, I have amazing fans and readers, and usually they do that for me.
The reason 19 Minutes is banned, 19 Minutes happens to be about school shootings and gun violence in America.
And you would think that might be a contentious issue, but that's not the problem with the book.
The problem apparently is one page where there is a date rape scene that is not graphic and is not gratuitous and is 100% part of the commentary about bullying that is baked into the book.
But that is what these parents and particularly the group Moms for Liberty was objecting to with that book.
I think the only thing you have to do is be a reader first because you really want to know how your stories, the stories that you need to tell, are going to fit into the canon somehow.
And I also think you need to take a writing workshop course.
Does not have to be at Princeton, does not even have to be at a college.
They offer them at libraries and at online and at bookstores.
The reason I suggest taking a workshop course is because you learn how to write on demand and you learn how to give and get criticism.
And those are probably the most important tools a writer has.
When I started out, you know, I told you three people bought my hardcover for my first book.
And eventually, a later publishing company, Simon ⁇ Schuster, bought the rights to all my earlier hardcovers and said, We're going to release these in paperback.
If you want to make any changes, you go right ahead.
And I was like, oh, do I do that?
And I went and I read through all of them.
And there were definitely changes that I would have made in terms of technique.
As I think I've become a more skilled technical writer.
For example, what might have taken me a paragraph to describe when I was writing and I was 23, I now could do in five words.
But I stood by the stories, I stood by the characters, I stood by the plots.
I thought those were all, they absolutely still worked me.
There were so many people in my life that encouraged me to write.
From my mother, who gave me that reality check, but has been my biggest cheerleader my whole life, to Mary Morris, who really whipped me into shape at Princeton and made me the writer that I am today, to the readers who were willing to follow me, even when I was writing very different books each time around.
You know, I think that there are so many influences on me, and even the writers I loved, you know, that I read as a reader before I was a writer who inspired me and made me want to do something just as great.
Alice Hoffman was one of my favorite writers, and I love that I get to talk to her now as a friend.
Yeah, it was actually, so that book was a really interesting, to me, a departure because I had been writing a lot about things that I was afraid of as a parent, you know, like your child getting sick, your child getting kidnapped, things like that.
And then my kids kind of made it through childhood and I was like, okay, good.
And I began to, I think, broaden my scope.
And the storyteller, which is the book you're talking about, was really about the nature of good and evil.
And I wanted to ask the question, if you were a good person, is there something that could convince you to do something truly evil?
And if you've done something truly evil, is there anything that could erase that stain?
And that honestly was where that story came from for me.
So I actually wound up shadowing a guy at the Department of Justice whose job it is to go after former Nazis.
Have you ever thought they have like in Florida kind of an animal country safari where you can just go in Florida and you don't have to go all the way to Africa to see the elephants.
Do you ever think about doing that as opposed to going all the way to Africa?
Well I did actually go to some of the elephant sanctuaries that were in the U.S. There's one in Tennessee that I went to and that was important too because there was an elephant sanctuary element in the book.
But I needed to really see these incredible animals, these matriarchal societies in the wild, which is why I went to Botswana.
So we write in your book, I think, that these elephants go back and look at the bones of elephants that have died and they can kind of sense that this was their cousin or something like that.
Yeah, well what they do is they'll go back to a spot where an elephant died and if there are bones there, it's really wild.
They'll pick them up with their trunks very sensitively go like this.
Sometimes they'll rub their feet very gently over them and even if there are no bones but they know an elephant died there, they will go back there like annually and just kind of pay their respects, just like we would.
One famous writer, I can't remember if it was Faulkner or Fitzgerald, who said that when you're writing for movies, basically you throw the script over the fence, they throw money back over the fence to you, and that's it.
But the reality is that if they feel that you can contribute in a way that is going to be useful and viable to them, then they'll let you, if you're lucky, contribute in some way.
You turn the draft in, and then since you've sold so many copies of your books already, does somebody have the courage to say, well, let me edit your work?
And I think it's, sometimes I think she cares more than I do.
I mean, she really gets so passionate about my books and really wants them to be the best they can be.
Like I said, sometimes you get too close to material, especially when you're writing for nine months, you know, and you don't realize how, I guess, caught up in the details you are, that you can't see that big picture.
And Jen is a master of that.
And I rely on her to be able to look at something with baby eyes and help me shape it.
Do you imagine that Shakespeare had an editor and somebody said, well, you're not really doing such a good job, Will, and we're going to edit your work?
Yeah, so I think I'm a rare writer in that I actually am a people person and I like going out on the road.
I like meeting my fans.
I really like talking about my books in public.
And so my tours get to be quite extensive.
So, I will spend, I'll do like a 30-city tour in the US, which is quite large, and then I'll go over and do a couple of weeks in England, and then sometimes I'll also wind up in Australia or another country.
So, when you go on these tours, how many people come up to you and say, I knew you in high school, or my daughter knew you at some point in high school, or something?
Do you have people that have personal connections?
Or how many people come up to you and tell you, I don't really like your work, I just came here to tell you I don't like your work.
Nobody ever does that because usually they have to pay for a ticket, so why would you?
But I have had a couple of people come up to me and be like, Do you remember me?
I was in your third grade class.
But most people are, what I actually love is when people come up to me and say, I started reading your books when I was 14, and now this is my daughter, and I have her reading all your books.
And you know, you see these whole generations of families that are reading books together, and I think that's awesome.
And I'm also really proud of the fact that I think people tell me very often that a book saved their life at a time when they needed it.
And I think that when we write fiction, we don't expect to have that kind of impact on someone, but every now and then you do.
And it's not just one or two readers, it is hundreds have come up to me with stories of their own lives and how my books intersected with them.
And I really do believe that the last piece of an equation when it comes to a book is the reader, what they bring to the story and what they take away from it.
And that is honestly what a gift to know that you helped someone when they needed it.
Now, one of the great non-fiction writers in our country is Robert Caro, who's written a book on Robert Moses, and also now four volumes and maybe a fifth on Lyndon Johnson.
He wrote a book not long ago on how he writes.
Would you ever consider writing a book about how to write?
I feel like if I were going to write anything like that, it would probably be a compendium of all the research that I've done and the stories I have from doing all the research.
I think a book on writing is useful only in so much as you have to be able to figure out what works for you because every writer is different and every writer writes differently.
And, you know, so Stephen King's on writing is an incredible masterclass in writing, but you may not take every lesson from there and apply it to yourself in a way that's healthy or helpful.
So rather than telling people this is the only way to do it, I would rather, I think, inspire them with the joy that I've had in my writing and hope that they can find that somehow in theirs.
But I don't say I go into reading a paper or watching the news looking for the next hook because very often it has to hit me at the right point in my life for me to want to write about it.
Well, so interestingly, both of those have happened.
I can't tell you how many emails I get from people saying, my life would be a great book, and I want you to write it.
And I always say, I always write back, I write everybody back, and I say, you know, thank you so much for thinking of me.
I don't take on story ideas.
I have so many of my own.
But that said, if this is the story you want to write, you should do it.
And here are some ways to get started, right?
So encourage them to tell their own story.
But that said, there have been people sometimes when I'm in the middle of organizing a book and trying to figure out research where someone writes to me and says, you know, I really am hoping you'll write about this topic.
This is how my life was affected by this topic.
And I'm like, you are exactly who I need to talk to.
And so I've wound up with, you know, Prison Pen Pals because of that.
And very often, I use their stories, the lives of the people who have walked through these situations in my books in a way that I haven't, so that I can write with authority about a character.
And when you are writing, let's say you write one day and you finish it, you go back the next day and look at it, you say, oh my god, who could have written this?
I think it's like around 35 or 40 languages that they've been translated into.
I certainly haven't gone to all those countries, but I've done book tours in Germany, I've done book tours in Italy, in France.
They're very disconcerting because I don't speak those languages fluently.
And some I don't speak at all.
And so I remember being in Italy in Rome doing morning TV and completely unable to communicate which TV program I was on.
And you know, there's someone in your ear translating as the anchor is talking to you and you're trying not, then you're speaking in English, but you hear the translation.
And then, you know, I thought there was a point where I actually almost got out of writing.
It was like my fourth book.
Book didn't sell well at all.
And I went and I got an application for Home Depot.
I thought maybe this is what I should be doing.
And I found out later, as I switched publishing companies, that it had been caught in a major war between an editor and the head of the company who were feuding with each other.
And the sales director came up to me and said, we were told not to bother trying to sell this book.
I mean, there's all kinds of politics that goes on that you don't know about as an author.
And so I did go back to writing and I had a more successful book and I kept at it.
You know, self-publishing didn't exist when I started writing, and now there are so many authors that are doing that or doing independent publishing, which is kind of a hybrid.
And that's a very different world from what I do.
I like being in traditional publishing.
I like having an army behind me to market my books, to put the books together physically and, you know, in terms of getting them out in the world.
But there are so many avenues now to publishing.
So yeah, I am quite happy with the route I've taken.
I don't know if I started writing now, if I would even be published.
Who's to say?
But I feel that I worked very hard, but I was also in the right place at the right time.
And that's the only picture we know of Shakespeare, really.
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This is the only picture where there's some reason to believe that people who knew him and worked with him were involved in the creation and the approval of that image.
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