Jodi Picoult, bestselling novelist, reveals her cowriters, psychologically speaking: Her creative process, according to what she says on her website

A successful novelist, with 14 million books in print worldwide, translated into 34 languages, she says the following in “Frequently Asked Questions” on her website:

Do you always know the end before you write it?

Let me put it this way - I think I do, and I’m usually wrong. When I start a book, I juggle a what-if question in my head, and push it and push it until I feel like I have a good story. I figure out what I need to know and do my research…I start to write when I come up with an excellent first line. And then I keep going, chapter by chapter, exactly in the order in which you’re reading it. Often, about 2/3 of the way through, the characters will take over and move the book in a different direction. I can fight them, but usually when I do that the book isn’t as good as it could be. It sounds crazy, but the book really starts writing itself after a while. I often feel like I’m just transcribing a film that’s being spooled in my head, and I have nothing to do with creating it. Certain scenes surprise me even after I have written them - I just stare at the computer screen, wondering how that happened…When I was writing Plain Truth, I called my mom up one day. “You’re not going to believe what’s happening to Ellie!” I told her. I think she said I was scaring her and hung up. I know it seems a little unnerving, but I love the moments when my characters get up and walk off on their own two feet.

—from “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)” https://www.jodipicoult.com/faqs.html

Comment

Her characters develop minds of their own, and she feels like she’s transcribing a film that someone, inside her head, has created. It is a little unnerving at times, but she enjoys it.

So why has she, together with her inside collaborators—not to mention the many other novelists, both literary and commercial, who have said similar things—never told the whole story about how novels are written?

Won’t her cowriters cooperate?