Witness for the Prosecution: Guilty of Innocent Lies
Reading and writing are like breathing to me, impossible to live without. I don’t remember the first book I ever read on my own, but I do remember my parents reading to me as a child. Maybe that’s where it started. I recall trips to the library to choose and return books long before I began attending school, and for years thereafter. As a youngster, my dad would tell me to “put down that book and go outside.” My mother said I read so much I’d “ruin” my eyes. I’m quite myopic and fair skinned, so perhaps they were both right. When I see Stephen King with his thick glasses on, I wonder if he had similar habits.
In any event, by about age 10 I was reading almost constantly. I read everything. The newspaper, the cereal box, signs on the highway. If it was printed, I read it. Twice, I let the bathtub overflow because I became engrossed in the TV Guide. Prunes boiled dry on the stove and smoked up the house while I examined the Sears & Roebuck catalogue. Nancy Drew and I became best friends long before I knew she was also friends with Sandra Day O’Connor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Laura Bush. I read Twain and Dickens and Melville and Hemingway and Wouk. If the library owned it, I read it. I preferred books and stories to parties and sports. Still do, actually.
To my parents’ chagrin, none of this made me a fabulous student. I did well enough, but I graduated from high school right in the middle of the class. By that time, I was ready for adventures of my own. I’d read grocery bags full of romances, but I prayed for a brave heart while craving the romantic international travel with espionage revealed by Helen MacInnes; endless nights with Dame Agatha Christie; gourmet food, swilling beer and admiring orchids in Nero Wolfe’s New York City brownstone with Archie, Fritz, Ted, and the gang of part-time operatives, Saul, Orrie and Fred.
It took about 90 days after high school graduation to realize that all of my friends were going off to college, leaving me with no traveling companions, no job, and no marketable skills save one. I knew how to type. Working as a secretary didn’t interest me for long. No one suggested I might work as a writer.
Right. College it was. Then, after seeking a non-existent teaching job for three years, law school.
I loved law school. I had perfected four skills that made everything about studying law an excellent experience. I loved to read and I’d learned to string words together into coherent sentences. Oh, and I could type.
But the most useful appetite I’d acquired was an insatiable desire for stories.
When we were assigned thousands of pages of cases to master in each class, what I absorbed were hundreds of stories about people in trouble. How they got themselves into those messes and paid the consequences. To me, these plaintiffs and defendants, their lawyers and judges were almost the same as fictional characters. Case names stuck in my memory like story titles. All of this made writing law school exams easier. These skills also propelled me onto Law Review, to several academic awards, published my law review case note, and helped me to graduate cum laude, which was well enough to secure a great job.
For the next 28 years, I’ve handled clients, learned the skills lawyering required, mentored and coached lawyers and writers, even taught law school for a while as an adjunct professor. Although I wrote briefs, letters, memos, opinions, jury instructions, wills, employee handbooks, each constrained by the facts and the applicable law, I didn’t publish another word for 20 years.
Eventually, I realized that lawyering is nonfiction writing with a better paycheck.
The lure of fiction’s innocent lies continued to entice me. By this time, Scott Turow and John Grisham had replaced Erle Gardner and Robert Traver as the lawyers writing fiction I turned to most often, the ones who inspired me to try.
I began to Publish and Practice in the mid-1990s. Since then, I’ve published 7 books, short stories, essays, interviews, book reviews, articles, newsletters, blog posts, and written many more words than I can recall. I hope to continue doing so until I stop breathing.
Everywhere I go, lawyers ask me about my writing and publishing experiences. I know many lawyers writing fiction and nonfiction now, as well as those who are continuing to practice law through effective legal writing. I started this site to connect with them, to help where I can, to offer what I’ve learned if it is of some use to others, and to learn what I can from those ahead.
Join me here, won’t you? I look forward to getting to know you better.
