I used to enjoy writing before I became a writer. I’ve been writing all my life. But all academically-oriented things geared toward conveying information—college newspaper articles, school essays, and endless legal research memos and briefs after I became a lawyer. I cared about being clear and precise, structuring my ideas so they flowed logically. If I had any anxiety about writing, it was around researching and forming a coherent argument, never around the writing itself. I remember hearing creative writing majors in college talk about being blocked, their intense desire to write something perfect getting in the way of them writing at all. This made no sense to me. Being nervous about screwing up a performance in front of a live audience, that made sense. But writing? You just wrote, and if you didn’t like it, you could fix it, edit it as many times as you wanted, for as long as you wanted, until you were satisfied. What was to be nervous about?
When I began creative writing, first memoir-type personal essays and then short stories, things I’d never before considered—word choice, cadence and rhythm, imagery—became paramount. I read stories that I fell in love with, that seared into my psyche, and I wanted to write like that, where it matters which of the seven synonyms you choose, where the placement of a comma can change the rhythm of the whole paragraph. Writing was no longer writing, at least not the way I’d understood it all my life, and I became slightly afraid of it. I realized that you can do only so much with editing; you can fix the substantive meaning of things, but you can’t change the voice without trashing the whole piece and starting over. The more I cared, the more slowly I wrote, carefully editing each sentence and reading it aloud until it sounded just right before moving onto the next.
When I started working on my novel, full anxiety kicked in, and I spent at least 6 months freewriting by hand, in scrawls I couldn’t decipher and therefore knew I’d never use. When I finally started drafting my novel, it took me pages and pages of writing over two weeks to land on the right opening sentence. It took me three months to write the six-page first chapter.
When I got to the first courtroom scene—the prosecution’s opening statement in the middle of chapter 3—something changed. I was sitting in front of the same computer in the same little nook where I’d written the previous scenes, but my goal changed, from drafting a scene in my novel to drafting an opening statement in a murder trial. I wrote not as a writer, but as a lawyer. I typed quickly, without second-guessing my word choice or wondering if there was a better word to convey my intent.
When I got to the defense attorney’s cross-examinations of the prosecution’s star witnesses, things got even more fun. My favorite part of being a litigator had been questioning hostile witnesses. Trying to figure out their motivations in saying what they said, the psychology of it, and using that analysis on the spot, real time, to craft the next question and the next, using documents, their previous statements, and logic to poke holes in their stories and to raise doubt. To capture this sense of spontaneity, I prepared an outline of the points the defense attorney would want to make, and then let go and wrote without stopping, at a blistering pace, as fast as my fingers could move. No hesitation, no anxiety, no questioning word choices or plot implications. It felt almost like being back in court, except so much better because I could have the witnesses say what I wanted them to say—a litigator’s fantasy come true!
My ego as a former trial lawyer, as someone who prided myself on my litigation skills, was preventing me from killing what needed killing…
The problem with all this exuberance (as with all exuberances) was the hangover that followed—in this case, the copious amounts of painful editing these scenes required. (There is, apparently, an inverse correlation between the amount of pain in writing something and the amount of pain in editing it.) Writing with my “attorney” hat on meant that I put in all the aspects of real trials and essentially wrote the equivalent of a trial transcript, which sucks to read. A real courtroom scene is not what you imagine from watching TV and movies. For example, on TV, when lawyers want to introduce a piece of evidence, they just whip it out and start talking about it with the witness. In real life, you have to mark the exhibit for identification, show it to opposing counsel, request the judge’s permission to approach and hand it to the witness, provide foundation and establish what it is (if the witness knows it, has seen it before, etc. to establish its authenticity and relevance), offer it into evidence, and respond to objections, if any. It’s time-consuming and boring as hell. It would be like transcribing a real-life conversation and calling it dialogue, with all the ummms and small talk and non-sequitors and awkward silences. You need to cut all that out. The writer in me knew that. But the lawyer in me fought it. My husband (also a litigator) and I regularly make fun of courtroom scenes in movies and TV shows for being unrealistic, we make sport of it. I kept picturing lawyers out there like us, reading my book, shaking their heads and laughing that I must be one of those big-firm associates who have never seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone dealt with actual witnesses and judges. I pictured the judge I clerked for frowning slightly, disappointed that I must have forgotten the basic fundamentals. My ego as a former trial lawyer, as someone who prided myself on my litigation skills, was preventing me from killing what needed killing, the parts that I’d put in there not to advance the story but to prove that I was a good lawyer.
It took my husband calling me out on it to help me to recognize what I was doing and to cut out almost all of the rule-oriented details, leaving just enough to give a taste of the technicalities involved. For the benefit of the stickler readers you hear about, who write long letters to authors complaining about some fact or premise they got wrong, I placed the courthouse in a fictional county, which I decided has unusual local rules that permit all the liberties my cuts forced me to take. Even after this drastic excision, the courtroom scenes were still too long, with me being so enamored with the back-and-forth between the lawyers and witnesses to get them down to the barebones that the story needed. My writing group and beta readers (several of whom are trial lawyers), my agent, my editor—at each stage of the edits, they all marked the courtroom scenes as needing more cuts. These scenes collectively, more than any one passage, were my darlings I had to maim, if not outright kill, and after five edit sequences, the final courtroom scenes ended up being about 25% the length of the original scenes.
I don’t think I’m alone in this, or that this applies only to lawyers writing courtroom scenes. We all have passions, expertise in things that we’re proud of, and it’s easy to make the mistake of assuming that our readers will share those interests and want to learn all about them in detail. But the story has to come first, and when we decide to show off and geek out in extended riffs that aren’t organic—even if the subject matter happens to be related to the story, as courtroom scenes were to mine—it does a disservice to our characters and stories and, most of all, to our readers.
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The other day, I found a blogger’s post recommending my novel for her followers. One person had commented that she might have to skip my book; she didn’t think she was a “courtroom-drama type” because she’d served on a jury and found it tedious and boring. The blogger said she could sympathize, she’d never been picked for a jury but she’d been in court, but that the courtroom scenes in Miracle Creek were short, intense bursts of drama, like the best of Law & Order, and besides, they were only a small part of the book. I laughed, thinking of the first drafts of those scenes that I had so much fun writing and how much work it took to get them to be so small, and how the lawyer-me ten, twenty years ago might have felt having my writing compared to Law & Order. I replied, “What a great compliment. That’s exactly what I was going for, so thank you!” and I meant every word.
