What being a lawyer taught John Grisham about writing novels

0:00I have to tell you, I've been reading you since the early 90s, and I think you're more different than I expected than anyone I've ever met. Is that good or bad? Well, I don't know. It depends what you make of how you're different. I had pictured you as really cerebral and serious. And I was completely unprepared for how hilarious you are. When I was a young lawyer, I realized quickly that in some very tense situations, people really want to laugh. And I do it in my books, and I always get in trouble. And these are serious suspense novels. and mysteries and thrillers, and invariably, they make me take it out.

0:42My wife makes me take out a lot of it because she doesn't think I'm funny. But if it survives her and gets to New York, they make me take it out in New York. So I'm always looking for something funny. Well, I have some beef with your wife and your publisher then.

0:59Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

1:17John Grisham is the author of more than 50 number one best-selling books, including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and my favorite, The Runaway Jury. His first book, A Time to Kill, flopped when it debuted. But John kept writing, and he's kept a strict writing routine ever since. His latest book is another legal thriller called The Widow. Like his first book, this one features a small-town lawyer. John's days in the courtroom have been an inspiration for a lot of his work and led him to a dramatic change of heart around the death penalty.

1:52John, you started your career as a lawyer. What was your first trial like? My first murder case, fresh out of law school, it wasn't capital murder. It was a self-defense claim. It was a honky-tonk shooting one night, and everything blew up and was out of control, and there were more guns you could count and bullets flying everywhere. But my client had obviously killed another man, and there was a lot of pressure. And I had no business trying that case by myself seven months out of law school. But that's the way it worked in our small county in Mississippi. We had no public defender's office. So the cases were parceled out by the judges to all the young lawyers, and there I was in court.

2:35And I was not prepared for the trial. I thought the trial would be postponed for another month or so. And the five or six cases ahead of my case suddenly went off on plea bargains. And the jury panel was there, and the judge said, okay, you're up next. Pick a jury and let's go. And I had no idea what to do. Made a lot of mistakes. every mistake a rookie can make. And the moment came from my final summation to the jury, the most dramatic moment in every trial when the lawyer thinks he can convince the jury or he can rescue a bad presentation or whatever, pull all the pieces together and do a magic trick and win the case.

3:19And I got up to address the jury, and I had nothing to say. I had a legal pad because you always have to have a legal pad, and there was nothing written on it. I had no notes. And I had this great judge, Andy Baker, and he was sort of my mentor. And he said, Mr. Christian, will you approach the bench? And I walked over, and he put his hand over the microphone, and he looked at me. He said, you're in trouble, aren't you? I said, yes, I'm in trouble. He said, do you need to go vomit? And I said, I don't know, but I've got to do something. I've got to. He said, okay, I'm going to hold everything right here.

4:02There's the door. Go out that door. Go downstairs. There's the restroom. Go take care of yourself and hurry back. And I did that. And I vomited. I was so upset and nervous. Just the butterflies were terrible. And I washed my face off. And I knew the jury was waiting. The courtroom was waiting. The judge was waiting. Everybody was waiting, and I had this really strong urge just to go out the hallway and start running and keep running and not to come back. I really wanted to run and just say, forget this case. Forget this profession. I'm going to do something else with my life. And found the guts to go back in there and address the jury and found some words that came together and was able to make a presentation off the cuff.

4:52And the jury found my client not guilty. And it was a big moment. And I learned a lot about myself through that one terrible incident. Wow. Oh, I have so many questions. First of all, I'm getting this image of you being a very dutiful, obedient young lawyer where the judge tells you to go vomit. Yes, your honor. And then you just go and do it. Yeah. Well, I would say it's not unusual. It happens all the time because the butterflies are horrendous. Your system is really keyed up, and there's a lot of nausea in those situations. So you said you wanted to run, but you didn't. Why not? You can't just leave the courtroom and leave your client.

5:40I had a duty to my client. At that point, my client was not speaking to me. After three days of watching my malpractice in the courtroom, he wanted no part of me. He was sitting at the far end of the table as far away from me as he could get. So we weren't speaking. But, you know, ethically, I had a duty. It would have been just a really juicy piece of gossip around the courthouse if I had walked out or run out. I managed to pull things together and grit my teeth and go back in there. Wow. It's easy to imagine you make it through that. Okay, I'm done. I do not need this again. How did you stick it out another 10 years?

6:21Well, I'll tell you, when the jury came back with a verdict of not guilty, and I was able to convince the jury that my client was acting in self-defense, which he really was, the thrill of that win, the courtroom victory was so enormous for a rookie. And I was driving home from the courthouse, and I was just laughing. I was so relieved to be away from the courtroom. But I just thought this is pretty great after all. And I was dreaming of being a big-time trial lawyer. That's what I wanted. And that's what eventually led to A Time to Kill because it was based on something I saw in a courtroom. And I was inspired to create this story involving a young lawyer, very autobiographical like myself, in a small town in Mississippi trying the big case, winning the big courtroom verdict.

7:12And so the dream, you know, continued. It was other wins in the courtroom, other victories and a lot of defeats. But I kept aiming toward that goal of being a really accomplished courtroom lawyer. That was my dream. So what was it that killed the dream? Writing books, success as an author. About halfway through that 10-year career, and that's not a long period of time, But I got the urge to at least try to write. I thought it was going to be a mystery at first, a courtroom drama. And I started writing a few words every day. I had the story, and I really believed in the story. I pecked away at it.

7:58And before long, the book was, you know, I had 300 pages stacked up, and I realized I was going to finish it. and my first novel was published while I was still a lawyer. It didn't sell, but I kept writing. I kept writing. John, one of the interesting things to me about your career transition is you obviously gained a lot of creative freedom, but in a very basic sense, it sounds like you lost some impact. You shift to writing novels, and you're not saving innocent people from a life in prison or from the death penalty anymore. did you struggle at all with the loss of meaning? It was just not financially rewarding.

8:42As a small-town lawyer, I just couldn't see myself doing that. And the cases I dreamed of getting, I didn't get. The big noted criminal cases or civil cases were not coming my way, and my dream was not going to happen the way I wanted it to. And, Adam, when you get the urge to write full-time, it's a very powerful dream, Especially when you're locked into a job that consumes so much time and so much pressure and so much energy and is not that rewarding. I was kind of tired of that. Suddenly to have the freedom or to dream of doing nothing but writing books, that was just a huge dream that became all-consuming.

9:21You have an interesting way of pursuing that dream, which is you impose constraints on your own freedom. I think you have one of the more religious writing routines of anyone I know. I'd love to hear more about it. Well, I didn't start off 40 years ago with the dream or goal of writing 50 books. I think I'm up to 51 or 52 now. The way I think of it now, and I have for a long time, is I'm blessed with good health and also a lot of creative energy. There's a period of time each morning from 7 until about 11 when I'm all alone in my writing room, my little office at home, on the farm with nobody else around.

10:07No phones, no fax, no internet, no music, no nothing. Same desk, same cup of coffees, same quilt, same everything. And I sit down at 7, 7.30, and I'm still very thankful I get to do that and create and write and create these stories that people enjoy. And I continually see stories involving the law, lawyers, law firms, courts, appeals, cases, litigation. That's where I like to live. That's my world anyway. I can read a story about a fascinating wrongful conviction case or a murder case or some kind of criminal action, and you change a few facts. Just change this fact and that factor, whatever, and fictionalize it, and you've got what could be a very compelling mystery.

10:57And that's just the way I think all the time. I think one of the things I struggle with as a writer is when I become that disciplined about my writing, I start to force bad ideas. And I end up going down rabbit holes. as opposed to saying, I want to write in a way that's a little more free-flowing, a little bit less linear, a little bit more imaginative. And I seem to do that better when I have a little bit less structure. And I think maybe there's something I'm missing. So talk to me about how you maintain this routine and the goal of writing 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 words without feeling like you box yourself in.

11:38Writers are noted for having these brilliant ideas, these great ideas for novels. And you run off and you can't wait to start writing. And you hammer away and you write 50 ,000 words. And all of a sudden you stop and you realize you don't know where you're going. Or you don't know where to end. Or you've got yourself written into a box into a corner. Writers do that all the time. I'm not going to do that. I'm too lazy to waste all that time. By the time I start a novel, I've worked on the story for a long time. Very few stories come out of nowhere and hit and stick and become novels. There are a lot of stories, and most of them go away.

12:14I work on them for a while. I let them sit for a while. And most of them, they're all brilliant when you first get the idea. And the brilliance kind of fades away with almost all of them. The good ones, though, stick around. And I'll continually add to it, work on the outline. What's a great opening? What's an unexpected finish? How do you maintain the narrative tension for 300, 400 pages? What's your main character look like? Just don't do a, you know, white boy every time. That's what I am. Let's try something different. Who's a secondary character? You know, all these things that are fun to dream up.

12:54And so by the time I start writing, I've got a pretty strong outline of the book written down. And I follow that. And again, I learned this with the time to kill. If you know where you're going, it's very hard to get lost. And having said that, in the course of writing a novel or any kind of book, you can't plan everything. And you don't want to because the surprises are always fun. When a new character pops up or you think of a plot twist or a subplot twist that you hadn't anticipated. And suddenly there it is. You can't plan everything. To me, it's still fun, the fun experience of writing a novel.

13:42As somebody who begins with the end in mind, I understand you're in for a little bit of a surprise as you're writing your latest book, The Widow. Yeah, got off track a little bit. I had an ending. This has happened once or twice in the span of all these books. But it happened in January of this year. I was not sure about the ending. I knew it was risky. And my wife, she's the first reader. She reads everything the first time through, and she didn't like the ending. That's a big sign right there. And then my agent, who's also my editor, he didn't like the ending. There are times with every book when I think this is healthy, where you become very frightened by what you're writing.

14:24And you say, who wants to read this? This story doesn't make any sense. Who wants to read this? This is not plausible. Fiction can be anything you want it to be, but it's got to be plausible. It's got to be believable. And you reach a point where you go, I'm terrified by this story. I'm not sure it's going to work. And you have to fight off the doubts and keep going. So anyway, to fix the problem, I just kept writing. And I wrote another ending after the one I thought I had, and it worked. I mean, that's part of the process of doing it, It's being able to fix something. My big fear in life is I'm going to write a book and my wife is not going to like it at all.

15:06And my agent and my publisher are going to really dislike the book. By the time I've gone through the whole process and written 100 ,000 words, 500 pages, I turn it in and I say, this really sucks, okay? That's my big fear. And it has not happened yet. It's fascinating to hear this, John. I mean, you've released more than 50 consecutive number one New York Times bestsellers in a row. And you're still grappling with the fear and doubt along the way of what if this one sucks? Sure. I think the fear and doubt should always be there with whatever you're doing. You talk about fear and doubt when you walk into a courtroom, even after years of practice, and you've got to select a jury and you've got to put the jury in the box and start calling witnesses and you've got to be in command of the courtroom or in control of your case because the outcome could be, it will be crucial for one side.

16:11That's fear, that's doubt. That's what I grew up doing and I learned it the hard way. So the self-doubt is always healthy. The self-reflection is very important. In psychology, we often suggest that there's an optimal amount of doubt, that if you get too much, you feel paralyzed by it and it becomes debilitating. If you have too little, you might be overconfident or complacent, and there might be a sweet spot in the middle of that stress curve where you say, okay, I have enough doubt to stay open to different paths and sort of keep critiquing and improving my work. but not so much that I just feel like I can't do it, so I might as well give up.

16:57Do you buy that? I've never had so much doubt that I gave up on something I was already working on. I have to believe in it before I start, and it takes a while to reach that point, to reach the starting point. It takes a long time. Even in life, I don't have a lot of highs. I don't have a lot of lows. I just kind of stay on an even keel. That's just my nature. I just kind of stay in the middle of the road. I know writers who are just paralyzed by doubt and cannot finish. And I know writers who have written some really bad stuff because they thought it was brilliant and it didn't work. We all want to read good writers.

17:39And I'll read a really good writer. And invariably, I'll say, I will never be that good. I just think that some things you can't do. And so I recognize my limitations. That's again, that's part of the self-reflection, self-analysis that is just kind of second nature. With that level of self-awareness and humility, how do you get to the point where you really believe in an idea? You said it takes a long time. What happens along the way? It's a gradual process. It's fairly easy to create a big hook early in the story. And when you write suspense or mysteries or thrillers, you better have the hook early on in the story.

18:25And then the ending is tricky because you don't want your reader to say, okay, I had this book figured out halfway through. You want an ending that is satisfying but not predictable. And it's got to be plausible. It's got to be smart. But it can't be predicted. Do you know the Vonnegut distinction between swoopers and bashers? No. I've never liked the terms because they're not intuitive. But the way he described it, swoopers are writers who bang out a first draft and create without editing. And then they go back and refine. And bashers do the opposite. They try to perfect each sentence before moving on to the next one.

19:08Which one is your style? The latter. I've never hammered out a first draft. I can't do that. My goal each day is to write a thousand words. And sometimes that may take two hours or five hours. Sometimes it may be 2 ,000. If I get into a situation where there's a lot of dialogue, that goes pretty fast for me. The pages can fly by. So anyway, whatever I write that day, at least a thousand, sometimes more. When I'm done, I'm done. When I'm done, I've written the last sentence. I don't want to see it again until the next morning. and when I sit down the next morning, I go back and read what I wrote the day before and make a lot of edits, clean it up.

19:50And reading it, again, we're talking about suspense here. Reading it gets me back into the rhythm of the story. Maybe I see a mistake I made the day before, whatever. Now, in between that to 24 hours in between or 20 hours in between, I get lost in the story. I think about it a lot. I think about the next scene. What am I going to start writing in the morning? What's the scene going to be? And I'm not obsessed with it. It's not work. I'm just thinking about it. It's just fun to, when I'm in the car, and I don't drive a lot every day, I never listen to music or anything. It's total silence. So I can think about what the next scene is and what's the dialogue going to be.

20:31And I'll replay dialogue from that morning if it doesn't sound right, to make sure it sounds right. So there's the constant revision. And so when I finish a book, it's pretty clean. I've corrected a lot of the mistakes I see. It still needs a good edit, and I still listen to my editor. But I've never been able to just plow through a rough draft real fast. I just can't do it. Well, you're making me rethink part of my writing process here, listening to you, because I've been more in that first swooper camp historically saying, yeah, I know that creating and critiquing are different mental modes.

21:11And if I start to criticize too soon, I can get paralyzed. I can see everything that's wrong with what I'm creating. And I go too slow and I second guess myself and I don't want to get stuck. That's where writer's block happens. And so I'm just going to be in drafting mode. It's all idea generation. And then I'll come back later and put on my critic hat and try to make it better. And what I'm realizing as you talk is, although there are benefits of that approach, there's also a cost, which is I am more likely then to end up in a rabbit hole. I may then spend weeks working through something that ultimately is not a compelling direction.

21:51And if I had revised along the way, I probably would have caught it sooner and not had to throw away thousands of words of garbage that didn't need to be produced in the first place. So I'm now wondering if I need a middle ground approach. I can't answer that. I've told you what I do, and everybody works differently. I'll say this. With my first novel, I worked on it for three years. I had no idea what I was doing. I'd never written before. And the manuscript for A Time to Kill was almost 1 ,000 pages long. So it got rejected. We talked about that. When I finally found a publisher and an editor, a really good editor, we cut one-third of the book from about 1 ,000 to about 600 pages.

22:39And that one-third, the way I looked at things, was one year of my life because I'd worked on it for three years. Wow. And listen, I was getting up at 5 in the morning to be in the office by 5.30 to write for two hours, sometimes three, before the day started, before the phone started ringing. So I was losing a lot of sleep. And I said to myself, I'm not doing that again. I'm not going to waste another year of my life by writing too much. and learn how to do that over the years. Just, you know, write and then look for ways to streamline it, make it leaner, make it faster.

23:19Are you ready for a lightning round? I guess, I guess. First question is, who are your dream dinner party guests? Alive or dead? Oh, Mark Twain. I loved Mark Twain since I was 12 years old. Who else? Jackie Robinson. I love baseball. Howard Cosell, the famous announcer. Didn't really like him, but I always wanted to argue with him. That's a good dinner party. I'd be happy to join that one. What's the worst writing advice you see given regularly? I've heard people say, try to write two or three stories at the same time. I think that's bad advice. I can't do that. Never been able to do that. One at a time.

24:03What's the question you have for me as a psychologist? It was in April and we were in Tuscany and we all gathered in the den by the fire. And you pull out a deck of cards and did three or four tricks that were truly phenomenal. Where'd you learn those card tricks? Well, thank you. I guess I was mostly self-taught. I had some books and some videos, but started when I was 12 babysitting for some kids down the street and needed a way to entertain them. The last card trick was pretty amazing. We scattered the deck all over the floor, ceiling, and walls, and then you pulled out the one card from the thin air.

24:38Oh, thank you. I'm going to play this part for my wife because we have an ongoing debate about magicians. Okay, what is something you've changed your mind about or rethought? Well, it's funny you mention that. This time yesterday, I was on death row in Texas talking to a guy named Robert Robertson who is scheduled to be executed. and I spent a lot of time thinking about the death penalty because I grew up not in Texas, but in the very conservative Southern Baptist part of the country. The death belt, as we say, also known as the Bible belt, where the death penalty is still very popular. And I grew up that way.

25:18And I had a dramatic change of heart 30 years ago when I was writing a novel. And it was a big change in my life because it runs contrary to what I was taught as a child and what most of my friends believe now. But I became a very strong opponent of the death penalty. Wow. I'd love to hear a little more about how you changed your mind on the death penalty. What was it that shifted your opinion? Oh, it was a conversation with a chaplain on death row. So in Mississippi in 1994, I was on death row researching a book that would become the chamber. And I'd been there several times. And I already knew the guards and some of the inmates.

26:03And I lived two hours away, and I knew the executioner. And my last visit there, we were next to the death room where the gas chamber was. There was no execution. Nobody was there but me and the chaplain. and we're sitting in this cold, damp holding room where they keep the inmate for the last one hour before he goes through the door and is executed. And the chaplain was a retired minister and he was a chaplain of death row. And he said, can I ask you a question? I said, sure, anything. He said, are you a Christian? I said, I am. He said, do you think Jesus would approve of what we do here? And there was no way to say yes.

26:52Jesus taught forgiveness and redemption, not revenge and retribution. And he said, you're right. This is wrong. And I thought, well, that was the 180-degree flip right there. And I drove away from Parchman from the prison with a whole different attitude, a whole different belief. Wow. Just one question completely changed your entire philosophy. Yeah. Well, it tracks with the psychology of motivational interviewing, which suggests that if instead he had said to you, you know, John, here's why your belief is wrong, that attempt to shame you might have made you defensive. Right. And instead, he invited you to answer the question for yourself.

27:36It worked. Wow, that's really powerful. since you rethought your stance on the death penalty, you know, starting with the time to kill, but in multiple books, using the tools of suspense and mystery and thriller, you've gotten a lot of readers to change their minds and, you know, wonder why does anyone think that the state has the right to decide who lives and who dies or that a jury should make that call? You serve on the board of directors of the Innocence Project, as well as another organization that's about exonerating the wrongfully convicted. I wonder if that provides some of the meaning that I thought might be absent from your legal career, both as a writer and as an activist.

28:16You're changing policy, you're changing opinion, and you're rescuing innocent people who might lose their lives. I don't start out writing a book hoping to change opinions. Some books, the more serious books, I hope to raise awareness about a certain issue, whether it's related to criminal justice or environmental destruction or insurance fraud or whatever. But no, the innocence work was something else I stumbled into by accident because I'd already published probably 20 books. By the time I got the inspiration to write a nonfiction book, something I never thought about doing, based on a wrongful conviction case.

28:54And it involved a guy in Oklahoma who was almost executed for a murder committed by a man well known to the police and should have been the first suspect. And I was just inspired by the story. And once I jumped into the middle of it and started researching it, I realized how many innocent people are in prison. I've written two nonfiction books about wrongful convictions, one novel about a wrongful conviction. There will be others, I'm sure. And I've said many times, every wrongful conviction should be its own book, should have a book because the stories are so compelling. So you've got a moral perspective on why the death penalty is wrong.

29:36It also sounds like you have a very pragmatic concern, which is there are just too many flaws and holes in our legal system to take the risk of executing an innocent person. I just left death row in Texas, the most prolific state, and a state that most of the people are quite proud of their death chamber. In that state, they have sent 18 people to death row, convicted by juries unanimously, 18 people who have later been exonerated because they weren't guilty. That's a lot of mistakes. That's a lot of mistakes. And I believe we can't prove it because there's no clear proof, but there's some very strong circumstantial evidence that they have executed, executed several who were innocent, not just in Texas, but around the country.

30:32And we as human beings should have proven by now that we can't be trusted to kill people on behalf of the state. Even if you support the death penalty, you cannot support the system of the death penalty. There are just too many mistakes. I mean, for me, it's hard to understand why we're still doing this. You know, I look at well over 100 countries have abolished the death penalty altogether. Almost all of Europe, some of the countries that still have it, I think most people would consider to be, in other ways, violators of human rights. Why is this such a slow uphill battle in the U.S., and what do you think it's going to take to change it?

31:15The death penalty is dying a slow death itself. There are fewer executions, fewer death verdicts, not because of courageous lawmakers or courageous judges, but because of courageous jurors. defense lawyers are better and jurors are now allowed to see more of the defendant's life and past and so most of these people are guilty most of them are the crimes are atrocious, horrendous beyond description, many of them are and there's always the urge to get immediate, you know, revenge But when you learn more about the defendant and the fact that he never had a chance in life, never had a family, never had whatever, the things that most of us have, he fell through the cracks time and time again through the systems.

32:22Juries have more sympathy these days, and they are saying more and more often, let's don't kill him. Let's just keep him in prison where he belongs. And that's what's happening. So you're seeing fewer executions. The number of executions has really decreased. Now, that could turn around given the current mood in our country with the full-throated support of the death penalty by our president, who wants to execute a lot of people. And that will filter down to his supporters and throughout society. We don't know what that's going to do to the death penalty, but it can't be good. From all the years you've spent working on this, what has been the most effective argument for you?

33:08It's very simple. We can all agree that killing is wrong, so why do we allow the state to kill? we are the state. We're part of the state. And we tolerate it. We allow it. It's still wrong. Hard to argue with that. I've got to run. Our hour is up. We're at time. Thank you, John. Thank you, Adam. See you down the road. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pillar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick, and our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hylash, Banban Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

33:58Original music by Hans Dale Hsu and Alison Leighton-Brown.

34:05Do you have a hot take or unpopular opinion that you're keen to defend? Oh, no. All my opinions are popular. All smart people agree with me. I can't think of anything.