Learning to Write A Novel: For Me, It Started as an Accident that Turned into a Passion That Turned into My Upcoming Novel, Deadly Declarations
In the spring of 2022, my novel, Deadly Declarations, will be released, and though I’ve written three books previously–The Christmas Courtroom Trilogy–they were all novellas. This is my first full-length novel. This article discusses how I went from being a practicing lawyer to becoming a practicing novelist.
Why do lawyers think they can write novels?
I’ve asked lawyers turned authors who have appeared on Charlotte Readers Podcast why many lawyers believe they have what it takes to write a novel. After all, law schools don’t teach novel writing. Senior partners don’t mentor young associates on the craft. Judges set page limits on briefs. And clients don’t like lengthy contracts. The practice offers lawyers few opportunities to understand how hard it is to write a story as long as 300 pages. So they presume it isn’t hard.
Maybe the answer to the question is arrogance, the misguided belief that it can’t be as hard as practicing law. Or maybe its confidence, the kind that comes with writing every day in the job. Or, possibly, it’s based on hope, the hope that they can build on their skillset in such a way to escape the billable hour and become the next John Grisham, John Hart, or David Baldacci.
I didn’t have arrogance, confidence, or hope when I started writing the story that turned into my first book. I didn’t even know I was writing what would become a book. It was an accident, that turned into a passion, that led to the novel that will come out next spring.
The accident of my first book
On Thanksgiving night about seven years ago, I was playing around with a short story on my computer–I used to start and never finish them–when I heard one of my wife’s favorite Christmas movies, Miracle on 34th Street, on the TV in the next room. It gave me an idea for the plot of my short story, one set entirely in a courtroom two days before Christmas. I started typing in earnest.
Every night between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I came home from my job as an attorney and wrote my story. On Christmas Eve, I typed “The End” on The Christmas Heist–what became a cross between My Cousin Vinny and Miracle on 34th Street. I printed out the story, cobbled it together, wrapped it in colored paper, and placed it under the Christmas tree as a gift for my family. You would have thought I had given them wool socks.
The story was only 33,000 words. Although it was much longer than any work of fiction I’d ever written, it was nowhere close to novel length. Nor was it a book. It was a bunch of unedited pages stapled together.
Somehow, the manuscript leaked out to friends and family and someone said, “hey, you should turn that story into a book.” That was when my writing lessons started.
I hired a good editor and learned about the editing process. More particularly, I learned how much I needed to do to make the story better. I also learned that being a writer is hard work.
The Christmas Heist was published in time for the next Christmas. The writing bug had bit me, and it was purely by accident.
The next five years
I had so much fun writing The Christmas Heist that I decided to write a sequel. Diving into my imaginary world was a wonderful escape from the practice of law. The result was a book called The Legally Binding Christmas. It released the next Christmas.
I had come to understand that writing a story began with “what if” and knowing that many good things come in threes, I asked myself “what if I could turn what I had started into a trilogy.” Then it was only a matter of asking “what if” about the characters and the plot. I decided to explore the story of the evil-doer from the first two books, who (like the Grinch, it turned out) had a bigger heart than I initially thought. The next Christmas, I wrapped the trilogy with the publication of The Christmas Redemption.
After the trilogy was completed, I retired from the practice of law, an act that should have opened up plenty of time for writing books. I reasoned that if I could write one book a year while practicing law, it would be easy to write several books a year in retirement. Ha.
Why did it take three years to complete the upcoming novel?
When I retired from the practice of law at the end of 2018, I decided to take on the challenge of producing and hosting Charlotte Readers Podcast. I had toyed with the idea of going back to school to get an MFA, but in the end, I decided I would interview authors and take courses offered by local, regional and national providers like Charlotte Writers Club, Charlotte Lit, North Carolina Writers Network, and Writers Digest, among others.
But it was more time-consuming than I thought it would be to learn how to build a podcast from the ground up. It didn’t leave much room for writing a novel, so I wrote shorter pieces, instead.
This is not to say that I didn’t start working on the next book. I did. But it was slow going. I wrote infrequently, and I couldn’t find a rhythm. I think I produced only 20,000 words in the next 18 months. And then, as fortune would have it, another accident happened.
I did a podcast interview with Charlotte author Scott Syfert who wrote the book, The First American Declaration of Independence? The Disputed History of the Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20, 1775. I was fascinated with this bit of local history with so many conspiracy theories and my novel set in a retirement community took on a new life. I’d found a better mystery for the amateur sleuths to solve, one that historians hadn’t been able to solve for 250 years.
I’d like to say that the writing took off, but the podcast was time-consuming. I thought about the advice that became a familiar refrain from authors who appeared on Charlotte Readers Podcast. The best way to finish a novel, they said, was to “Put your butt in the chair and write.”
I decided to take three weeks off at the end of last year and into the beginning of this year. I went to my mountain cabin and wrote every day. With that effort, plus writing every day for the rest of January amidst podcasting, I produced a rough draft of 115,000 words. It was novel length, but it wasn’t novel. There was much work to be done.
The things I needed to do before completing my upcoming novel
If I had jumped into a fourth book too soon, I wouldn’t have had a chance to study the things I needed to study, to read the books I needed to read, and to listen to the wisdom of authors on the podcast talk about their writing.
Tracy Curtis suggested the book, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. I read it and learned more about the structure of a good book.
I read Stephen King’s On Writing, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, Anne Lamont’s Bird by Bird, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and Lisa Cron’s Story Genius, among others.
I read Maureen Ryan Griffin’s Spinning Words Into Gold, Carrie Knowles A Self-Guided Workbook and Gentle Tour on Learning How to Write Stories from Start to Finish, and Cathy Pickens’ Create: Developing Your Creative Process. And I interviewed all three of them about their books on the podcast.
I read articles on writing in Writers Digest. And I took courses on flash fiction, short stories, novels, character development, mystery writing, humor writing, and more.
I conducted more than 100 interviews for the podcast Patreon channel on the craft and business of writing.
I interviewed more than 250 authors on the regular podcast about their books, and I read a wide range of books, seeing writing styles and techniques I hadn’t considered.
I also wrote shorter pieces, submitted them for critique and got feedback and then submitted them for publication and got accepted and rejected. I considered what worked and what didn’t and tried to make the next story better.
In short, I prepared myself to write my full-length novel by doing the following things:
- I joined writing organizations
- I took writing classes
- I read books on writing
- I submitted my short work for critique
- I read a variety of books, and then read and read more book
- I talked with authors about their books and their writing
I realized that to write a full-length novel I needed to think more about the following:
- The 3 act structure: the how and why of it
- Point of view: why it matters and how it works
- Characters: the most important pieces and how to develop them
- Plot and subplot: what makes them work and why
- Dialogue and tags: bringing truth to the page with dialogue, and with tags, less is more
- Pace and rhythm: kill what slows a good story
- Theme: it’s there, you just need to find it, because it’s what your book is about
- Revision: the way a shitty first draft becomes a good story
- Beta readers: how to seek and obtain feedback
- Editors: how to get more out of the editorial process
If I hadn’t taken these steps, Deadly Declarations would not be what it is. The three year period without a published book gave me time to mature as a writer. I needed that time to learn more about how to write a good story and frankly, to figure out the story I wanted to tell in novel form.
Thoughts about technology and other things not to fear
I learned not to fear technology. I experimented with Scrivener and found it to be helpful in organizing the manuscript. I experimented with Pro Writing Aid and found it helpful in identifying places where I fell into passive voice. I used the quick lookup feature in WORD and the online thesaurus to enrich my word choices and I searched online and in books for how better to get emotion on the page.
I tried to train myself to expect and relish criticism from my beta readers and editors. A marked up page could either be a bang to my ego or a path to a better manuscript. I tried to dress down my ego and look at feedback as an opportunity to make the novel better. I am pretty sure that no book ever improved with feedback that applauded every page.
The most difficult critic to defend against was the inner critic. Will the book be any good? Will readers like it? To tame this critic, I have tried to remind myself that readers have different tastes and the best written books are not for everyone. People like what they like. And if some people don’t like your book, it doesn’t mean others won’t, and it doesn’t mean it’s not well-written or well-edited. As long as you don’t take short cuts and give it a good effort, it is what it is.
Deadly Declarations
It’s modern day in the New South City of Charlotte, North Carolina, when an unlikely trio of retirees at the Independence Retirement Community, a/k/a The Indie, team up to solve two mysteries related to the death of a 96-year-old resident. Why was his manuscript about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence missing when they found his body? And why did his handwritten will dated the day he died disinherit his beloved granddaughter (his only heir), and leave his $50 million fortune to Sue Ellen Parker, the most despised resident at the Indie?
At the urging of Chuck Yeager Alexander, an optimistic soul who shoots fish in Freedom Lake and loves historical conspiracies, and Harriet Keaton, a former businesswoman with an extreme dislike of Sue Ellen Parker, Craig Travail, a disconsolate widower and trial lawyer who was just ousted from his law firm after 40 years, reluctantly goes to court with the help of his accomplices to challenge the dead man’s will for the granddaughter. This decision sets in motion a series of dangerous events that could lead the threesome to discover the answer to a mystery that has evaded historians for 250 years. That is, if they don’t die trying.
Deadly Declarations plunges readers into the world of retirement, where the reality of getting older is a combination of fear, doubt, humor, and new life, and then transports readers to the courtroom and to the Virginia countryside to prove that age is just a number when searching for and finding the truth.
The learning continues
As a recovering trial lawyer who jumped from law to writing, I value the opportunity to continue learning about the craft and business of writing. I will remind myself to do the following:
- Stay curious
- Continue to take writing courses
- Continue to read books about writing craft
- Don’t be afraid to be creative
- Practice, practice, practice a/k/a write, write, write
- Read books by other authors, and then read some more
- Talk with authors about writing
- Keep an open mind about the feedback on your work
- Submit and publish
- See rejections as opportunities
- Don’t graduate from the school of writing; just try to get better