A writer discovers story

Scott Turow gave up writing for the law and then reversed himself. He describes here what he learned as a prosecutor.

I was hired as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago. There I was astonished to find myself facing the same old questions about how to address an audience. The trial lawyer's job and the novelist's were, in some aspects, shockingly similar. Both involved the reconstruction of experience, usually through many voices, whether they were witnesses or characters.

But there the paths deviated. In this arena the universal trumped; there were no prizes for being rarefied or ahead of the times. The trial lawyer who lost the audience also inevitably lost the case.

Engaging the jury was indispensable, and again and again I received the same advice about how to do it: Tell them a good story. There were plenty of good stories told in the courtroom, vivid accounts of crimes witnessed or conspiracies joined. The jury hung in primal fascination, waiting to find out what happened next. And so did I.

Thus I suddenly saw my answer to the literary conundrum of expressing the unique for a universal audience: Tell them a good story. The practice of criminal law had set me to seething with potential themes: the fading gradations between ordinary fallibility and great evil; the mysterious passions that lead people to break the known rules; the mirage that the truth often becomes in the courtroom.

The decision to succumb to plot and to the tenacious emotional grip I felt in contemplating crime led me naturally to the mystery whose power as a storytelling form persisted despite its long-term residence in the low-rent precincts of critical esteem. I was certain that an audience's hunger to know what happened next could be abetted by some of the values of the traditional realist novel, especially psychological depth in the characters and a prose style that aimed for more than just dishing out plot.

That epiphany led to Presumed Innocent, a best-seller. "I worked on that book for eight years on the morning commuter train and was staggered by its subsequent emergence as a best seller," Turow writes. "My only goal had been finally to publish a novel. I didn't even like most best sellers, which I deemed short on imagination."