Another in a series of posts about the intersections between the art of trial lawyering — which I performed, so to speak, for 35 years — and the art of writing.
This is all about a skill that both art forms have in common: being able to plan backwards. It's not a skill that's commonly considered to be essential to either. In fact, it's essential to both.
As a trial lawyer I was a prosecutor, which means that I had to advance my case from the beginning of trial, from opening statement on. (Defense attorneys have the luxury of — naturally — playing defense, and the best are like guerrilla warriors, lurking in the shadows before springing out and attacking.) And I had the burden of proof — at trial's end, establishing the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Which means that I had to look to that end point and work backwards.
In every trial I handled, I plotted out my closing argument before I wrote my opening statement. I couldn't predict in advance everything that would happen in the trial, but I could foresee what I'd need to be able to tell the jury at the end — and here's something important — based on the evidence that I'd be presenting. Contrary to what's presented in popular entertainment, trial lawyers can't get up before a jury in closing argument and wax eloquently about matters that may sound wonderful but don't have facts to back them up. So my trial plan began at the end, and ended at the beginning. Every detail that I'd be talking about in closing had to be set forth through witnesses in what's called the government's case-in-chief, and, before that, introduced through my opening statement to the jury.
So what does all of that that have to do with the art of writing? A lot.
There are various schools of thought among writers as to how much structure should be imposed on a work in advance. But I don't believe that any serious writer would say that you should just sit at a keyboard, come up with a rough idea of a plot and a few characters, and then let the characters run around over 300 pages or so, figuring stuff out for themselves. You have to have a really good idea of where you're going before you even start.
As a young prosecutor, this wasn't an easy intellectual exercise for me. Lawyers are trained to have linear minds — A leads to B which leads to C, and so on — not, jump up to J and move back to A by way of I, H and G. But I learned.
And on the writing side there's this, offered recently on Substack:
"R. L. Stine has written 300+ books. The Goosebumps series alone has sold more than 400 million copies. In 2016, he revealed the secret to his impressive output: 'I figure out the end first.'"
Funny how it all comes together.