Why would someone – anyone – write a book? Certainly not for money, if one has any modicum of sound judgment. There is a flood of books constantly being birthed, some of them good books, and not many of them earn any money. Assuming some royalty checks eventually come in, they probably won’t offset out-of-pocket costs, and, if they do, chances are the per-hour income from the effort will be pitifully meager. This is not to say that authors are not glad to be paid something for their work, but the anticipated amount is scarcely a reason for undertaking the hard work of bringing a new book to life.
The motivation could be a personal quirk of fulfilling a lifelong desire to hold in one’s hand a book that bears one’s name as an author, stemming from some sort of stimulus embedded in our personalities and education. Or it could be a precipitating event, or series of events, that cries out for scripting. In my case, it was both things. I had always placed authors, especially authors of the classics, on special pedestals for having moved or at least engaged the minds and emotions of the general population in some meaningful way. I wrote my first (thankfully unpublished) book when I was 14 years old. I subscribed to the Writer’s Digest for years, beginning in my early teens. I was the editor of my high school newspaper which won the Sweepstakes Award as the best high school newspaper in the state. I got good marks on my college papers and in law school was an editor of the Virginia Law Review and later a member of the editorial board of the International Trademark Reporter. The heavy demands of my law practice, which required me to write innumerable briefs, draft legislative bills, and draft many other legal documents, left me with little time to pursue creative writing. Then, in later years, when I eased off on my lawyering and went into semi-retirement, I had enough flexibility in my schedule to permit me to begin writing my memoirs. Although I had had a memorable career as a lawyer, handling many unforgettable cases, I had no thought of publishing the memoirs beyond my family and a small circle of friends. My purpose was really to leave a record of my life, a kind of defense of the way I had lived, and a remembrance of the fact that I had once existed and dealt with incredible challenges that would otherwise be unknown or forgotten. I had begun to realize that my closest friends and even family saw me in unitary contexts, not seeing the range of multi-contexts in which I lived. I realized that my family knew me only in my after-office evening and weekend hours and my professional colleagues knew me only as a lawyer, my law students knew me only as a teacher, and my civic associates knew me only in connection with my civic work. No one knew, and probably few really cared, about the totality of who I was. Yet I cared and hoped that maybe someone would find inspiration from an account of my experiences in life. I worked through my childhood, teenage, college, and law school years and then, when I got to my professional life, I realized that there was no way I could meaningfully include the living essence of the riveting cases and experiences I had had in the practice of law. In the first place, any understandable reiteration of my experiences would overwhelm and consume the memoirs. Perhaps more importantly, it would not have been possible to convey the emotions and the mental processes of the characters in a nonfiction format where strict factual accuracy was demanded, and I would be constrained from portraying what I believed (but could not prove) was going on in the minds of all the relevant characters. I could accomplish what needed to be done only in fiction, where I would be free to tell in a you-are-there manner what was really happening, what really underlay the actions and events. Ironically, the only way to give the true flavor of the events, and to make sense of them, was through fiction. – inspired by actual real courtroom experiences but freed from the limitations of expressing only verifiable facts. Hence, I began writing my Ted Born classic courtroom series.
Yet this alone does not explain why I undertook the long and twisting challenge of “contributing” still more books into the ocean of books that stream into public forums at ever-increasing volumes. The reason, as I think back on it, is that I have a passion for justice, and justice is an elusive thing, hard to get one’s arms around. That is why there are so many lawsuits because people have different concepts of justice. Having wrestled with the chimera of justice for a lifetime of practice, it seemed to me that maybe, just maybe, I had a few insights that would strike a responsive chord in somebody, somewhere, who might get a glimpse of this critically important but hard-to-nail-down issue that affects us all. It is not a sermon or lecture; I was not intending to hit readers on their heads with some particular tenet I was advocating. No, it would be in what I hoped would be a gripping, engaging novel of mystery and suspense, with surprising turns and twists, like all good novels do that strive to hold the reader’s attention. But when the last page of the last chapter is read, I want the reader to continue to turn the matter over in the mind, wondering whether justice was done, and why. To accomplish this end, I had to spend a lot of time on character development and unforgettable word images so that the reader can relate to each character and event. For me, it was not and is not a matter of selling books, but of offering in the public forum a serious but entertaining account of an incredible case that would provoke thoughtfulness regarding the nature of justice, a matter which, consciously or unconsciously, is the great issue of the day. That’s why I wrote these novels.