Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground

Raymond Chandler's Cure for Writer's Block

Chandler didn't bill it as a cure for writer's block, exactly. Think of it as a sort of work-around--

1. Set aside four hours every day.

Raymond Chandler

2. During this time, you don't have to write.

3. On the other hand, you can't do anything else.

See Tierney, "This Was Supposed to Be My Column for New Year’s Day," New York Times, 1/14/13. 

I'll thank my mother for the link. She sent it to me this morning, apparently thinking I suffer from writer's block.

As regular readers of this blog know, I don't believe in writer's block.

Well, not really. 

I think it was in my post "Advice to Young Lawyer's #13" that I first began to examine the concept of writer's block. I concluded that "the cause of writer’s block is always the same: a mistaken notion of self-entitlement, a touch of self-pity, and perhaps a lack of sleep." 

To cure writer's block, I proposed this solution: "Simply take your head and bang it on your desk until you either lose consciousness or come to grips with the fact that you, and you alone, must write the next sentence. Continue in this fashion, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, until your memorandum is complete."

In later posts, I proposed other cures, having concluded that the bang-your-head solution wouldn't necessarily work for everyone.

In "Cure for Writer's Block #177 (illustrated)," I advised a cure that was very similar to a common hiccup remedy. 

In "Cure for Writer's Block #57 (illustrated)," I radically suggested that those who suffer from writer's block are morons.

It's possible that in the past, I've been too harsh and dogmatic when it comes to writer's block. I might as well think about this for a little while. I'm stuck here in this room, after all, for another three hours, twenty minutes. And I really don't feel like banging my head on my desk.

A final warning. Please don't go looking for writing-block cures 1-56 and 58-177 on this blog--I haven't published them yet.

Maybe I will soon. In the meantime, happy writing!

P.S. Of the three posts I linked to above, only one of them is compiled in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (and Other Irreverent Observations from the Legal Underground). To find out which one, you'll have to buy the book--or at least examine the Table of Contents in the "look inside" feature at Amazon. Please note that if you should happen to purchase and read this book, I would VERY MUCH APPRECIATE a review at Amazon. Why? Because I recently had a five-star literary agent tell me that the lack of Amazon reviews for How to Feed a Lawyer might make it impossible for me to ever interest a publisher in anything I write ever again!!! Lacking additional Amazon reviews, in other words, my writing career is pretty much finished. And that's bad news for a guy who rarely suffers from writer's block!  

Publication note: First published 7/9/13.

David Lat's Supreme Ambitions: A Review

Does law school breed tiny monsters? You bet it does. Each year, another group of bright-eyed innocents enters law school, their brains filled with nothing but song lyrics, sports statistics, and perhaps a bit of Nietzche. This is scary enough, but law school transforms them into something even more perverse. After just three years, these young law students are now ambitious and ruthless baby lawyers. They can quote black-letter law, distinguish between the writing styles of "Posner" and "Scalia," and place bets on which editor of their law journal will be the next Supreme Court justice. Not only is the world theirs for the taking, they think, but so are the highest reaches of government. All they have to do is get a well-paying starter job and then wait for the earlier generations of monstrous law-school graduates to do them the favor of dying.

Exaggerated? Hardly. I myself am a textbook example of this phenomenon. In 1990, bloated with self-importance, I graduated from law school and assumed my rightful place in our nation’s democracy as a “BigLaw associate.” If had been a character in a novel, perhaps one written by David Lat, the reader would have been willing to wait a great many pages for the world to finally deliver a well-deserved smack in my face. That smack would persuade me, once and for all, that I was just an ordinary person.

In David Lat’s first novel, the fun and entertaining Supreme Ambitions, the monstrous baby lawyer who eventually gets her comeuppance is the first-person narrator Audrey Coyne, a graduate of Yale Law School. As a first-person narrator, Audrey is unreliable only in that she doesn’t fully know herself. The genre of Lat's novel most closely resembles chick lit. (Male writers, if you didn't know, aren't excluded from the genre.) Lat's novel is a fast read. With generous doses of dialogue, Audrey recounts her tale in a linear manner, chapter by chapter, beginning to end. In addition to the main action, diversionary asides include Audrey’s flirtations with co-workers, both male and female; the ins-and-outs of her job as a federal appellate clerk; and plenty of observations about fashion.

Is Readbility a Myth?

In The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky says that a book's "difficulty" is subjective. The opening might grab you--

What's the most difficult book you've ever read? For me, at least within recent memory, there's no question—the book that was hardest for me to slog through, the book that I would have put down if I didn't have to read it for work, was E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey.

Yeah, well . . . I don't think I'm buying this definition of "difficult." Among people who sit around writing essays about difficult books--by which they mean, right from the start, something that has some objective claim to merit, at least to others in that group--they are leaving commercial entertainment out of the discussion. To this group, that other kind of writing is "bad." And when they say reading that sort of "bad" entertainment is "difficult," they don't mean it's difficult for them to understand, but difficult to stomach.

That's my riff, in any case, on the first paragraph of Berlatsky's essay. It's an essay that I liked a lot, despite my questions about whether he's setting up a straw man by defining "difficulty" to mean something other than it normally does in discussions about books.

Full essay: "Readability Is a Myth," by Noah Berlatsky.

William Gaddis, Again. . . and A Frolic of His Own

In a review of The Letters of William Gaddis, Paul Griffiths writes that William Gaddis's satire about law and lawyers, A Frolic of His Own, was his "most appealing" work--

Through the late 1980s and early 90s, however, he was clearly having fun, too, writing the legal satire that became A Frolic of His Own. As he read up cases in the eighty-four volumes of American Jurisprudence and corresponded with lawyers, he was putting together an exuberant comedy voiced again largely in dialogue, intercut with court opinions, passages from his Civil War play (whose fictional author is suing a Hollywood studio for breach of copyright) and, as always, long sentences of startling descriptive power. Half the size of The Recognitions or JR, funnier and certainly sunnier than Carpenter’s Gothic, this was his most appealing book.

When I last reported on A Frolic of His Own, I was stuck on page 188. I've now made it to page 310. It's still slow going and I don't pick up the book very often. While parts are incredibly funny, the whole doesn't work for me. Too many details about the law practice seem wrong. Since the parodies of depositions and court opinions don't seem even partially rooted in reality, you end up being distracted rather than entertained. In my opinion, they just don't work. The characters, on the other hand, are very funny, and the whole book is interesting in the way that difficult literature is often interesting--you want to figure out what the writer is up to.

Finally, here's another take on Gaddis by Jonathan Franzen: "Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books," which first appeared in the New Yorker in 2002--

William Gaddis

Gaddis's last real novel, "A Frolic of His Own," rambles on for nearly six hundred pages in illustration of how a system designed to create order (American law) can end up sponsoring disorder. The book is ideal for graduate study. It makes a banal but unexceptionable social point (we litigate too much in America), it's riddled with motifs, quotations, stories within stories, and countless allusions to Gaddis's own earlier works and other famous texts (better brush up on your Plato and Longfellow), and its only aesthetic weakness, really, is that much of it is repetitive, incoherent, and insanely boring. This novel, of course, got the warmest reviews of any of Gaddis's books, and was given one of those unofficial lifetime-achievement National Book Awards.

 There's much more about Gaddis in this very interesting essay. (Incidentally, Franzen goes on to say that one of the best things about the A Frolic of His Own is the legal opinions, which proves, I guess, that reactions to parody can vary widely.)

Review: The Price of Justice, by Laurence Leamer

In Laurence Leamer's new work of narrative non-fiction, The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption, two lawyers file and prosecute a wide range of lawsuits against Massey Energy Co. and its CEO, Don Blankenship. One of these lawsuits, Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., eventually ends up in U.S. Supreme Court. (The issue: whether an appellate judge should have recused himself after having received campaign assistance from a litigant.)

Loosely organized around the Caperton case, Leamer's book condenses more than a decade of litigation against Massey into a fast-paced, suspenseful read. This couldn't have been easy for Leamer, given that lawyers and their lawsuits are generally far from entertaining, especially for 400 pages. It's why you have to excuse the sometimes souped-up, over-heated prose found in The Price of Justice and other books of its type, which publishers are now calling "non-fiction legal thrillers." 

The two principal protagonists are the lawyers for the various plaintiffs, Dave Fawcett of Buchanon Ingersoll and Bruce Stanley of Reed Smith. In an early scene, Fawcett and Stanley become frustrated after Massey's representatives show up at a mediation with no good-faith intention of settling. The two react by making a "blood oath" that they'll "never settle, never stop" until they've brought the Massey CEO, Don Blankenship, to "justice."

Good idea? Readers can decide. But as the book ends, Fawcett has left Buchanon Ingersoll and joined Reed Smith in order to continue fighting Massey and Blankenship; the two firms have expended at least $8 million in "unpaid billing"; and Blankenship has retired from Massey with a $39 million retirement package (though facing "possible criminal indictment" following a mine explosion).

If you're looking for trial scenes, there are plenty of those in The Price of Justice. Some of the procedural details that might interest lawyers have been omitted or simplified for the general reader. Even so, the details that remain will have anyone with experience in these matters shaking his head: the trial judge in Caperton, for example, who takes two and half years to rule on post-trial motions, or the court reporter who hasn't prepared the transcript after four.

Readers will also be amazed by the parts of the book dealing with the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, the exception to the rule that lawyers and judges can't be entertaining. These justice are, albeit in a circus clown sort of way. Since the Caperton case passes through the Supreme Court of Appeals a number of times, a pretty significant chunk of the book deals with the court's assorted shenanigans. Here's Leamer, bringing readers up to date on the justices at a later point in the story:

The five justices continued to wear their black robes and to act with studied dignity, but the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia was a bickering, ludicrously dysfunctional institution in which the Mad Hatter would have fit right in as chief justice.

The Mad Hatter would probably have brought some order to the court. A favorite part of the book for me, though much too short, was the section quoting from the "private diary" that Justice Larry Starcher gave to Leamer to aid him in writing the book. Here's a sample:

We decided the now $75 million Massey Energy case in less than 60 seconds. (HONEST!) The Massey case obviously was pre-decided by the 'evil three.' Benjamin and Maynard are buddies with Don Blankenship and Robin kisses their butts . . .

The "evil three" are Starcher's colleagues on the court, Justices Benjamin, Maynard, and the butt-kissing Robin Davis. No judicial restraint in Starcher's diary! 

The book's two lawyer-heroes are also depicted as being occasionally human. Examples:

• When faced with a liar on the witness stand, Fawcett "was sometimes so abruptly caught off guard that he froze with surprise."
• Before a deposition, Fawcett "was so nervous that when Blankenship and his attorneys walked into the room he broke into a cold sweat."
• During trial, Fawcett "had prepared each question of his cross-examination with precision, lining them up one after another. But those queries had all been used, and he didn't know where to go."

I could have picked on Stanley too; the point is, Leamer's discussion of the lawyers' occasional failings adds verisimilitude to his account. The Price of Justice, which will be released on May 7, is available for pre-order on Amazon. 

Some of the Books I've Reviewed and Recommended on This Blog

I've reviewed and recommended a number of books here at Legal Underground over the years. Some of my reviews can be found in the following posts--

Thoughts from a Rock 'n' Roll Dilettante on Zappa, by Barry Miles

Zappa: A Biography, by Barry Miles (Grove Press, 2005)

Anonymous Lawyer, a Novel Coming Soon

Anonymous Lawyer, by Jeremy Blachman

For Civil Trial Enthusiasts

A Measure of Endurance: The Unlikely Triumph of Steven Sharp, by William Mishler (Lindisfarne Books, 2008)

Lawyers: Want Some Variety in Your Career?

One Person/Multiple Careers, by Marci Alboher (Business Plus, 2007)

Law Professor Writes Novel About Lawyers

In the Shadow of the Law, by Kermit Roosevelt (Picador, 2006)

Freud Takes Center Stage in New Thriller by Yale Law Professor

The Interpretation of Murder, by Jed Rubenfeld (Picador, 2007)

The Monday Morning Books Blogging Post: A Brief Review

Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam, by Paul Clayton.

Also of interest: the posts in the "Between the Covers" category, which frequently focus on lawyer-writers. And at my other blog, the Trial Practice Tips Weblog, there's another post like this one listing the other book reviews I did there.

SAUL BELLOW ON THE AMERICAN REALISTS . . .

In an interesting Paris Review interview from 1966, Bellow defends Theodore Dreiser against his critics--

"Dreiser, a realist of course, had elements of genius. He was clumsy, cumbersome, and in some respects a poor thinker. But he was rich in a kind of feeling which has been ruled off the grounds by many contemporary writers—the kind of feeling that every human being intuitively recognizes as primary. Dreiser has more open access to primary feelings than any American writer of the twentieth century . . . He somehow conveys, without much refinement, depths of feeling that we usually associate with Balzac or Shakespeare."

In the same interview, Bellow ranks Fitzgerald above Hemingway: "I don't think of Hemingway as a great novelist. I like Fitzgerald's novels better, but I often feel about Fitzgerald that he couldn't distinguish between innocence and social climbing."

As for Bellow as a realist, here are a few links: "Saul Bellow, America's Poet of Urbanity," by A.O. Scott, and "The Library of America Interviews James Wood about Saul Bellow," (pdf) (Wood: Bellow is "full of life but not traditionally realistic").

TIPS FOR GETTING RID OF WRITER'S BLOCK . . .

Over the years, I've developed a number of approaches to dealing with writer's block. It wouldn't be fair for me to keep them all to myself. Here is just one of my patented cures, chosen at random and illustrated by my team of in-house artists.

Cure for Writer’s Block #177 (Illustrated)

1. Drink a large glass of water while bending forward, so that you are essentially drinking upside-down (see Figure 1, left; note clown shoes, arguably too-small cranium). 

2. Hold your breath for at least 90 seconds, making certain no air passes through your nose or your mouth  (see Figure 2, right; note chilling expression of undeserved self-pity and despair). 

3. Wait at least five minutes for your normal breathing pattern to return.

4. Quit feeling sorry for yourself and get your ass back to work.

Are you writing again? If so, congratulations: your writer's block is cured! (More tips coming soon . . . )

IN DEFENSE OF PARODY . . .

"Leaving aside its immediate aim of making the reader laugh, parody - literary parody especially - has an infinitely wider remit. Pace F R Leavis, it is ultimately a form of literary criticism, where the judgements are arrived at by amplifying a writer's stylistic idiosyncrasies to the point where they collapse in a wounded heap."

From "In Defence of Parody," by D.J. Taylor in the Literary Review. Link from Arts & Letters Daily.

CHRISTOPER HITCHENS: "AN IMPOSSIBLE ACT TO FOLLOW"

 

 

From the Telegraph: "Christopher Hitchens, the influential writer who died last year, approached the end with his customary wit and charisma intact – and his wife always by his side. Carol Blue recalls their final months together."

Plus a related note from the archives of Beyond the Underground: "A Detour for Shameless Name-Dropping: Christopher Hitchens," in which I recall a memorable night of drinking with Hitchens in St. Louis.