How Being a Defense Attorney Prepared Me for Being a Full-Time Writer

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From Publishers Weekly:

I had another life before I became a full-time writer. I was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years, working primarily in federal court. We handled all kind of cases, from white-collar crimes to murder and just about everything in between.

The question I got most often during my career in law—and am still asked today—was, “How can you defend all those guilty people?” This question always perplexed me. First of all, no one’s guilty at the outset, in a legal sense—not until the jury comes back with a verdict. And that might sound like a bunch of slick lawyer talk, but it’s a fundamental truth in this country: innocent until proven guilty.

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 I believe that working as a criminal defense attorney requires an embrace of moral complexity. Note that I didn’t say moral flexibility, which is something I think a lot of people wrongly assume about defense attorneys—that we have no idea where the moral lines are drawn. Rather, I view moral complexity as an ability to see beyond stark categories such as wrong and right, good and bad, friend or enemy—to see the world in all its hazy shades of gray.

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Eventually, I left the practice of law to stay home with my young children and fulfill my dream of writing a book. And it was no surprise to me that the moral complexity I encountered daily in my legal career wove its way into everything I wrote.

When writing The Roanoke Girls, I knew I wanted readers to feel some of the same conflict that the girls in the book do, to squirm a bit at their own feelings for certain characters. I recognize that it may make for uncomfortable reading, the idea of finding yourself charmed by people who have done awful things. But for me that was essential to the experience of the story. I believe it is entirely possible to recognize the humanity in others, to try to understand why they do what they do, to even feel some sense of pain for them, and still believe they have crossed a moral line that can never be uncrossed. For me, none of those ideas negates the others.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly