Scott Turow
Scott Turow
Scott Frederick Turowis an American author and lawyer. Turow has written nine fiction and two nonfiction books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Films have been based on several of his books...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 April 1949
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
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I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell.
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Being a lawyer, even in a city as large as Chicago, is like being a citizen of a small town. I love watching the life of the town play out. You know, the rise and fall of individual lives in the entire community is just fascinating to me.
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If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.
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It turned out people were intensely curious about what actually goes on in courtrooms, and that Americans were deeply interested in law.
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I write based on powerful inner impulses, and those seem to shift over time.
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For people like me, people of a certain privilege, the sixties were extremely important in shaping our sense of humanity.
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Criminal law in particular does indeed present human beings in extremis. You're always dealing with definitions of evil.
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My view is that popular fiction as it existed was just plain dumb, and literary fiction was either abstruse, or unbelievably boring.
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In re-reading 'Presumed Innocent,' the one thing that struck me - and I re-read the book four different times in writing 'Innocent,' interested in different things each time - but I did think there were a couple of extra loops in the plot that I probably didn't need. The other thing that sort of amazed me was how discursive the book was.
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Because I spend so much time traveling, I tend to do most of my reading on the same iPad on which I write. For me, it's words, not paper, that matter most in the end. This practice has had the additional benefit of greatly reducing the time I spend storming through the house, defaming the mysterious forces who 'hid my book.'
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I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together.
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Amazon can't be all good or all bad. I don't think that everything they do is evil; they've given a lot of authors access.
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Americans have grown a great deal more realistic about lawyers and the law. I think that's all for the good. A lot of people will say to you these days, 'If you are looking for justice, don't go to a courtroom.' That's just a more realistic perspective on what happens in the legal process.
films four realize separate work
I think one of the blessings that I've had in watching, you know, films be made now from four of my books is to realize that it's a separate thing. It's a separate work.