All you lawyers who are going to write a novel (or a screenplay, or a memoir ...) "someday"-- and I know you're out there -- ought to head to the MSBA Convention on Thursday to hear novelist Phillip Margolin discuss "How to Write a Novel in Your Spare Time."
Margolin has some insight into the topic, although after having writing 12 New York Times bestsellers, he no longer has to cobble together a writing life. But his did write his first novel while in law school and teaching junior high school in the Bronx.
Margolin published five novels while conducting a "heavy duty" criminal practice. He was the first attorney in Oregon to use a battered woman defense on behalf of a woman accused of murdering her husband.
Margolin wasn't giving away too many secrets about his system in advance of his talk on Thursday, but did say it doesn't involve getting up at 4 a.m. every day. He didn't stop taking new clients until 1994 and just this year went on inactive status. But, he emphasizes, "I loved being a lawyer." At the same time, there's only so much slack a judge is going to allow you when you try to schedule trials around book tours, he said.
His most recent book, "Proof Positive," will be published in paperback in July. He's at work on a new novel. ("You interrupted me on page 375," he said). He declined to disclose the working title of his new book on the ground that he doesn't like it.
Ramsey County District Court Judge Robert Awsumb invited Margolin to the convention after hearing him address the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, where Awsumb is a board member.
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