A Word on Words; 2217; Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

A word on words, a program delving into the world of books and their authors. This week, Nancy Taylor Rosenberg talks about interest of justice. Your host, for a word on words, Mr. John Siegenthaler, chairman of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. Hello, I'm John Siegenthaler. Once again, welcome to a word on words. Tonight, a mystery and an author who is on the bestseller list with our first book and is now out with us. I can welcome Nancy Taylor Rosenberg to a word on words. Thank you. Nice to have you here to talk about interest of justice. Nice to talk to, I guess, about mitigating circumstances your first novel, which soared

to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. I know you didn't expect that when you wrote that book, did you? Of course not. It was my first novel. But you hoped. Well, I mean, you know, I used to have dreams at night of the bestseller list, the New York Times bestseller list, and some other rather embarrassing things I wouldn't admit. But I did think of it at inappropriate times. So let's just say I was beginning to associate it with very nice things in my life. I didn't think it was possible. No. I didn't. I really didn't think I'd ever get published, but I'd been writing for 15 years. I'd written another, a number of other novels, but I'd never submitted them for publication. So mitigating was quite a shock to me. It was a wonderful thing. Well, mitigating was a wonderful read. Lily was a heroine worth knowing, as thousands and thousands of American readers decided. And now you've given us Laura, a judge.

A judge whose life is caught up in all sorts of turmoil and controversy. Strong woman, because Laura Sanderson couldn't sit on a bench and preside over cases in which crimes are litigated without being a person of strength. Now where has she come from? Well, of course, all of my characters are me. Not very many people want to admit that, you know, other authors don't. But in fact, Lily, I even described it to look like me, which I think is sort of a novel idea. I saw a review that said just that. But the reason was because a lot of the cases that are in my books are real. Because I was a criminal investigator. And so I- In Texas, New Mexico, and in California. And Arizona, but this one is not worthy in Arizona. But most of the most extensive time was spent in California working in the judicial system

here. Where you live now? Right. And I didn't want my friends coming and saying, you know, Lily is me. You're writing about me. So I thought, well, I'll just take the blame for it. I'll become this character in my book. And it's fun when you're writing, you know, to become the character, except when they do something that maybe is unacceptable. Yes. But still. Well, I mean, there are moments in Laura's life when her conduct is not only unacceptable to us, but to her. I mean, her, I guess the first encounter we have when she's with Benjamin, her fifth date. And they sleep together. What a loud. What a loud. Why isn't he terrible? A loud. You think maybe I'm trying to get a little dig in to someone I might have known with that? You know that's the next question.

You read my mind. Confession is good for the soul, even for an author. You don't believe how many men have, women love that scene just because she goes out and goes to sleep with a man who's thinking more of himself than he is of her, which of course, that never happens in real life. It just couldn't happen. No, that's right. That's right. Why don't you take our cab home, honey? Never happen in this world, you know? Never. But women react to it, you know, they love it. And because it's real. And that's what I try to interject into my books. But I want to bring reality into my books. And I'm one of these that when I'm reading novels and everything seems to go perfectly or they don't have these little trivial, mundane things that really do interrupt your life and make you very unhappy or cause you to have a very bad day. So my characters don't have an easy life. But I think they're very contemporary women. They're strong, but they're also vulnerable. And underneath it all, they're still very feminine.

So that's what I was trying to bring across and developing them that they have the strengths they need. There's another aspect of Laura's life that should be meaningful to readers. And that is, it depicts a woman who has put on the ermine, the judicial robe, to preside over a court where justice and equity are administered. And we look at judges on the bench sometimes and forget that they are human beings whose own lives at times are touched by human tragedy. And very soon we find out that Laura has a conflict in her life with her sister, Avery. Correct. Avery, who has been the way with sister, the sister who has flirted with crime, the sister whose husband Charlie has been slain, the sister who's now married to Sam who's not a very nice man.

He's a dog. Not at all. An opportunist. Yeah. That's right. A real ripoff artist. And so you tell us right away that Laura is not just a judge, but she's a judge with a soul and a judge with a heart. And in that first confrontation she has with Avery, Avery makes some strong accusations as you want to take my son away from me. You're trying to steal my boy, Josh. And that sort of lets us know that there's probably going to be a conflict between these two women throughout the book. Not so. Yeah. Not so. Did you know when you started writing this book you were going to kill Avery and Sam? Yes. Yes, I did. I did. I really liked the personality development and the human drama aspect of what was going on with Laura. I liked the fact that she was very dedicated to her job, that she had let her personal life go because she had become so immersed in her work. And she was a real warrior.

She was a fighter for justice and for victims. And for the right things in life, a real champion, so to speak. And yet her personal life was very vacant. And I wanted to show that. I wanted to show that a lot of people in positions of power have sons and sisters and brother-in-laws and daughters who do commit crimes and step outside the law. And that's a very difficult situation to handle. So I wanted to show that. And I also wanted to show in the murder of her sister that now where she's been ruling on the law from one perspective, you know, her position on the bench, now she sees crime as it touches her. And that's the terrifying part. And that was very similar to mitigating and that Lily was a district attorney. Exactly. And then she felt that, you know, the sort of evil tentacles of crime reaching in and touching her. So close. And now she looks at the system from a different perspective, and that's what I was dealing

with. I like that. Do I ever occur to you that it might have been nice to have Lily promoted from district attorney to judge and just make it a sequel? I thought about doing that, but I really didn't want to, because I think that what happened with the Lily in that book, which was quite a shocking book, and it was a very thought provoking book, and a lot of people had strong reactions to it, you know, I never asked anyone to agree with what my character is doing just to maybe understand their motivation, which helps you to understand crime or social problems. But I thought about that, and I just liked the aspect of creating someone totally new. I think Lily was so troubled, and I wanted to write a character that didn't come from a troubled past and see how she dealt with it. So that was a challenge to me. But she is much more stable, and her world is much more stable, even though it's hit by these disorders and near disasters. I mean, certainly a disaster when she finds that Iverian Sam has been murdered and that

she is to take on this young kid who himself naturally is beset by serious problems, Josh. Now having given her a romantic interest that was a, that was, I said a bit of a dog, you also create a potential for another interest. I mean, she needs a strong male figure in her life, and I don't want to sound like a good old boy sexist pig when I say she needs. But the vulnerability that's so evident in that scene that we talked about does let you know that she is alone, and she does have a challenge with this boy who's been given to her. And she is surrounded by crime. I mean, and you immerse her more deeply in the world of crime, and she becomes a victim. And so you create a strong male figure on whom, when necessary, she can lean.

Is that fair? Well, I think, you mean, fair for her to need this person or fair to you? No, it is my description of it, fair. Oh, totally, you know. I also, there was a reason for that, and that was that the first man that she was attracted to, that she dated, that was really an open and very inconsiderate, was a very established attorney. Oh yeah. And he was, you know, he was a very desirable choice for her. He was attractive. That's right. He drove her Mercedes. He was a very prominent, established corporate and criminal lawyer. He combined his practice. And yet the man that she found herself attracted to was a police detective, who was a more basic man. He had more basic values. Not so much flash and dash. No. Steady Eddie. That's right. He was steady Eddie, and he made her feel good when she was with him. And so I think a lot of, you know, I was trying to say something about women when we seek

out relationships or we seek out partners in life that we don't always know what we're looking for. And sometimes I think because of Laura's basic type of personality and that she, her parents were ordinary working class people, and she had basic values about life, about being honest, dealing with her job in a very serious way and carrying her responsibilities on her shoulders. And so she really needed that type of person who was as earnest in life as she was. Do you know Rickerson from somewhere? Well, both Rickerson and Detective Cunningham, who were in, was in my first book, are kind of composite characters of various different fabulous detectives that I've known in my life. I started in Dallas with the Dallas Police Department, and I was very young. I was maybe 23, 24, you know, back in the early 1970, well 1970, I believe. And so they were much older.

They were more middle-aged. They were maybe 40, 45, and I saw them as these wonderful family men, people that were dedicated to, you know, catching criminals and seeking justice, and so I kind of come in. Doing good. Yeah. And Rickerson is a do-gooder. Yes, he is. He's a good person. He's a hard, he's a decent human being who cares. And he's a non-stereotypical cop. I agree. He sure is, non-stereotypical. I have a lot of bad cops in my books and bad attorneys and bad judges, and yet I try to show that it's like any other profession, because people are always talking about, you know, police corruption and everything, and corruption in the legal community. And there's as many bad people, there are in IBM. You know, it's the same thing. They're just human beings. And it's true that their job would, you know, they shouldn't be corrupt and no one should. You then take Laura home to find that our house has been tossed.

And there is an officer there who says to, you know, Judge, how are you? I wouldn't stay around here very much. You know, this looks pretty bad. You inject a little mystery beyond the mystery into the story. Now it's not just the murder of Ivory and Sam. It is the fact that she is to be the victim of the stalking. Well, she may be the intended target all along. Yes, exactly. And of course, anyone that works in the criminal justice system on a higher level in a punty fashion has to consider that they're always in jeopardy of some sort of revenge attack or an assault by someone they've put in prison. So that's very frightening. Yes. When you put her in that situation, have you, just as a writer now, have you decided already

how this mystery you're creating is going to come out? You know who the villain is going to be? Well, actually, I do believe a wonderful writing instructor, and he's a very brilliant man in Leonardo Bercavici, and I studied under him for a time at UCLA. And he told me that, you know, he sort of taught me that you have to have a sense of the characters' destiny from the onset of the novel, because if not, it's just like your writing blind. So, you know, I might not know exactly how it's going to end exactly what's going to happen to one character or another. But I have a sense of their destiny, will this person survive, you know, or will they be caught up in it, will they be a victim? So I do sort of see the ending in my mind before I began. You do, Sue. Yes. And do you set that out on paper as some writers do, or is it basically an outline that's in your head and that you don't need a written roadmap to follow? I don't have any written roadmaps.

I'm very unusual as to my writing, I think, that's what I've been told, and that I'm extremely prolific, and I write 15 hours a day, probably six days a week, sometimes to like extremes to where I'm actually wearing cervical collars and have ice packs on my back to set up. But it's my great joy in life, I'm compelled to write, I love to write, and I never run out of words. It's just the stories are there that characters drive me. It's like in the morning when I wake up, it's like Laura would be setting in there going, come on. Well, and you know, you create some characters who, where their feelings on this leaves, some who hide behind a mask, some who are what they appear to be, and some, like people, who appear to be one thing and turn out to be something else. Now, if you're going to create a character who wears a mask, do you decide going in at what point you're going to unmask them?

No. You know, we've got to, I'm not going to share the secret of the story with our audience, because they all miss the fun of reading your book. But you and I both know that there is a character, a key character in this book, who very late is unmasked. Correct. Well, you know, I always try to write honestly though. The one thing I do, and there's a lot of twists and turns in my novels, but when I was just a reader, even though I was writing, but I was just a reader, I wasn't a published author anything, I would be reading a book and I hated to be tricked. I didn't want to be manipulated. I wanted the story to fall naturally into that pattern, that even though it might be a shock or a twist or a surprise ending or whatever, that it would fall naturally and the reader would have a chance to put it together and figure it out, that they would have that chance.

And I wouldn't just outright blatantly deceive them. And I don't think I did that. No, you give us a few clues along the way, I can't hear you there. And I'm not surprised at where you take us, but I was surprised how it came about and when it came about. I mean, it was very a droid, and you're pretty tricky writer, I'll tell you that, and that's the reason you're so successful. You say that you write sometimes 15 hours a day, six hours a week. I've had- Six days a week. Yeah, six days a week. So, six days a week, 15 hours a day. The last person to sit in that chair, Richard Russo, told me that his model and his style, and I've heard this from, after other writers, but I've heard from some who are his committee to it as well. But his style is to write two, three, four, five pages a day. And once that's done, and the four or five pages are well done, he's up and out of

the chair until the next day. And that's sometimes that might take an hour or two or five. But that two pages and two pages and two pages make six pages, that's right. And a novel is made that way. I take it, your regimen is different, and your day's work is different. Tell me about it. Well, I generally get up about six o'clock in the morning, and in the minute I get out of bed, I think God that I'm finally in print. And you know, I'm very grateful for the opportunity to do something that I've wanted to do since I was this tall. I mean, when I was little, I used to go up to books and smell them before I could read them. I loved books, and I loved to read, and so I always wanted to be a writer. I get up in the morning and I go, I don't dress, I don't brush my teeth. This may not sound great, but it's a compulsion to me to get to that time. I'm a writer, and it's not a typewriter now, it's a computer, the first book, it was

a typewriter. Now I've got a nice computer and all the equipment, you know, to do this with. And I say they're all that. I take a couple of breaks. My husband is wonderful and very supportive. He makes me a sandwich for lunch, and if he didn't know, it wouldn't eat. And I wouldn't remember that I didn't eat, you know. I take a break for dinner, sometimes I'll go out for dinner with my husband or sit down and watch the news, and then I'll be back at it until maybe 11 or 11, 30 at night. And how many pages will that produce? Sometimes 30 or 40. 30 or 40. But now those are 30 or 40 pages that will be gone over and rewritten, you know, probably 10 times. No, do you try to get all the way through the story before you come back and cut and edit? No. I do something that's probably not real advisable, meaning that instead of like storing things on my chapter at a time, I store my whole novel as a whole.

So I can go from scene to scene because the minute you change something in one scene, it might change everything from, you know, chapter one. And I like to be able to get back into the first chapter very quick, you know, with just a little tap of the computer. I love this computer stand out. I'm really into it. Well, I was going to ask about that because I know some writers who are wedded to the typewriter. I mean, computer technology has come along and they simply haven't been able to break the habit. In some ways, they're intimidated by the computer. Willie Morris was here in that chair and not long back. He still writes in long-hand. But you- As James mentioned. Yeah, that's right. As mentioned to us. And many others. Now, you find that we'll talk about working on a computer because does it help the creative juices to be able to punch a button and transpose a paragraph or raise the sentence or a paragraph? It's absolutely wonderful. It's the- I mean, any writer that has not accepted computers, it's just not accepting

the future. And they're not- I mean, I'm not like this big champion for technology. But I know what it's done for me. And I mean, I used to anguish over things because it took me so long to edit, to move things around. Sometimes maybe I would make a decision not to change something because it was so time-consuming. And I didn't have anyone typing for me. But I can understand their feeling. It's hard because old habits die hard, you know, and you're used to one way of expressing yourself and you're used to one piece of equipment if it's a pen or a tie-priter. But the computer is just so efficient and it allows you to do so many things fast that you couldn't do before. And I think it's excellent. I think it's excellent. These- maybe the camera can come in and these two covers bear a striking similarity, I think. They do.

How do you like those covers? Well, you know, my publisher might be watching, so I don't want to say anything. I wanted this one only that the letter is being gold and they wouldn't show up as well. You wanted the interest of justice to be in gold. No, the mitigating. The mitigating starts as to be in gold. And yet this one I'm not unhappy with. I'm getting a little tired of the justice figure. And so the third book doesn't have it. So the third book does not have it? Well, we'll talk about the third book in a moment. But I think that similarity in those two books is there to market the book. It is. It seems to me that when mitigating circumstances would be hit, your publisher said, ah-ha. The way to make another big hit is to remind them that Nancy is here and she's here with interest of justice. And I'll tell you an interesting story. My wife is a fan of a certain writer whose publisher has done that same thing. And he has about a dozen novels out.

She picked up a novel on the book stand, not too long back, came home and said, they've cheated me. It wasn't his book. But the similarity between the two covers was remarkable, was absolutely remarkable. Now tell me about the third book. Do the third book pair the same sort of cover theme? No. You won't. The only thing it has is marble. And it's kind of a cute story because there was a critique about, they were talking about the phenomena of legal thrillers, you know, which of course people don't realize legal thrillers have been here for many, many years. Oh, sure have. You know, it's not a new phenomenon. But throw in Grisham and Rosenberg have really sort of reminded us that there was a new wave and a new interest. Oh, and that it's a compelling thing. Everyone is thinking about the law now, you know, how it affects them, the criminal justice system. So I think it really caught on for that reason. But they were saying that our books, because if it's a legal thriller, they usually have a marble background on the cover.

And so this article accused us of, you know, that we were found guilty of excessive marble izing on the covers. So, but I still have a marble cover, you see. But it doesn't have a justice. It doesn't have Lady Justice on it. Well, the administration of justice has been here for a long, long time, and abuses in it have been here a long, long time. And the thrillers that surround court scenes have been there for a long, long time. It's not like spy thrillers. I mean, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and Russia has robbed all the, I don't know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I don't want to pass over interest of justice. But, what's the theme of the next one? The next one. I'm very happy with it and, you know. It's nice to say you're always happy when you finish a book, for one thing. You just love it because you're finished with it.

And now you can go into something else. But this one I really am very happy with. I feel like it's a powerhouse book. And, I try in the, in the midst of making a page turner which is something that seems to be real important to people reading books today. I also try to interject a little social conscience, you know, thought provoking issues. And this one's called First Offence. And so it does deal with the legal system and a First Offender, obviously, that may or may not be a First Offender at all, which is something people don't usually think about without giving any of the plot away. This theme really compelled me. You know, we were talking about this in a relationship to the killings in Florida, the tourist, that some of these boys, you know, have a juvenile record of 17 or 18 crimes, and they go into adult court and they're considered a First Offender. And those records are purged because they were juveniles. Speaking of juveniles, in the few minutes that are left, let's talk a little bit about Josh, the interesting character in your book.

Could the book have gotten along without Josh? No. No. I don't believe it could. Yeah. You mixed me up about Josh. I felt one way about him, and then I felt another way about him, felt another way about him. You meant to do that, didn't you? Well, I meant to show that Josh came into Laura's life as an abused child and a bitter child. And a lot of people don't have sympathy for children, when I was in the court system, like we had little girls who were victims of sexual assault, and they would come into the court and they were very promiscuous, and the way they dressed, and they were smartmouthed, and they didn't make very good witnesses. But that was because of the fact that they were sexually abused. And this was an outcome. It was almost part of what they suffered as a result of the crime. And so I wanted to show that Josh had suffered, and he was bitter, and that's the way it would come across. He was a bitter, sarcastic young man, you know, who hated life, and through Laura and the stability.

You exposed him to affection and stability, and you gave him a little touch of Rickerson along the way to give him both, and Emmett, and Emmett, that's right, to bolster that world's stability. And then you saw what he really was. And the surprise was that because he had long hair and he was just like the typical teenager, and Laura thought that he was like a mediocre student. And then well into the relationship, she's shocked when Josh tells her that he's almost a straight-a student. That was another preconceived notion that people get that because a child has his hair long or he wears a metallic a t-shirt, they can't be on the honor roll, but they can. Nancy Taylor Rosenberg, author of Interest of Justice, has been our guest on a word on words. Our host is Ben John Sagan-Thawler, chairman of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University.