7 Questions with Author/Lawyer Marianne Wesson

If someone told you that a professor, a lawyer, and a mystery writer were standing by a fence talking to a llama, it would sound like the opening line to a joke but it is actually the life of Marianne Wesson.

Her friends call her Mimi and she is an award-winning professor at the University of Colorado Law School who is an attorney with scholarly attributes and, in addition to all of her legal writing qualities, is also a local mystery writer.

In her spare time, she enjoys raising llamas on her ranch. Mimi’s writing style engages her readers into the complex world of legal and mystery with her books—"Render up the Body," "A Suggestion of Death," and the "Chilling Effect." Despite her very full schedule, she agreed to talk about her dual roles of being an author and a lawyer with me.

Matthew Crouch:  How do you establish boundaries between being an author and a lawyer?

Mimi Wesson: I’m not in danger of forgetting that I’m a lawyer when in court or the classroom, nor of forgetting I’m a writer when I sit at my laptop, so I have never worried about policing the boundary you mention.  I’m more interested in puncturing or making more permeable the compartments in which those different skills seem to dwell.  I would like to be a more artistic lawyer, and a more analytical and persuasive writer.

MC: Since your books are mystery-fiction, do you find your personal experience incorporated as a fictional "emphasis added" and does this cross over into the law?

MW: When I teach my students about the hearsay rule, I try to get them to reflect on what a strict rule it is to require that one can only speak in court of what he or she has experienced through the senses—to consider how little of the world we can claim to know through genuinely personal, or firsthand, experience.  Almost everything we know, or think we do (including our own names) comes from someone else’s description or information.  And even the things we do experience in a firsthand manner only make sense to us, on the whole, because we fit them into the web of all of our other experiences, most of which are not firsthand.  Sorry if this sounds a little roundabout, but it’s by way of trying to answer your question.  Of course it’s all experience, and of course it’s all made up, too.  But it would be impossible to make stuff up, at least stuff that is accessible to readers, without a base of experience, personal or otherwise.  That’s why very young excellent creative writers always amaze me—not necessarily because of their skill, although it can be astonishing, but by their precociously acquired experience of the world and what’s in it.

MC: Do you ever get writer’s block either as a mystery writer or as an attorney? How do you overcome it?

MW: No.  The only “block” I regularly suffer is when I have to stop writing and do something else, which happens too often.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t long periods of sitting, hands motionless, while the mind thrashes like a car engine that turns over and over but refuses to start.  Even so the experience for me is not of a "block," but perhaps of a steep hill I have to climb and for which I’m not yet prepared (or in the right gear, if we’re to continue the car metaphor).  Generally the difficulty turns out to be an attempt to address, in whatever I’m writing, six things at once, when what’s called for is a decision about which should come first and which can be postponed until later.  Once I’m able to realize that this is the decision that needs to be made, the engine finally coughs and starts.

MC: When you are writing fiction does it tap into a creative side of you that you can’t be used as an attorney?

MW: Of course, there’s room for a greater variety of approaches to creative writing; legal writing is extremely conventional.  But then, so is the sonnet form.  There’s a school of thought that the rigid conventions of poetry by their very constraint, serve to channel and intensify the creativity of the writer.  Sometimes I think the same might be true of the “rules” of legal writing.  One must, however, be a very, very good poet or legal writer to succeed artistically. Almost anyone with certain training can write a sonnet or a brief. But only a few write them well.

MC: How do you remember a plot idea in the middle of doing something else with your busy schedule?

MW: As for the ideas that come in the midst of some other task, I’m certain that I forget as many as I remember, but I’ve come to believe that’s a good thing.  A good memory is important to a writer; so is a good “forgettery.”  I can’t be sure, but I think my internal editor uses forgetting as a way to discard the ideas that weren’t that good in the first place. Of course, it is not really possible to test this hypothesis, since I cannot remember the forgotten ideas and so cannot evaluate how good they were.

MC: As an author/attorney, are you more curious about other people’s life situations? If so, why?

MW: I’m curious about nearly everything, and a terrible eavesdropper and thief of fragments of life that I observe or conversations I overhear.

MC: What is your favorite law and why?

MW: I do not mean to be rude, but this is a remarkably odd question.  No law works all by itself without the web of laws surrounding it, and I cannot imagine any criterion for choosing a favorite.  It would make as much sense to ask me my favorite law of physics.  But I will say that I am, more from long and close acquaintance than for any other reason, very fond of the hearsay rule (and all of its exceptions).

For additional information about Mimi and her books,
please visit : http://www.wessonbooks.com/