From the Law to Literature

A friend of mine has a way of looking at people who break up a marriage because they've fallen in love with another person. Before passing judgment, he asks, "Did the new relationship last?" If it has endured, he is not critical.

I've applied a similar standard to my relationship with the law, which I left more than 30 years ago to pursue a career in publishing. It's worked out fine, so I don't doubt that it was the right thing to do. But even now, whenever I talk to a lawyer who has written a mystery novel or a memoir--as happened again this week--I find myself revisiting the pivotal moment in my career, when things might have gone either way. It happened while I was a law clerk in San Francisco, I'd been ambivalent about going to law school, having majored in both economics and English and feeling pulls in both career directions. During college I'd been a reporter for a city newspaper and took all the creative writing classes I could, working summers for the international division of a bank. Law school was the perfect way to postpone making a decision while "keeping all my options open."

But then law school ended.

So I found the ideal clerkship for my divided loyalties: I worked two years for the chief judge of the federal district court, who needed clerks both for his cases and for his administrative duties. In addition to drafting opinions, I wrote speeches, congressional testimony, reports, and articles for him.

Though I had struggled for years trying to write fiction, I'd managed to write only the Great American Paragraph. But from the start of my clerkship, I was successful in figuring out what the judge wanted to say and helping him express it. I also had no problem leaving my ego at home, being perfectly content to shape someone else's words and have his name appear at the top.

Still, it was legal writing, so maybe the career scale was tipping in that direction.

Then, about halfway through the clerkship, three events converged and precipitated my decision: The judge was holding an unusually long and messy hearing to revoke probation for a high-profile defendant; I received high praise from a professor in a creative writing workshop; and I got the perfect offer for a law job.

During the probation hearing, I loved the moments of great drama, as the highly skilled defense lawyer picked apart witnesses and turned allegations of wrongdoing into mere jealous lies stemming from a love triangle. But I couldn't visualize myself as an advocate for one side or the other--I don't like fighting or controversy. For me, the most compelling aspect of the proceeding was figuring out the participants' underlying stories and motivations.

It wasn't just the rules of evidence that were the obstacle; it seemed to me that the legal system itself wasn't intended to bring out the whole picture, nor to deal with the real problems. For the first time, I felt it would be frustrating to work in an area that was so circumscribed. Literature, I thought, had a much broader purview.

The second event occurred in a weekly writing workshop that was part of the masters program I had enrolled in. I'd been slowly realizing that what I contributed best was not my own short stories but what I said in response to other writers' stories.

And then one night, after I gave some advice, the professor said to me, "Where'd you learn to make comments like that? You could be running this workshop!" Even though he was complimenting my critical abilities and tact, not my writing, this recognition gave me a big rush. It also gave me an idea.

The third event was the great job offer, which, if I was going to stay on the legal career path, I should have accepted. In my gut, though, I knew instantly that I didn't want it. That realization crystallized my thinking: My future was not in law and not in my own writing but in working on the words of others.

I finished my clerkship, took a long trip, and then started life as an editor, beginning with literary magazines and quickly moving to book publishers. But every once in a while, when talking to lawyers about their book projects, I look back fondly at my brief brush with the law.

After 25 years as an in-house editor at publishing companies, Jay Schaefer is now an editor in "private practice" at Jay Schaefer Books in San Francisco.

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