my date with John Grisham

I first saw him across a crowded room.  Our eyes met, briefly.  He lifted the bottle he’d been holding in his hand, took a drink…

…and continued listening to author Kathy Reichs, who stood at the podium to his right, while she described the life cycle of maggots.

The North Carolina Literary Festival launched last night, with keynote speakers Reichs and Grisham treating me, and perhaps a thousand other eager listeners, to their stories of how first being professionals (she a forensic anthropologist, he a lawyer) led to their becoming novelists.

Reichs is a an energetic, youthful woman who has somehow managed to fit several professional lifetimes into one. Her anthropological work (which she continues to do) is grisly, fascinating, and important. Her novels are inspired by real cases, real problems, and the effects of doing the kind of work she does. Listening to her, I was entertained (she’s funny), and intrigued. I would have enjoyed listening to her for longer than her allotted time.

But then Grisham took the podium, and the evening became, for me at least, more than entertaining.

He is a commanding man in person, easy in his skin, and his voice is Southern Gentleman plus a shade of tone that comes from having spent twenty years in active concert with New York. Grisham’s path to publication is well-known to aspiring writers, and if you aren’t already acquainted with it, I’ll leave you to look it up elsewhere.  (I will say, though, that he took a moment to point out that the “urban legend” of his having self-published A Time to Kill is wrong.) What I found so compelling about his talk were two things: first, that I identified in so many ways with him and the experiences of his early novelist days, and second, that even though I’ve already made the arduous journey to publication, am working with a fantastic publishing team, and have won international acclaim and readership, he inspired me.

He related how, in the early days when The Firm had just been published and become a bestseller, he’d had a conversation with someone from Barnes & Noble (a sales rep, maybe) and the man had remarked to him that “the big guys” put out a book a year. Grisham thought, I want to be a big guy. It was, for him, a seminal moment of understanding about the industry, and of committing to a writing career.

I have that understanding already, and have made that commitment before. But now I see clearly that for every author who wants to “be a big guy,” in whatever way that means to him or her, the commitment has to get made, and remade, and made again and again as time goes on. Grisham is not Random House’s top selling novelist for nothing.

He also told how he writes two kinds of legal thrillers: the purely entertaining, high-adrenalin stories like The Firm, and the stories that he hopes will open readers’ eyes to something that matters, like The Appeal. That philosophy, of writing commercial fiction that is both entertaining and thought-provoking, is one I share.

So, while I don’t even entertain the idea of ever matching Grisham’s success, spending an evening in his company left me invigorated about my writing career, and eager to take a fresh look at my newly revised novel with an eye toward making it the best thing I’ve written yet.