John grisham, 69, on true stories of stunning injustice | members only

YOU WERE A LAWYER YOURSELF FOR A WHILE. WHAT WAS THAT LIKE? I only did it for 10 years, and I kind of wanted to get out of it the whole time. It was a small-town practice in Mississippi, and

I quickly learned it’s really hard to make a living that way. We were [working with] people who needed help, not those who can pay fees. But I never had a client who I thought was wrongly

convicted, because I knew the policemen, the prosecutors, the judges, and we had a good system. Everybody kind of played by the rules.… And I assumed, wrongly, that that was pretty much the

situation everywhere. YOU’VE SAID FICTION IS EASIER TO WRITE THAN NONFICTION BECAUSE YOU CAN MAKE STUFF UP. BUT WRITING FICTION SEEMS PRETTY HARD TO SOME OF US NONFICTION WRITERS. I’m

blessed with a hyperactive imagination. And I’m blessed with a lot of material because even though I’m not a lawyer anymore, the law fascinates me, and that’s what I read about: law firms,

lawyers, cases, courts, appeals, trials, crimes. That’s where I live, and there’s a ton of material there that you can take and fictionalize and have a great story. And it honestly just

comes easy for me. I’m very lucky. YOU START WRITING A NEW BOOK EVERY JAN. 1 AND FINISH IT BY JULY 1. DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE AN IDEA BY THE FIRST OF THE YEAR? Anytime there’s downtime, I’m

thinking about the next book and so kind of gearing up for it with several ideas. And when it’s time to start writing, I just take the best idea I’ve got and run with it. But my wife and I

were talking about my next book after _Framed_, and she said, “I am so sick of death row. Please do not write any more books on death row.” WHAT’S YOUR WRITING RITUAL LIKE? I get into the

habit of getting up early and going to the computer around 7 or 7:30. In my little writing room, there are no phones, no fax, no internet, no music, no disturbances — nothing but the same

brand of strong coffee, the same coffee cup. I sit there for several hours, just in another world. After 35 years, I still treasure those moments. But after four hours or five hours, I’ve

got to have a break. My mind is kind of muck. WHAT DO YOU DO WITH YOUR FREE TIME? My wife and I are just about full-time grandparents. We live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one

grandchild is here in Charlottesville and two are in Raleigh, North Carolina, about three hours away. So we see them all the time, and we do a lot with them. I’m babysitting them right now.

We spend a lot of time on the farm — it’s 1,000 acres of beautiful countryside — and we take hikes, and my wife has horses. We travel, play some golf. It’s a pretty laid-back life, really.