NY Times Op Ed Columnist recently
wrote a piece on the Israel and the Middle East. He interviewed Israeli author
Amos Oz:
Here is Amos Oz on writing a novel:
“It is like reconstructing the whole of Paris from Lego bricks. It’s about
three-quarters-of-a-million small decisions. It’s not about who will live and
who will die and who will go to bed with whom. Those are the easy ones. It’s
about choosing adjectives and adverbs and punctuation. These are molecular
decisions that you have to take and nobody will appreciate, for the same reason
that nobody ever pays attention to a single note in a symphony in a concert
hall, except when the note is false. So you have to work very hard in order for
your readers not to note a single false note. That is the business of
three-quarters-of-a-million decisions.”
Having now written two novels, both
of which are in the editing process,
(not to mention the “I would love an agent and publisher” process") a few
dozen aphorisms came to mind when I read what Oz said: “Been there, done that”;
how about “it ain’t bragging if you can do it”; and finally “he can walk the
walk and talk the talk.”
I cannot draw. I am not musically
inclined. For most of my adult life, creativity came from either a well cooked
meal, or a unique sentence or two tucked into an otherwise boring motion or
brief on appeal. And of course, the perfect zinger on cross, or the penultimate
part of a closing argument, before the perfunctory ending imploring the jury to
acquit my client.
As a prosecutor I was assigned to
prosecute a drug trafficking case (as shocking as that may seen in Miami circa 1980’s). The defense
however, was unique: that the two kilos
of white powder the defendants were negotiating to buy was –they thought- Cascaria- a white powdery substance used
in the Santeria religion.
The defense listed a Santeria
priest as a witness, and I am surely one of the only lawyers to have ever cross
examined one (although I remember a well publicized lawsuit in New York City
over a Santeria church shut down because
they were sacrificing animals.)
The
priest testified that the white cocaine powder in evidence looked exactly like
Cascaria, which was a powdery substance used to cleanse away evil spirits. He testified he had been hired by the
defendants and had told them to meet the individual who would sell them the
Cascaria they needed for his services. Instead, the defendants somehow mistakenly wandered into a drug deal (which wasn't really that difficult in some parts of Miami in those days.)
It
was my first really good cross examination as a prosecutor. In many cases,
prosecutors are often reduced to presenting their own witnesses and simply
asking “what happened next?” No offense to my colleagues who are prosecutors,
but clearly we defense attorneys have the more interesting roles in trial.
Cross is always more fun than direct.
I took the priest through a careful
explanation of Cascaria:
“You need this powder for your
religion?”
“You use this powder by sprinkling
it?”
“Yes”
(No surprise that every day when I
arrived to court, there was a small sprinkling of white powder near my chair.
This was in the days well before 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax scare. I just
ignored it. There are legions of stories of the City Of Miami Bomb Squad
blowing up suspicious boxes left at the courthouse that were later determined
to have a dead chicken inside-another Santeria ritual designed to help some
defendant in court that day. I always wanted to see one of those explosions. I
kept imagining the curses as a jumble of feathers floated down to earth.)
“In this case you were hired to
clean the new house the defendants bought of any bad spirits?”
Then a thought came to me. It
wasn’t planned. I had sort of had an inkling of where I was going with the
cross, and luckily, the next few questions came to me. I am not a proponent of this type of
cross examination. The best lawyers who seem to think on their feet have
actually labored over every word and line-like Amos Oz labors over every word
and apostrophe and comma.
“The Cascaria would help clear the
house of bad luck?”
I walked over to the evidence- two
kilos of cocaine and held them up to the jury dramatically:
“Sir. This is four and half pounds
of cocaine. How much bad luck can someone have?”
I remember the line. I remember how
satisfying it was. I remember the look on the defense attorneys faces, as they
saw their defense crumble. I must admit, I do not remember the answer. But it
didn’t matter. The jury returned with guilty verdicts and I had won my first
big trafficking trial.
I wanted this post to be about the joys and
agonies of writing. About my putative career as a new novelist. About how I was
struck by Amos Oz’s words and how I thought to myself “exactly!”. That is
exactly how hard it is to write.
So you will have to tune back in
for “On Writing-Part Two.”
Who was it who said about an
entertainer and the audience: “Always leave them wanting more?”
PLR
