4 Fun Tips for Writing Law Into Fiction

From Franz Kafka to Wallace Stevens, Min-Jin Lee to Jasmine Guillory, countless writers once made their living as lawyers. Writing and the law are natural bedfellows. Training for both requires extensive reading and writing, and the most successful practitioners in each possess an unwavering attention to detail.

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It’s this attention to detail that often thwarts writers who want to incorporate law into their work. Even lawyers-turned-writers can feel daunted by the idea of translating complex legal concepts into readable fiction. In this article, I draw upon my own experience to offer four actionable tips for writing believable legal storylines—no bar exam required.

STEAL SHAMELESSLY

Let’s start at the beginning. People often ask me: Where do you get the ideas for your books? My answer is that I often steal shamelessly from real life. Now, as a lawyer, I know it’s wrong to recommend stealing anything, so before the bar association steps in to strip me of my license, let me provide an example of what I mean.

Several years ago, I was four hours into a two-day legal conference, and everyone in the darkened ballroom was nodding off into post-lunch coma. The speaker clicked “next” on her PowerPoint slides and said three short words: “the Yates Memo.” Right away, people woke up and started taking notes—which prompted me to do so too.

Until that moment, I’d never heard of the Yates Memo. Simply put, in September 2015, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates directed federal prosecutors to go after top executives responsible for corporate wrongdoing. Before the memo, if a company did something unlawful, prosecutors would normally seek a financial penalty. After the memo, business bigwigs faced the real threat of prison. Suddenly, the concern among executives wasn’t “how much will the company have to pay?” but rather “which of us will take the fall?”

Thus, the kernel of my debut novel A Good Family was formed.

Rest assured: You don’t have to subscribe to Department of Justice memos to get juicy ideas for your novel. My favorite sources of inspiration are small town newspapers (obituaries! police blotter! local politics!) and weekly gossip magazines. A beloved restaurant falls victim to arson. A former pop star dies unexpectedly. A planned luxury resort goes belly up. Shamelessly steal these ideas, ask yourself “what really happened, and why?” and let your imagination run wild.

RESEARCH RELENTLESSLY

Once you’ve stolen discovered the kernel of your story and gone as far as you can go with the narrative arc, step back to look at your work-in-progress and identify any legal concepts. In the examples above, they would be arson, murder, and real estate. For my second novel, Relative Strangers, a contemporary retelling of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the story turned on inheritance law, something I knew absolutely nothing about.

Now, it’s time to research.

Legal research can be daunting even for the most seasoned practitioners, but don’t fret. In law school, my legal research professor extolled the virtues of “the one good case.” If you find one good case (or article) on your topic of choice, you’ve got the key to unlocking a treasure trove of information.

Where do you find the one good case for your fictional story? As with most things in life, start with Wikipedia to get a general lay of the land. Don’t forget to check out the hyperlinks and any footnotes. Nolo.com has countless articles that explain legal concepts and relevant court cases for the layperson. And, of course, there is always Google—the lazy lawyer’s best friend.

As you do your research, keep careful notes as if you were a prosecutor creating a “case file” for your fictional characters. What are the elements of the crime (or legal issue) in your story? What are some real-life examples when the crime was proven—or when the alleged criminal “got off”? Don’t be afraid of going down rabbit holes during your research journey. Those rabbit holes are often where the best and most surprising plot twists come from.

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SEED YOUR STORY

Now comes the hard part: seeding the law into your story.

If you are a plotter (someone who tends to work from an outline), start by going over your research notes, circling your favorite facts and examples, and plotting out a plan to insert the law into your narrative. For example, you could introduce the essential elements of the crime early on, “tick off” each of the elements as the story unfolds, throw in an “inspired from real-life” plot twist or two at the book’s midpoint and climax, and reveal the final piece of the legal puzzle just shy of the very end.

If you are a pantser (more inclined to write by the seat of your pants), try re-reading your notes several times to allow your legal research to seep deep into your subconscious, and then weave the law organically into your writing as you go along. Don’t worry too much about whether all the legal pieces fit together perfectly as you draft. That’s what revision is for.

Either way, you shouldn’t be surprised if most of your “case file” is left unused. Legal research should inspire—not constrain—your imagination. After all, you’re writing fiction, not a legal treatise. When in doubt, include less rather than more information about the legal elements of your story. It’s easier for a reader to spot a mistake than to notice an omission, and too much detail can bog a story down.

PHONE A FRIEND

Once you have finished drafting and revising your manuscript, it’s time for feedback. Trust me: I know how hard this can be. After working in the privacy of your little gray cells for months or even years, it can be humbling (some might say terrifying) to share your words with actual people. Take heart. I’ve found it does get easier with time.

For me, the best “beta readers” are not my family and best friends (who unconditionally love anything I write) but rather those friends and acquaintances who are widely read and whose taste in books I respect. Even without law school training, such astute readers can frequently pick up on loose legal threads or unbelievable plot twists.

Ideally, however, you’d have an astute reader who is also a lawyer to review your manuscript. Because law is a highly specialized profession and lawyers avoid malpractice like the plague, your legal reader may hedge that they’re not qualified to opine on your manuscript’s accuracy. That’s OK. Again, you are writing fiction, not a legal treatise. You just want to make sure your book doesn’t contain any errors that would take the reader out of the story. 

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