Scott Turow: ‘My characters, like me, find society’s problems in the law’

The simple truth, I’m pleased to acknowledge, is that most days writing makes me happy. Usually what’s ahead of me flashes through my mind not long after waking, igniting a triumphal fantasy: I will imagine epically, think precisely and, like an underwater swimmer with elastic lungs, breaststroke through the murk until I unseal the buried treasure chest of perfect words.

Of course, it is almost never like that. In fact, at my current stage, when I’m starting a new novel, I know that most of what I write will not appear in the finished book, since I chew my work over relentlessly like a ruminating cow. But I understand my own process. Each day inches me closer to the goal of harnessing soul and self and producing something that is, for better or worse, quintessentially me.

My day begins slowly with coffee and three broadsheet newspapers. During the baseball season I usually read first about the Chicago Cubs, before absorbing the latest outrage from Donald Trump. Around 8.30am, I tell my wife, in our standard joke, that I’m headed upstairs to play with my imaginary friends. My study, the original master bedroom in this redbrick house built in 1917, still holds a king-size bed that serves as a collecting place for neglected filing. I face a wall of double-hung windows and my 21-inch computer monitor in a mild trance; the made-up people I’m writing about are visible before me, as the words spill from brain to fingertips.

Writing a novel has three distinct phases. The first, getting started, seems to become harder each time. I often wish that my desk chair was equipped with a seat belt, because I lose patience and concentration quickly. I was taught by Wallace Stegner, while I was a graduate writing fellow at Stanford, that it’s imperative to write every day, to keep the machinery oiled, to give the Muse a chance to visit. The effect is a little like meditation, putting the would-be novel at the centre of my mind for a while. But there are frequent escapes. The refrigerator. The bathroom. A visit to my assistant. Finding the contours of voice and character requires a good deal of experimentation and failure. And time.

For this reason, I make no rules about what I will write in this phase. Anything that seems like it might find its way into the novel is good enough to put on paper: a quip, an extended musing that might help define a character, the look and feeling of a place. I don’t worry about whether today’s writing follows from yesterday’s. Sequence will come later. I want to be immersed, even for nanoseconds, in the world of the novel.

After roughly a year of what I call wandering around inside the book, I begin sewing these scraps together in a draft, moving from start to end. This is when I’m “really writing”. I’m at the computer on weekdays from roughly 8.30am to 1.30pm, with an hour or two often stolen from other things at the weekend. Even then, I’ve come to realise that I spend no more than 45 minutes out of every hour actually at work. My imagination depends on constant reprieves, for which email is especially handy, since I get a break, without leaving my chair. I remain a partner in a huge international law firm, Dentons, and occasionally there are calls from work. One talent above others has allowed me to lead this double life. I can answer the phone in the midst of writing a sentence and finish it the second I hang up.

Eventually the prolonged period of lying to myself about how good this book is, or at least is going to be, must end. I show what I’ve written to my wife, my kids, my agent, my editor. My third phase, the bone-crushing business of rewriting, begins. I demolish parts of the world I imagined. I think about how every sentence, every chapter can be made shorter, more fluid. I attend to grammar and syntax. I’m unsparing with myself about exactly what a sentence means. Some days it feels like digging a ditch, more craft than art and much less play.

I have been spending days this way, chasing words, for the better part of 50 years and, corny or not, feel blessed to have done it. Looking backwards, I sometimes miss the self-discovery and opportunities for invention that went with starting out. But I do not long for the frequent disappointments that were part of learning, of feeling that what was on the page did not match what was in my heart. And I am grateful to have escaped the ravaging anxiety, which ultimately drove me to the “real world” of law school, that arose from believing that I had to extract from myself each day something to justify my place on earth. At this point, 50 years along, it’s far harder to push myself beyond established boundaries. I know what’s going to happen. My novels will be dominated by dialogue; my characters live in the here and now and don’t seem to thrive through exposition. They will be lawyers who, like me, find the essential problems of living in society expressed through the law. Yet now, as it long has, it makes for good days and a rich life.

• Testimony by Scott Turow is published by Mantle on 27 July.