“He Was a Lawyer. He Had Discipline.” An Associate’s Transformation. . .

[WSJ Law Blog]

While we’re on the subject of lawyer-authors — or lawyers pretending to be authors — or even authors becoming lawyers! — let’s turn to the ultimate home of the literary highbrow, the New Yorker magazine.

For all you associates who’ve contemplated hanging it up and pursuing the writing life, listen up.

This week’s issue contains a feature by Malcom Gladwell on why we tend to associate genius with precocity (it’s true, isn’t it?). As a counterpoint, Gladwell begins with an anecdote about Ben Fountain, who was “an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction.” Gladwell continues: “The only thing Fountain [pictured] had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job.”

Here’s what happened:

He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer. He had discipline. . . .In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper’s. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It . . . drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le Carré.

As Gladwell explains, Fountain’s breakthrough success came 18 years after he left Akin Gump. “The ‘young’ writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.”