Preface

Let me start by acknowledging that there may be a significant chunk of you who look at an interview about “storytelling” and scoff at its place in the world of the Serious Lawyer. And I can understand why. There is an aura surrounding the practice of law of the rational, the dispassionate, the objective, and the reliable. These are all important values in our legal system. They help keep the system fair by treating like-situated people alike.

But almost 20 years of practice and learning from my betters has taught me this: to do justice, it is as important for us, as advocates, to know our client’s story as it is to know the law. Our cases are not logic problems. They are the embodiment of the most important, and often difficult, moments in the lives of real people.

Effectively telling our clients’ stories acts like a glue that adheres their perspective in the minds of others. Human beings often forget facts, but we remember stories.[i]

I could not imagine anyone better placed to talk about the art of great storytelling than Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Anthony Doerr.  He has won several awards and fellowships for his work, including the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence for Fiction, five O. Henry prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, and three Pacific Northwest Book Awards.

His recent novel, All the Light We Cannot See, was a #1 New York Times bestseller, remained on the list for 200 weeks, and was later developed into a series for Netflix.   Mr. Doerr’s 2021 novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Given this acclaim, it is not surprising that Mr. Doerr’s writing has been translated into over 40 languages.

In a truly shocking turn, Anthony Doerr agreed to have a conversation with me about storytelling as a tool for advocacy.  Here are some excerpts from that conversation:

First off, would you mind telling us a little bit about your connection to Idaho?

I came to Idaho in the late 90s because I fell in love with the Idaho girl who would become my wife. I soon fell in love with everything else: the people, the wildflowers, the rivers, and especially the mountains. Idaho is a state where, pretty much any time I get outside, I can find awe—where I can be reminded of my own smallness in the context of geologic and evolutionary time, where I can transcend the self. There’s no more valuable gift in the world than that.

What is the role of story and the storyteller in modern society?

Storytelling is everywhere. Humans have always, and will always, crave story. Nowadays, of course, technology delivers stories to people with different technologies beyond the novel, or the epic poem. Going through the experience of having one of my stories made into a Netflix show, for example—that scale was so enormous compared to what I was used to that I could hardly comprehend it. In the book world, if you sell a hundred thousand copies of a book and have it translated into a few other languages, it’s considered an enormous hit. But in the first two weeks that All the Light We Cannot See was on Netflix, I think it was being watched in over 80 countries.

And of course, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc. is where so many humans go to satisfy their appetites for narrative—perhaps even more seek those venues than they do TV shows and films.

I don’t worry, though, that books will go extinct because of streaming or AI or whatever comes along next. Seemingly every 10 years someone predicts the death of the novel, but there will always be people who love the full immersion that you get from 20 hours spent swimming through a novel. It’s so unique.

Video games are the only other thing that offers such a long timetable of immersion. (I don’t think we should dismiss video games as just an enormous, zillion dollar industry: the good ones can lift you up out of yourself and make you feel less alone.)

Some thinkers argue that there are evolutionary advantages to being a storytelling species, and I tend to get persuaded by those lines of argument. Sure, maybe our ancestors told scary stories like: “Grandma went down to the river and a crocodile bit her in half, so don’t go down to the river, kids” and that helped protect the next generation. But there’s more complexity to the argument: myth and story can preserve memory, motivate people to engage in political action, and power the immense might of organized religions.  Stories are a deeply influential force in shaping society.

There is a line in your novel Cloud Cuckoo Land where one of your characters says, “When a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.” This novel also speaks to books being repositories of memory. In these passages, are you speaking directly to the reader?

Of course, absolutely. I’m asking the reader to think of the book as a physical world in Anna’s hands. How do these worlds survive? Because of stewards.

When I was in high school, they made us read The Iliad and The Odyssey, but I didn’t really get them. The translations felt lifeless and dry. As an adult, I picked these stories up with newer translations, including a version from one of the first female translators of The Odyssey, Emily Wilson. The role of the translator is to drag a seemingly dusty old story up into the contemporary world and inject blood into its veins. It felt like that to read her translation. 

When you read the Wilson translations, you get to experience the same characters, the same linguistic pleasures, and the same emotions that a kid listening in some village 3,000 years ago got to experience: that’s extraordinary continuity. And the survival rate of old stories is so rare. For every billion trilobites that existed on the Earth during the Cambrian Period, how many fell into the mud with just the right combination of factors to be fossilized?

So many forces are at work around us that try to remove stories from the world: especially the stories of immigrants, of women, of the poor. On the other end, working against those forces, we have stewardship—people protecting and amplifying those stories. Librarians, archivists, advocates: they are memory keepers.

For all of the horrific things that social media is doing, especially to our young people, that’s perhaps its greatest selling point, too: everybody is allowed (at least theoretically) to tell their story. Though I remain skeptical that for-profit companies are the right place to store your memories.

Why do libraries and librarians feature so prominently as the heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land?

With the librarians in this novel, in all the diverse forms they take, I tried to invert the characteristics of the classic Greek hero. Achilles, for example, slashes and cuts—that’s how you get remembered in a Greek epic: if you’re good at slicing up people. Librarians in this novel are a different sort of hero. They’re teachers; they’re weavers; they’re knitters. They connect.

That’s also what lawyers can do. A lot of lawyers—certainly not all—come from a privileged place, but they can choose to elevate the stories of their clients. That’s a form of connection: a binding of society. A good lawyer is empathetic. A good lawyer is someone who can tell the story of their client fairly and skillfully, so that listeners gain an emotional investment in their client’s journey.

On a practical level, are there any core characteristics of good writing, and do you have any advice for people who might not think of themselves as writers but want to improve this skill?

Specificity is the key to good writing. Inexperienced writers often come to fiction, and they want to reach for big things in their writing. What does it mean to be in love? What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to feel loss? What does it mean to be frustrated?

So, they stay up in the clouds, writing about emotion, rather than trying to create it. What they forget, ironically, is that the most convenient way to get to those big universal feelings is through the individual.

The same is true for law. Law is about trying to build universal structures that can fit into all of these idiosyncratic, individual circumstances. Storytelling works in the opposite direction. We try to suggest things that might be universal by telling the idiosyncratic, unrepeatable journey of a single human being. My advice is: get to know your clients, and try to tell their stories with care, empathy, and particularity.

Often beginning writers will say of a piece of writing, “I didn’t give any specifics about the house they lived in, and I didn’t go into detail about the town they lived in because I wanted the story to apply to everybody. I wanted it to feel like ‘Every Town.’” But that means the reader has nothing to see or hear or feel. What’s ironic is: the more vividly you can portray, say, a single apartment Meridian, Idaho, the more deeply it will become vivid to a reader in, say, Bangladesh.

In Cloud Cuckoo Land, the more specifically I could explain what Lakeport looked like for Zeno in the years that he was growing up, the more a reader living in a different time or culture might be able to imagine what it was like to be closeted in mid-century America and not be allowed to love the people who you want to love.

Bad writing—are there common mistakes or benchmarks of bad writing that we should look for if we are trying to improve our writing?

Probably 100 times a day while I am working, I think about cliché. I try to recognize when I am automatically, unthinkingly choosing the easiest combination of words, and I try to resist that impulse. Clichés may have originally been interesting combinations of words, but they have since become so habitualized to us that they become invisible and ineffective.

As humans, we need habits to get through the day. It’s a lot easier to cook scrambled eggs in your kitchen for the 300^th time than on the first day you moved in. It’s a lot easier to find your way to work on your 300^th day of employment than on the first day. But I want my writing to feel like it’s your first day in a new house, your first day on your way to work. I want my work to feel alive. When a reader is tripping along a sentence, I don’t want her to be able to assume what word is coming next. That little moment of surprise when you think one word might be coming, but another word comes, a more fitting word, is pleasurable. It helps you see something that otherwise has become so familiar that you no longer really see it.

That’s the key to fracturing cliché. And I think that can be relevant to high school kids writing a paper and lawyers writing briefs, not just fiction writers trying to write a book. If you want your writing to last in a reader’s mind, don’t automatically reach into your toolbox for “the sun glinted on the water.” How can you render sun striking water in a way that your reader actually slows down and glimpses the beauty and the mystery of our solar system? Of the sophistication of the human eye? Of the majesty and miracle of being alive?

AI might be useful in many ways—for example to make formulaic writing even more formulaic. But what humans can do is recognize when they are sleepwalking through a sentence.

At those times, try to catch yourself and put in a little imaginative work. Rather than saying, “She was upset,” tell me what this one individual client of yours does when she is upset.  What does she do with her hands? How does she portray emotions through her face? It takes more effort to write like that, but that’s the type of writing that stays with people. A cliché slides off the mind because it’s too familiar.

Can we talk about writer’s block?

Absolutely! Writer’s block is a shorthand way to talk about fear and I have to fight through some kind of fear every day. What if what I write is lousy? What if no one cares about what I’m writing about? What if I’m not up to the task? Gathering a series of tools to help fight through those fears is the key to breaking writer’s block. For me, it always goes back to reading.

I go back to Virginia Woolf, back to Melville, I go back to a favorite Anne Carson book on the shelf that, even if I read two pages at random, has that magic that got me interested in writing to begin with.

It also helps to recognize that everybody who makes something must overcome fear.  You’re not alone. (And, if all that fails, try caffeine.)

Epilogue

I’d like to leave you with another of my favorite pieces of wisdom.  United States Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter, just prior to joining our highest Court, said that there were two key lessons he had learned from his time as a trial judge:

The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we are in, whatever we are doing, whether we are on a trial court or an appellate court, at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected. Some human life is going to be changed in some way by what we do, whether we do it as trial judges or whether we do it as appellate judges, as far removed from the trial arena as it is possible to be.

The second lesson that I learned in that time is that if, indeed, we are going to be trial judges, whose rulings will affect the lives of other people and who are going to change their lives by what we do, we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right.[ii]

Not every judge is as wise as Justice Souter, but we can point them down his path through our advocacy.  Effectively telling our clients’ stories helps judges to do justice and get their rulings right.  Telling these stories fairly, completely, and with regard to our clients’ humanity lifts our people out of the “faceless, undifferentiated mass” and reveals them as “uniquely individual human beings.”[iii]

But it does more than this.  It gives our clients a chance to be heard in a world that largely ignores them. And in seeking to understand our clients’ history and perspective, we reap a personal benefit. Allowing ourselves to be invested in the hopes and fears and aspirations of the people around us may feel like an uncomfortable stretch for some, but it makes us kinder and wiser as a result.

Sarah E. Tompkins is a Boise criminal defense attorney specializing in appellate work as well as legal research and writing. Upon graduating from the University of Idaho College of Law, Sarah was a judicial clerk at Division III of the Washington Court of Appeals in her hometown of Spokane, Washington.

Following her clerkship, Sarah left Washington state for Boise to join the Idaho State Appellate Public Defender’s Office, where she worked for nearly 10 years. She handled felony appeals throughout Idaho, including death penalty cases. Next, she served over six years with the Ada County Public Defender’s Office, initially as a misdemeanor trial attorney and subsequently as a legal research specialist.  As a trial level public defender, Sarah loved engaging directly with clients but found her true joy in helping to build the first legal research and writing specialist position within this office. During this time, Sarah was awarded the John Adams award, recognizing excellence in public defense, by the Idaho Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Sarah is currently in private practice.  

[i] I stole this bit of wisdom from professor, author, and one of the greatest experts on myth and storytelling: Jospeh Campbell.

[ii] Hearing on the nomination of David H. Souter to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 101st Congress, pp.51-52 (9/15/90) (Testimony of David H. Souter).

[iii] Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 304 (1976).