Complementary Legal and Fiction Writing by Nancy L. Eady

As I explained in a post in 2023, the writing I do as an attorney creates problems for my fiction writing, such as over-explaining matters, overuse of dialog tags, overuse of the word “that” and the dangers of “grocery store syndrome.” However, there are ways in which my legal writing and my fiction writing complement each other, including the use of Microsoft Word, perseverance and engaging summaries. 

Word “secrets” learned in one sphere carry over to the other. The first thing to understand about Word is that it comes loaded with default settings in place. Unfortunately, the person who chose those default settings was most likely a software engineer rather than a writer. The second thing to remember about Word is that it prefers to think for you, so unless you turn certain defaults off, Word does things you never expected or wanted. The third thing to remember about Word is that most of the stuff you want to do with it will never show up unless you click the “more” button. On the toolbar, the “more” button is a boxed in arrow in the lower right corner of each tool bar section, or an upside-down arrow next to a rectangular box or below a label such as “Styles,” “Editor” or “Compare.” The fourth thing to remember about Word is that most functions are never where you expect them to be. 

An example of this is the way you get new sections in a longer work to begin page numbering at “1.” Go to the “Layout” tab, click the little upside-down triangle besides the word “Breaks” and click “Next Page” under section breaks. Doing so places a “section break” in your document, which tells Word it is okay for the numbers to start over if the author wants.

Of course, that information is useless unless you know how to put page numbers in to begin with. Page numbers are under the “Insert” tab about two-thirds of the way across the toolbar in the “Header & Footer” section. Click on the upside-down arrow beside the words “Page Number” and a menu opens up that lets you choose where you want the page numbers to go. 

Another trick you won’t find by accident is centering pages vertically, which you might need for the title page of your manuscript. Click the little arrow symbol in the bottom right of the “Page Setup” box on the “Layout” tab. A “Page Setup” box pops up on your screen with three tabs. Choose the “Layout” tab in the little box, then look towards the center of the box, and you will see the words “vertical alignment” with a box beside it. Click on the little upside-down arrow on the box. One option is “center.” Choose it, and your page will be centered top to bottom. Remember to go back to that tab to reset the vertical alignment when you move on to the next page. A piece of cake, right? Or maybe not. 

Perseverance in writing is something else my legal writing taught me. When the choices are get thrown out of court or get words onto a page, you learn to keep slogging along regardless of your inspiration level so you can meet the deadline. In fiction writing, the words don’t always fly from my fingertips to the keyboard; sometimes each sentence slumps forward at a glacial pace. The perseverance I learned writing briefs is useful then. I usually feel after such a difficult writing session that I have done the worst writing of my life, only to discover days or weeks later that what I wrote was acceptable. 

There is a way in which my fiction writing has helped my legal writing as well. I almost never begin a brief now without giving the judge a few sentences about the case he is deciding in the most professionally dramatic way possible. I do this to help them understand why this case differs from the dozens (or hundreds) of other cases in front of them, and to help them care more about what happens to my client because of the brief. These summaries have benefited greatly from the same skills I learned to create a synopsis of a novel or story. 

Unless you are one of the lucky people who can pursue this profession without a “day job,” how has your day job helped you with your writing or vice versa? 

 

Standing Up Again by Nancy L. Eady

My first job after college in 1987 was as a high school math teacher in the poorest county in North Carolina. We knew it was the poorest county in North Carolina because the second poorest county used the fact that we were poorer as a recruiting point for its teachers. Coming to it as a new bride from a normal middle-class background, I was in for a rude awakening. 

The high school consisted of a handful of buildings scattered across the grounds, including a few trailers. There was no air conditioning, so the heat and humidity in rural North Carolina during the first month of school, August, and the last two or three weeks of school, May-June, made classrooms miserable. The teen pregnancy rate was through the roof. Nor was education a priority for some parents. The principal told a story about having caught one child skipping school and calling his parents. The parents swore up and down that the child wasn’t skipping school; he was, instead, home sick with the parents. During the entire telephone conversation, the student was sitting in front of the principal. I had less sympathy for those parents than I did for those struggling to make enough money to pay for food and electricity; more than once, an older high school child would be kept home to take care of younger sick siblings so the parent wouldn’t miss work. 

Since I was the new kid on the block, I was assigned the general math classes. According to the curriculum of the time, I was expected to take the ninth through twelfth graders assigned to my classes from basic addition and subtraction up to pre-algebra and statistics in one year. And to add to the difficulty factor, I was a “floater.” A “floater” does not have a classroom of her own; she goes from room to room as the school day progresses, using rooms when other teachers have planning periods. So, I normally was setting up while my students were arriving. 

Like any other high school students (and teenagers in general), the students tested me. The testing caused two problems. First, I was brand new and figuring out how to keep control over my classes at the same time the students were trying to wrest control from me. Second, I am not by nature a disciplinarian. I finally came up with a disciplinary system where students who disrupted my classes had their name written on the board as a warning, then a check if they kept it up and then finally, if they earned a second check, I put them out of the classroom. The theory behind this was to remove the disrupter from the classroom so the other students could learn. 

That first semester is a blur except for one sharp, painful memory. One fine fall day, C. pushed me to my limit, as well as garnering the required number of checks, and I ordered him out of the classroom. C. was a giant, and I had assigned him a seat at the front. In response to my order, C. stood up and began meandering to the door at the end of the classroom as slowly as he could. Fed up, I stepped up behind him and pushed him, telling him to get out. As soon as I moved my hands away, I burst out in sobs. 

Somehow, someone got the principal or assistant principal to the room, and someone took me to the teacher’s lounge. To help calm me down, someone also got my husband on the phone, then gave me some time to myself. To this day, I doubt anyone but my husband understood why I was crying; not because of anything C. had done, but because I had put my hands on a student, and that was wrong. More than anything else, I wanted the earth to swallow me at that moment and to never have to set foot in the high school again. 

But I did. I went back to my job the next day, and then the next day, and then the next week, and then the next month until suddenly I had been there three years and the powers-that-be gave me tenure. And it is the getting back up again that is the point of my story. 

I have some wonderful memories from those three years, and even now have students I still remember fondly. I did a lot of growing up and learning during that time, too. All of which I would have missed had I given up.

As writers, we are all burdened with those days as well. The days when we get rejection letters for the manuscript we sweated bullets over for years. The days when we feel like we are sending queries endlessly into black holes that are siphoning off our souls. The days when someone gives us a particularly brutal critique. The days when we look in the mirror and wonder why we do what we do and whether it will ever be worthwhile. When those days occur, the writers who make it, the ones who end up with published books and reader followings, admit that they have been knocked down, but they stand up, again. 

It’s okay to be in a place where you are discouraged about writing. It’s what you do the next day that will determine your success. 

It is a matter of record that my crying jag became legendary at the high school. It is also a matter of record that C. was never in any of my classes again. 

PICKING YOURSELF UP by Nancy L. Eady

 Every life has high points and low points. One low point for me occurred a lifetime ago in the fall of 1987. I had my first full-time job as a first-year teacher at Hoke County High School in North Carolina. The poverty level in Hoke County was shocking, and the main employer was the turkey plant. My solidly middle-class life and background had not prepared me for this environment.

The new kid on the block gets the toughest assignments, so I was 1) a floater, which meant I didn’t have a class room of my own and had to travel to a different room for every class, and 2) was given the general math class, where I was expected to take kids, some of whom could not add or subtract, from basic math up through pre-algebra in a school year. Some students tried; some students did not.

One of my floating rooms was a trailer. Somewhere in my second month of teaching, fumbling my way towards learning how to keep a class in line, I was experimenting with a system of checks for misbehavior on the board. Once you earned enough checks, you were kicked out of the room and taken to the principal’s office. (At least in theory.) One particularly bad day, a young man named Curtis reached his limit of checks and my personal tolerance limit, and I told him to leave the room. Curtis was huge, both in height and in muscle, and he started walking to the door – at a rate that would have given a glacier a run for its money. Completely fed up, I pushed his back to hurry him out the door. I’m not sure he even felt the push, but I immediately burst into tears in front of him and the other students.

I’m not sure who, but someone got the principal in there quickly. The powers-that-be put me in the teacher’s lounge, assured me Curtis would no longer be in my class and told me to take a break so I could calm down. In fact, they were so worried about me that they got my husband on the phone, in the days before cell phones, which means they called the plant where he was working 45 minutes away to yank him off the manufacturing floor.  And the part that was the most humiliating was that only my husband understood why I was crying. I wasn’t crying because Curtis had hurt me in any way or done anything but mouth off in the way adolescents often do, but because I had failed – I lost control and put my hands on a child. Granted, he was three feet taller than me and outweighed me by about 100 pounds, but he was a child.

So there I was, humiliated and a failure in the profession I had been studying to join for years. And since news at a school telegraphs wirelessly through the air, the faculty and the student body both knew, probably before I left the breakroom that day, that I had pushed a student and cried in class. I won’t ever forget that day. But I got up the next morning and went back to the school and kept on teaching and kept on trying. And slowly, my skills improved as did my temper. Three years later, when the principal told me I had qualified for tenure, he admitted that he never thought he’d see me again after the Curtis day.

Why does this matter? I am at that point right now in my writing, not because I doubt my ability to eventually craft a publishable novel but because I am having an incredibly difficult time carving out the time to write said novel. So yet again, I face a crossroads. Not as dark a crossroads as that fall day in 1987 but a crossroads nonetheless. And because I showed up the next day in 1987, I know the direction I will take – the one that keeps me working towards my dream.

What lessons have you learned from failures or problems? What gives you the courage to move forward after a difficult day? Are there painful memories that help you?