Evidence
I have jury duty this month, and every year I experience the same emotional mishmash of perverse excitement, anticipation, and dread.
I’ve been summoned many times and somehow never made it onto a jury. Which is ironic. I spent nearly a decade as a paralegal, watching the theater of our legal system firsthand. Then I spent the next few decades researching crimes and writing sixteen thrillers.
Mostly, it’s morbid curiosity. A hunger to pull back the veil and see what happens when twelve strangers are asked to differentiate truth from nonsense, decoding the courtroom melodrama of trial litigation.
Waiting to be selected also feels strangely familiar.
I was the bookish, artistic kid who was always picked last for sports teams. Gym class, family gatherings—it didn’t matter. I knew my place in the lineup. As a kid, that kind of public sorting hurts. You stand there while everyone else is chosen, pretending you don’t care.
Now, all these years later, I’ve finally found a team I actually want to join.
And apparently I’m still standing on the field, laugh/crying at the irony.
The funny thing is, if they finally pick me, I’ll spend the next several days evaluating everyone else.
Reasonable Doubt
Courtrooms try to sell a clean, binary facade, utterly glamorized by Perry Mason and Atticus Finch. Two opposing sides. Evidence. Testimony. Verdict.
But hiding beneath that facade is a wilderness of human behavior, tamed by a bailiff and a gavel.
Facts don't arrive carrying instructions explaining what they mean. In court, their significance is argued through evidence, testimony, expert interpretation. Dissect them closely enough and even facts can start looking gray and blurry around the edges.
I saw that during my paralegal years. Two sides can take the same events and build very different narratives around them. People remember differently. Sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors.
Mystery and thriller readers do this constantly. We meet a cast of characters and almost immediately start sorting them.
Trust her. Watch him. She’s hiding something. He definitely did it.
Crime writers, of course, encourage this behavior.
We decide what you see, when you see it, carefully curating the precise angle from which you’re allowed to view. Silence can look like guilt from across the room. Move closer and maybe it’s fear. Or shame. Or protection. Or grief.
The fact hasn’t changed.
The story has.
After decades of writing crime, “Who did it?” has never been the question that interests me most.
It’s why.
Motive
Why this person? Why this act? Why now?
What made them cross the line?
Without motive, it’s all a house of cards. Motive gives a crime legs. History. Baggage. The things that help form its shape and context. Understanding why someone did something doesn’t excuse it, but it can change our perception of the person, the choice, and what we thought we knew.
That’s where things get interesting for me.
We talk about crossing the line as though it’s painted brightly on the ground and everyone agrees where it is. But circumstances blur things. Perspective shifts. The closer we look, the harder it can be to sort people neatly into little boxes: guilty, innocent, truthful, deceptive, good, bad.
And sometimes I wonder: is the line itself where I thought it was?
Substance & Shadow
What happens when someone who spent a career verifying facts starts writing about everything facts can’t tell us?
In this month’s Story Impact Podcast, I talked with former Wall Street Journal deputy editor-in-chief Neal Lipschutz about journalism, crime fiction, morally complicated characters, and the things people hide.
"How far will people go before some level of moral decision making becomes part of their calculus?" — Neal Lipschutz
Watch it on YouTube here.
Writing Life
On September 19th, I’ll be teaching Find and Use Your ME Factor, an all-day author branding workshop for Sisters in Crime based on my book The ME Factor: Your Secret Weapon for Author Visibility. We’ll explore what makes each writer distinctive—and how to put it to work.
Learn more about the workshop here.
It’s funny how different that childhood field looks from here. Back then, there were teams, coaches, and a clear dividing line between being picked and being passed over.
Maybe it was never about which team picked me...but whether it was a game I actually wanted to play.
Catch you on the other side...
Lisa