A time to kill

But before we get to them and your new book, I want to start with a general question or even confession.

When I was a teenager struggling to decide whether or not to study English or law at university, it was reading your very first novel, A Time to Kill, that tipped the scales for me towards law, alongside a weird Scottish Calvinist thing that English would be too enjoyable and therefore inappropriate.

We don't need to get into the wisdom of that decision on my part, but I think the reason for me at the time, which has also been instrumental in your writing career, is recognising that the law is absolutely full of stories.

It's all about stories, isn't it?

And one day just got the urge to sit down with the legal pad and write chapter one and then write the first sentence.

And that's how it got started.

And that first book, A Time to Kill... wasn't an instant runaway success when published in 1989, was it? I mean, how do you think your writing has changed from then to now with the release 37 years later of your new book, The French Illusion?

A time to kill is a total flop.

He turned it into art.

He created a story about an idealistic young lawyer who has to defend a grieving father who actually does exactly that, and that raw emotional processing became his first published novel, A Time to Kill.

I am looking at these three moments, and I have to ask a question.

We have a veteran shouting down a professor.

Did he?

Oh, yeah.

When he first decided to channel his anger into writing A Time to Kill, he had absolutely no idea what he was doing.

He was a 30-year-old lawyer working full days writing longhand on yellow legal pads.

That was, it was the only thing that anyone knew of.

He had actually written A Time to Kill before that, and it had no, you know, it, it didn't get picked up.

They, later they came back and, and re-released it.

But I remember at the time, 'cause I was a baby lawyer at the time, I think I was practicing, or maybe I was still in law school.

You know, I discovered him when the firm was just – that was the only thing that anyone knew of.

He had actually written A Time to Kill before that, and it had no – it didn't get picked up.

Later, they came back and re-released it.

But I remember at the time, because I was a baby lawyer at the time.

If you're trying to write a book and you're not writing at least one page a day, he said, then the book is not going to get written.

Now, to write his first book, A Time to Kill, Grisham took almost four years.

He simply kept his ritual of just one more page every day.

And when he was done, he was rejected by dozens of publishers.

Well, that was 10 years earlier, but the idea stuck with Grisham.

So committed to write just one more, Grisham kept up his schedule of writing every morning.

Learning from the painful editing process of A Time to Kill, he learned the importance of extensively outlining his books in advance.

The more time I spend on the outline, he said, the easier it is to write the book.

Most of them are based on something that really happened, still, today, after all these books.

And so I had the story, and as I was writing A Time to Kill, my first novel, which is a tough book to write, tough book to read, tough book to get through, I wanted something, and, that would be more fun to write and read.

And I'd always pitched the story to Renee, and she's a, she's a, my s- sounding board.

And she, she's always said, "I love that story.

I don't care what your dream is or what your goal is, but you've got to do it every day.

I learned that lesson the hard way.

And once I started practicing that 40 years ago as a, you know, rookie lawyer trying to write a novel, I made myself get up at 5:00 every morning and have time to write.

And it took three years for the first one, took two years for The Firm.

My guest today has authored more than 50 consecutive number one bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly 50 languages around the world.

He's best known for writing classic legal thrillers such as A Time to Kill, The Firm, and The Pelican Brief, as well as recent reader favorites like The Widow, Framed, and Camino Ghosts.

He's got a new novel out this fall called The French Illusion.

John Grisham, thank you so much for being here.

John Grisham is the author of more than 50 consecutive number one bestsellers.

See how nice and slowly I said that so we could absorb it, including classic legal thrillers like The Firm and A Time to Kill.

Now he has written his first ever espionage thriller.

It is out today.

I mean, I dreamed of writing full time.

I never thought it would happen.

The first book, A Time to Kill, was a total flop when it came out in 1989.

And I told Renee, I'm going to write one more book.