Three Answers: Scott Turow

by Dick Donahue, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 10/31/2005

Three Answers this week are from Scott Turow, whose Ordinary Heroes will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux tomorrow.

PW: With Ordinary Heroes you trade the courtroom for the battlefields of World War II. Were you tired of courtrooms?

ST: To tell you the truth, the first draft of Ordinary Heroes had a lot of the David Dubin [the book's protagonist] court martial in it. The bottom line was, in the ruthless process of editing, those sections were just getting in the way. Eventually people said to me—readers I trust, like my wife—"this is really beside the point; it's outside the main thrust of the story." I really did start out thinking that I was writing about a court-martial, and when my wife read the finished manuscript she said, "This doesn't have anything to do with a court-martial."

PW: Are there parallels between the plot of Ordinary Heroes—a son discovering surprising truths about his father—and your own life?

ST: My father was an army doctor, but he was certainly not David Dubin. He was a much different kind of guy. I've often said that my father was much more Augie March than he was David Dubin. Some of Dubin's experiences, like getting captured by the Germans, were stories that I heard from my father. They had a lasting effect on me and I always wanted to incorporate them. Some of them are distorted by the lens of time, but in some ways it's really a way to claim a legacy from my father.

PW: Your books have appeared every three years. Would you be publishing more often if you weren't also working as a lawyer?

ST: I'd like to believe that I could write a novel faster if I didn't have anything else in my life, but a lot of it has to do with my own gestational process. On the other hand, the New York Times has started running serialized fiction in the magazine, and I'm working on one of those pieces now. It's impressing me how fast it happens when it has to happen.