The other way around

It seems like everywhere I go, I find frustrated lawyers who wish they could leave the practice of law and write for their living. It's certainly a favorite dream of people stuck in a life that often feels devoid of true creativity. (Just today, I had to tell a partner that I have "no pride of ownership" in the brief I spent the last week working on, after he told me that he felt bad making some major changes. Given that I'd cribbed much of it from other briefs on the same topic, it was most definitely not my creative baby and he could slaughter it all he wanted to!) We are always looking to the past, looking to precedent and templates and trying to make sure we are everso consistent with what has gone before. Great writers concoct beautiful words out of thin air, and it is about as far opposite as possible from the experience of your average BigLaw lawyer. Thus, it's pretty easy to see why the big firms are filled with people dreaming of becoming then next Kerouac, or maybe just Grisham or Turow.

So it was very interesting today to read an interview with Elizabeth Wurtzel, who you may remember as the author of such 90's mainstays as Prozac Nation and Bitch: In Defense of Difficult Women. (A book I still wish I'd gotten around to reading simply for the title alone. Maybe someday.) Wurtzel has been seldom heard from in the last 5 years or so, and for good reason: she has been attending Yale Law School. Last week, she began working for Boies Schiller and did some work on the Wachovia/Wells Fargo deal. The WSJ law blog interviewed Wurtzel about why she'd decided on this reverse escape career path. Basically, her reasoning can be summed up here:

I used to feel that I spent too much of my time in my pajamas doing nothing, and I’d think ‘in the time that I don’t spend writing, I could raise a family of five.’ In a lot of ways, being a writer is lonely and alienating. You hear about the work ethic of people like Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike and you think ‘well, God bless them, but I don’t know how they do it.’ Most of the rest of us just wind up watching Oprah. I was roaming the neighborhood every day, lingering at the dog run with my dog. It was really bad. I just wasn’t doing enough, and I feel like law school sort of gave me my voice back. When you have a lot to do, you get a lot done. At least that’s how it’s been for me.

It was quite fascinating to see someone complaining about feeling useless for sitting around in her pajamas writing for a living, when I and virtually every other lawyer I know pretty much consider that our idea of heaven. But it is also nice to hear someone excited about practicing law like we all were once upon a time. I could not help to think, however that we'll have to see how she feels a year from now about the daily grind. Much like I suspect I would last about six months in her former life before I'd either collapse into a pit of laziness or crave structure so much I'd go racing back to the first firm that hired me. The grass is always greener...