Ask the Author: Treg Julander
Answered Questions (3)
Treg Julander
My daughters’ middle school cancelled their drama class. My wife and I had experience directing a high school summer Shakespeare program, and we know the great value of theater training for kids, so we volunteered to run an after-school drama program at the school for four years. It was great to work with youth again and to flex our theater skills. Scripts that are appropriate for middle school students are hard to find. So one year I wrote a script for the kids to perform—a Facebook parody called Fallsbrook, depicting people behaving in real life like they do on social networks.
I love rock music, which shows through in the main character of my novel. I also enjoy learning about the meaning behind songs. So a few years ago, I got together with some buddies and created a podcast called Rock Tale Hour. In each podcast, we choose a song and tell the stories behind the song and the band.
While I was in law school in Washington, D.C., I was a White House intern in the Office of Presidential Letters and Messages. I worked on compiling all the separate policies for handling incoming correspondence into a single manual. One of the interesting things I remember is that the White House regularly receives gifts of food, and the policy required all perishable items received to be donated to a homeless shelter.
I love rock music, which shows through in the main character of my novel. I also enjoy learning about the meaning behind songs. So a few years ago, I got together with some buddies and created a podcast called Rock Tale Hour. In each podcast, we choose a song and tell the stories behind the song and the band.
While I was in law school in Washington, D.C., I was a White House intern in the Office of Presidential Letters and Messages. I worked on compiling all the separate policies for handling incoming correspondence into a single manual. One of the interesting things I remember is that the White House regularly receives gifts of food, and the policy required all perishable items received to be donated to a homeless shelter.
Treg Julander
Developing the characters, keeping the plot moving, and staying internally consistent fried my brain on this project. But my greatest challenge was determining what to cut. I filled the initial drafts of my legal thriller with too many descriptions, lengthy subplot scenes, and self-indulgent commentaries about topics such as the evils of big law firms. When the first completed draft weighed in at about 130,000 words, I knew no one would read a legal thriller that hefted like War and Peace and dragged on for five hundred pages. So I spent literally months analyzing every word and cutting anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary to get the pace right without sacrificing the story. Cutting the words and ideas I’d fallen in love with and spent so much time carefully crafting felt like severing a limb. In the end, I told the story I wanted to tell at the pace I wanted to tell it.
Treg Julander
Writing a novel is the most challenging project I’ve ever undertaken. The difficulty of keeping the plot moving, without revealing too much, while maintaining the pace of character development, far exceeded the most complex legal brief I’ve ever written. Unlike a legal brief, however, writing a novel gave me the ultimate freedom to build a world and play in it. I enjoyed creating characters, exposing them to fabricated situations, and dreaming up how they would react and change. Contrary to popular belief, attorneys never get to take such liberties with the facts in a real case. I also took great pleasure in building a puzzle, leaving clues, and crafting complex twists and turns. My greatest reward is to hear readers tell me that they were still guessing until the last scene or that they figured it out in the first few chapters.
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