Storytelling for Lawyers (22 page)

Spence's story, like most torts stories, is fundamentally a simple melodrama. And Spence's Silkwood character is a simple hero without the depth of character of, for example, a complex tragic hero. Indeed, attempting to transform Silkwood's story into the genre of tragedy by adding another dimension to Karen Silkwood as protagonist would diminish the story's persuasive power. There are, nevertheless, clearly tragic victims in Spence's story: the young workers who, Spence argues, will suffer horrible struggles with cancer if the jury does not intervene heroically to give Silkwood's life meaning by speaking the only language the Beast corporation understands, the language of money.

It is a presentational style and voice that Spence marries intentionally to his theme and story. Spence's voice is appropriately respectful, reverential, and lawyer-like. Spence chooses a third-person omniscient
perspective
for telling most of his story. Spence strategically employs edited audiotapes, however, to shift purposefully from the third-person omniscient voice into Silkwood's own first-person voice and perspective, and, likewise, incorporates vignettes or stories within stories to strategically readjust his narrative frame. Spence purposefully and effectively varies the rhythm and cadence of his speech on
various levels, from the rhythms and word choice within sentences to the modulated, shifting use of
scene
and
summary
throughout the story.

The selection of details and images for story elaboration is an equally strategic part of a presentational style. Thus, for example, Spence contrasts rural and bucolic details that characterize the innocent townspeople with the details that mark and signify the big city corporation and its evil minions. These are all shrewd stylistic choices.

This chapter attempts to provide an understanding of these alternative stylistic possibilities through analysis of short literary illustrations and also excerpts from selected legal stories. I choose as narrative illustrations examples primarily taken from creative nonfiction and from criminal appellate and postconviction briefs. Although a primary focus here is on writing, these examples could have been drawn equally from oral stories and oral arguments and from other areas of practice. The nonlaw examples include analysis of excerpts from James Ellroy's autobiography
My Dark Places
,
¹
Norman Mailer's
Executioner's Song
,
²
Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood
,
³
and Frank McCourt's
Angela's Ashes
.
⁴
The choice of examples from creative nonfiction is purposeful: legal storytelling often seems stylistically akin to the practices of creative nonfiction storytellers. The journalism of Mailer and Capote and Ellroy's and McCourt's memoirs are all presumably bound by the constraints of evidence and memory. Although all are truthful and factual storytellers, akin to legal advocates, all are also situated storytellers, purposely telling their stories to persuade and move their readers emotionally; none purport to be telling purely “objective” stories.

There are many different styles and voices manifest in effective legal storytelling, although we do not typically label or deconstruct these styles as such. The legal stories told in criminal cases are often presented as detective mysteries. One of the characteristic voices is that of the hard-boiled detective. This is a voice that creates a distinctive rhythm and, as David Lodge puts it, typically “stays on the surface” of events.
⁵
It is a style that “focuses obsessively on the surface of things.… The dialogue is presented flatly, objectively, without introspective interpretation by the characters, without authorial commentary, without any variation on the simple, adverb-less speech tags
he/she asks/says
.”
⁶
The effect, as Lodge observes, is often “at once comic and chilling.”
⁷
It is a style that, as Anthony Amsterdam observes, “hustles the reader rapidly across a catwalk above a pit, giving him or her no pause to look down.”
⁸
The
style conveys a sense of a dangerous world out of balance; it is simultaneously riveting and disturbing.

It is not coincidental that lawyers purposefully embody the voice, rhythms, and stylistic conventions of the “hard-boiled” detective mystery story in many criminal appellate briefs. Indeed, the very purpose of these stories is to draw the reader into a mystery that activates the imagination; they are successful when they compel the reader to, as Jerome Bruner puts it, go “beyond the information given.”
⁹
This style invites readers to dig beneath the surface of the language and solve the unsolved or wrongfully solved puzzles of meaning.

What does this style look like? I take, as an initial example, a brief excerpt from James Ellroy's autobiographical memoir
My Dark Places
. Like many criminal defense attorneys, Ellroy uses a style or voice akin to that employed in detective fiction, albeit for a different purpose: Ellroy uses this voice to tell his deeply personal story, a memoir. Initially, the plot of the story appears to match that of a typical genre “whodunnit”: James Ellroy's mother was murdered, and the murderer was never apprehended. Many years later, Ellroy, the narrator-detective, must return to the past and attempt to retrace the steps of the criminal to rediscover the story of what happened to her. In retelling the story, Ellroy hopes to reassemble the clues and evidence in a way that points to the murderer. Ellroy's story operates on a second level crucial to the memoir (akin to Tobias Wolff's story in
chapter 4
): the purpose of Ellroy's narrative quest is to understand who his mother was and, in doing so, to navigate his own artistic identity, and understand how his own voice and vision were shaped by these long-ago events.

Stylistically, Ellroy's autobiography initially assumes its power through the authority of the voice.
My Dark Places
begins with the subtitle “The Redhead” and the disturbing and graphic crime photo of Ellroy's murdered mother, lying facedown in the brush, her dress partially undone, the ligature marks from the strangulation around her neck.
¹⁰
The use of the subtitle from detective fiction supplemented by an actual image of Ellroy's deceased mother is a striking choice for framing the story.

Ellroy begins by speaking directly to his mother, seemingly bypassing the reader, employing a second-person voice. It is a voice that delivers a cry of anguish that also frames the story that he will tell. He puts these paragraphs into italics to differentiate this voice from that of the third-person detective story that follows:

A cheap Saturday night took you down. You died stupidly and harshly and without the means to hold your own life dear
.

Your run to safety was a brief reprieve. You brought me into hiding as your good-luck charm. I failed you as a talisman—so I stand now as your witness
.

Your death defines my life. I want to find the love we never had and explicate it in your name
.

I want to take your secrets public. I want to burn down the distance between us
.

I want to give you breath
.
¹¹

Although it is only the second page, Ellroy has made several bold stylistic moves: First, Ellroy has used significant “white space” on the page to focus on the horrific visual image of his mother. He has framed the image with an attention-gathering, tabloid-like header. He then employs short sentences and short paragraphs containing one, two, or no more than three sentences. He arrests the reader's attention with the plea of the son for the mother whose “death defines my life” who “want[s] to find the love we never had and explicate it in your name.” Yet even here, the hard-boiled style “stays on the surface”
of the images, with the beat of short rhythmic sentences pushing the reader compulsively forward over the chasm below: “A cheap Saturday night took you down. You died stupidly and harshly and without the means to hold your … life dear.”
¹²

Next, the narrative voice shifts abruptly from the first to the third person. Hard-edged visual details pile one atop another as if in a montage of photographs or a sequence of cinematic images:

Some kids found her.

They were Babe Ruth League players, out to hit a few shag balls. Three adult coaches were walking behind them.

The boys saw a shape in the ivy strip just off the curb. The men saw loose pearls on the pavement. A little telepathic jolt went around.

Clyde Warner and Dick Ginnold shooed the kids back a ways—to keep them from looking too close. Kendall Nungesser ran across Tyler and spotted a pay phone by the dairy stand.

He called the Temple City Sheriff's Office and told the desk sergeant he'd discovered a body. It was right there on that road beside the playing field at Arroyo High School. The sergeant said stay there and don't touch anything.

The radio call went out: 10:10 a.m., Sunday 6/22/58. Dead body at King's Row and Tyler Avenue, El Monte.

A Sheriff's prowl car made it in under five minutes. An El Monte PD unit arrived a few seconds later.

Deputy Vic Cavallero huddled up the coaches and the kids. Officer Dave Wire checked out the body.

It was a female Caucasian. She was fair-skinned and red-headed. She was approximately 40 years of age. She was lying flat on her back—in an ivy patch a few inches from the King's Row curb line.

Her right arm was bent upward. Her right hand was resting a few inches above her head. Her left arm was bent at the elbow and draped across her midriff. Her left hand was clenched. Her legs were outstretched.

She was wearing a scoop-front, sleeveless, light and dark blue dress. A dark blue overcoat with a matching lining was spread over her lower body.

Her feet and ankles were visible. Her right foot was bare. A nylon stocking was bunched up around her left ankle.

Her dress was disheveled. Insect bites covered her arms. Her face was bruised and her tongue was protruding. Her brassiere was unfastened and hiked above her breasts. A nylon stocking and a cotton cord were lashed around her neck. Both ligatures were tightly knotted.

David Ware radioed the El Monte PD dispatcher. Vic Cavallero called the Temple office. The body-dump alert went out:

Get the L.A. County Coroner. Get the Sherriff's Crime Lab and the photo car. Call the Sherriff's Homicide Bureau and tell them to send a team out.…

… Her face had gone slightly purple. She looked like a classic late-night body dump.
¹³

Ellroy's opening stays compulsively on the surface of the details. Although his voice is now cast in the third person and an omniscient perspective, Ellroy avoids descending into the consciousness of his characters and providing their thoughts other than his brief observation that a “little telepathic jolt went around” when the boys discovered the body. The freestanding details have sufficient power to hold the reader; any emotion of Ellroy for his mother is compressed into “hard” visible objects and a matching hard-edged voice. Ellroy employs short concussive sentences, equally short and arresting paragraphs, and the rhythms of the prose are derived from the colloquial street language characteristic of a contemporary detective mystery. The surface of language is foregrounded by the absence of any commentary by Ellroy on the images he depicts and splices together almost cinematically. This stylistic form of presentation encourages the reader to function as a detective-investigator. Images are clues to be sifted through by the reader and not ascribed specific meanings by their author. These images are tethered back to the initial image of Ellroy's dead mother, who serves as the focal point and emotional pivot of the story. Ellroy looks down from outside the experiences and images with a detached and hardened clarity, whether he is engaged in revisiting and investigating the circumstances of his mother's death or in investigating the equally harrowing circumstances of his own life as it takes shape—in an almost predetermined manner—after her murder.

In his chapter “Staying on the Surface” in
The Art of Fiction
¹⁴
David Lodge observes that this is a form of story elaboration where “the narrative discourse impassively tracks the characters as they move from moment to moment towards an unknown future.”
¹⁵
The “text's refusal to comment, to give unambiguous guidance as to how the characters should be evaluated,” may be “disturbing” but “may also be a source of power and fascination.”
¹⁶
The qualities
and techniques that are compelling in Ellroy's prose, drawing the reader into the story and activating the imagination of the reader to resolve a complex puzzle of meaning, often serve the legal practitioner as well, especially in effective appellate and postconviction relief briefs.