About.com: In an interview for the Huffington Post, you said that you spend years working on the plots for your novels. Can you talk more about this part of your writing process?
Phillip Margolin: I frequently get ideas for books but an idea is small. For example, "Could a president of the United States be a serial killer?" That was the idea that I thought about in 1995 that eventually became Executive Privilege, but it is only an idea, not a 400 page book manuscript. After I get my idea I start asking myself questions like the ones you are taught to answer in journalism school when you are writing a news story: who, what where, when, and how. So, for example, "Who is the president? What does he look like, where was he born, etc." "How would a president commit murder without the Secret Service or the media seeing him?" Over time I get ideas for scenes, plot twists, character development, etc. I put these ideas into a file. When I need to start a new book, I look through my idea file and find plot ideas that are sufficiently developed to work on. Sometimes I go from an idea to a finished book in a relatively short time (a year or two), but it took me twenty years to get Lost Lake right and three years for Gone, but Not Forgotten.
AC: How long on average do you spend revising a novel?
PM: When I write my first draft I spend time revising, but I'm more interested in quantity than quality. I have all these ideas rattling around in my head and I want to get them on paper. I think of my first draft as a 400 page outline. Then I spend several months of heavy duty editing. When I have the book as good as I think I can get it, the manuscript goes to New York and my editor at HarperCollins beats me up for another two to four months. I'd guess that I spend almost half a year editing, but this is the most important part of writing. Almost no first draft is any good. Every time I read what I've written I see things that need to be edited. If you want to be a good writer, you can't have an ego. You have to be able to listen to criticism unemotionally and objectively and accept it if it is correct.
AC: What have you learned over the years about writing from the point of view of the opposite sex, as you do in many of your books, including Executive Privilege?
PM: After my first novel, Heartstone, was published my editor asked me if I would like to write a series with a woman prosecutor. I panicked. How could I write from a woman's point of view? It was impossible. So I turned down the offer. My third novel, Gone, but Not Forgotten revolves around a lawyer representing the most horrible person imaginable -- a serial killer who intentionally dehumanizes women before he kills them. At first, my main character was male, but I realized that the tension level would go through the roof if the lawyer was a woman. Imagine a man locked in a jail interview room with someone like that. Now imagine the same scene with a woman. Again I panicked. Then I asked myself who the toughest person I knew was. The answer was Doreen, my wife, who was also an attorney. I knew I had to have a woman as the lead to make the book work so I imagined my wife in every scene where the heroine, Betsy Tannenbaum, appeared. Once I finished the book, I developed the confidence to write women characters effectively and at least half of my books have had strong women as the lead.
