The Advocates: Wordplay Festival and Scott Turow

Welcome to our spring/summer series, The Advocates. We wanted to pay tribute to the bloggers, writers, book stores, fairs, conferences, organizations, teachers, and anyone/anything else who has helped us, or the crime fiction community, on our writing and publishing journey. The Advocates is the result.

Scott Turow and the Wordplay Festival

By Angie Kim

Picture this: you’re on a big, outdoor stage, seated next to a household name, superstar author. Instead of focusing on his own book, he tells the crowd about yours and why he loved it, and he’s so convincing that everyone buys your book and you end up signing books for so long that your hand cramps up.

Pure fantasy, the kind of stuff debut authors dream about, right? Except that it actually happened to me, just a few months ago. The famous author? Scott Turow. The venue, Wordplay Festival in Minneapolis. The fact that I was at this festival at all was amazing enough, given the other authors in attendance—not only Scott Turow, but Stephen King, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Mary Karr, and other literary rock stars (literally, as they’re all in the rock band The Rock-Bottom Remainders, which kicked off the festival). I, on the other hand, was a brand new author whose book hadn’t even been released when I was invited to attend. But Founding Director Steph Opitz took a chance on me, reading my galleys months before anyone had heard of my book, and put me in the line-up right next to (as luck would have it, given our last names) Stephen King. Then, a few months before the conference, came the news that sent me screaming: I would be paired with Scott Turow for a joint event.

There was, of course, the obvious reason for my excitement: Scott Turow is a mega-popular author, and being paired with him would mean a huge crowd and great exposure for my book. But it went beyond that, to something personal, because Scott has influenced my writing life throughout the years. As a foundational matter, One L, his memoir about his experience at Harvard Law School, altered the course of my life. That book would make any sane person stay far away but, because I’m crazy, it desperately made me want to go there. I’d originally enrolled at a different law school, but after reading his book, I changed my enrollment to HLS, which is where I met my husband, with whom I had kids, who had medical issues that led me to start writing. In this If-You-Give-A-Mouse-A-Cookie sense, I wouldn’t be a writer today if I hadn’t read Scott Turow’s book all those years ago.

And then there’s the influence of his work on my writing itself. Like many, I consider him to be the creator of the contemporary legal thriller genre, as well as one of the first authors to perfect that shocking twist ending. I had several of his books next to me as I wrote Miracle Creek, deconstructing them to study and learn how to structure plot points and build suspense.

Finally, there’s his generosity in reading and blurbing my book when it was just a raw manuscript, before I even had a publisher. I’d written him an awkward letter (is there anything more awkward than asking for a blurb from an author you love?) and sent it via a friend who knew him professionally. I had no expectation of any response at all, but unbelievably, he asked for the manuscript, and a bit later, came through with a perfect blurb that ended up on the cover of my book’s advance reader’s copy and, eventually, the hardcover.

Given that background and the extent of my gratitude, you can imagine both my excitement and nervousness before our Wordplay event, both of which increased when I was (in another surreal moment) talking to Amy Tan and Mary Karr and they mentioned coming to Scott’s/my event, and oh, maybe Stephen, too. By the time I met Scott a few hours later, my nerves had gotten to the point where my hands were actually shaking. But he calmed me down, sitting and chatting with me like we were old friends, so charming and engaging that I got drawn in and forgot everything else.

When our event began, our moderator, another lawyer, asked for “opening statements” about our novels. I gave my novel’s elevator pitch and turned to Scott, expecting him to talk about his most recent novel. But he didn’t; he said, “I want to talk about Angie,” and proceeded to talk about my novel, its characters and themes, and why he loved it. I had the biggest, stupidest grin on my face the whole time, and I had to blink rapidly to keep from tearing up at this generosity, his graciousness in using his time to promote a new writer to the crowd of his fans.

At the end of the event, when our moderator asked for “closing statements” about what we were next working on, I took the opportunity to pay tribute to Scott, to thank him for everything he’d done for me. I thanked him for writing One L and helping me to meet my husband. I thanked him for creating the modern courtroom drama and paving the way for writers like me. I thanked him for reading my book and endorsing it, and for continuing to support me at that event. I told him how incredible I found that level of generosity from a veteran author like him toward a newbie like me, and I said I’d try my hardest to pay it forward. As the audience and I clapped for him, he reached for my hand and squeezed it tight.

Afterward, we moved to the signing table. I’d figured Scott would have a never-ending line of readers wanting their books signed, and I’d have a handful. But the most unexpected thing happened. Almost all the people in line bought my book as well as his, and asked both of us to sign. Many of them said some variant of “Hearing Scott talk about your book made me want to read it,” and I thought again how powerful that moment had been, not just for me but for everyone witnessing it, how his generosity of spirit had endeared him to all of us and made us even bigger fans that we’d already been.

I’ve told this story many times, to other authors, to my friends, to my editors and agent. But when The Thrill Begins offered me the opportunity to pay tribute to someone who’s had a tremendous impact on my writing life, I jumped at the chance to say this publicly:

Thank you, Scott. I know I’ve already thanked you many times for all that you’ve done in the past. But with this, you’ve given me my favorite book tour moment. I won’t ever forget it.

Thank you, Wordplay and Steph. For giving new authors like me a chance to attend alongside the big household names, for pairing us with each other and giving us a chance to lift each other up in our own ways.

Angie Kim moved as a preteen from Seoul, South Korea, to the suburbs of Baltimore. She attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, then practiced as a trial lawyer at Williams & Connolly. Her stories have won the GlamourEssay Contest and the Wabash Prize in Fiction, and appeared in numerous publications including Vogue, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Slate, The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, The Asian American Literary Review, and PANK. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and three sons. Miracle Creek is her first novel.

To learn more about Miracle Creek, click HERE.