My guest interview this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is with legal thriller author Amanda DuBois.

Among other things, we talk about how telling true stories persuasively can make you a better fiction writer.

Learn more about her novel, Unshackled, here.

For a PDF copy of the interview, just click here. It’s there, somewhere. 🙂

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest this week is the founder and managing partner of DuBois Levias Law Group, one of Washington State’s longest standing woman-owned law firms before becoming a family law attorney, a field I learned to avoid like the plague, frankly, she was a labor and delivery nurse. She uses her medical and legal knowledge to address inequities in the legal system as an author of the Camille Delaney Mystery series, an award-winning book series. Her third and latest book is called Unshackled. She also founded an organization that helps formerly incarcerated people to reenter society. What a laudable goal. And I just finished reading the script for The Shawshank Redemption. What interesting timing. Anyway, I’m pleased to have with me today the author Amanda DuBois. Hi, Amanda. How are you doing?

Amanda (01:57): I’m doing awesome. I want a copy of that script. How interesting that would be.

Debbi (02:01): Oh, I can probably send you the link to where it was found. Or even a copy.

Amanda (02:05): Oh, fantastic. I didn’t know you were reading that.

Debbi (02:09): Oh, it, it’s kind of cool to read it, and I didn’t have a chance to actually watch the movie. We were doing a discussion on it, and I hadn’t had a chance to see it in a long time, but it seemed like there were scenes in there that might not have made it into the movie, which was interesting.

Amanda (02:24): Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Debbi (02:26): It was very interesting to read, but I’m always pleased to have a lawyer on who has written crime fiction. I’m just pleased to see lawyers writing fiction, frankly, in general. And you have done some remarkable work starting your own law firm. How long have you had your own law firm?

Amanda (02:49): So I’m just this year celebrating 30 years.

Debbi (02:52): 30 years.

Amanda (02:53): And so that makes us one of Seattle’s longest-standing women owned law firms.

Debbi (02:58): That’s really awesome.

Amanda (02:59): We’ve been celebrating all year. We have a little pontoon boat outside our office. Our office is on a lake, and we just did this champagne thing. You cork the champagne off and yeah, we’ve been having a good time celebrating.

Debbi (03:11): That’s awesome. That’s fantastic. I think I can hazard a guess as to what led you from delivering babies to law, perhaps the absolutely broken healthcare system in this country that had something to do with it?

Amanda (03:26): Well, a little bit. Yeah. Mostly I just wanted to do something different and was, here’s a really funny story. How I ended up in law is I wanted to get out of nursing and I thought I’d go to medical school. So I went, took all the super hard science classes and then I decided I didn’t really like … I took like two years of biochemistry and all that stuff. And then I thought, well, maybe I’ll go get an MBA. And so I went to buy the MBA study guide book at the bookstore, and right next to that was the law school book. And I thought, well, I’ll buy that. I’d never thought about law school. So I went home and I was doing the MBA study book, and it was all this math and calculus and it was really hard, and I thought, this is awful. So I got a beer and sat down and did the law school study book, and I’m like, oh, this is much easier.

(04:09): So my husband came home and I said, I’m going to go to law school. And he goes, what? I said, well, I’m not good at this MBA stuff. It’s too much math, and I’m really good at this law school, so they must have a better idea about what would make a good lawyer. So I was totally the accidental lawyer. I had no interest really in being a lawyer at all, but I thought I had the aptitude. So anyway, I ended up in law school and ended up as a medical malpractice lawyer for the first seven years of my practice. So once I got into law school, I thought, okay, I got to work on this healthcare system. So you’re right.

Debbi (04:40): Oh, wow. Well, that is really interesting. There are so many similarities between you and me in terms of background. I had this hard science background for a while and then the math killed me and I was like, oh, no, no, I can’t do this. I was really interested in physics for some reason, and then it was just like–

Amanda (04:58): Me, too!

Debbi (04:58): Wow, how interesting.

Amanda (05:02): In my other life I want to be like an astrophysicist or somebody kind of like math genius or something, but it’s not happening in this lifetime. So here we are.

Debbi (05:10): Here we are, yeah.

Amanda (05:10): Here are writing books.

Debbi (05:12): I’m a would be cosmologist. You’re a would be astrophysicist. I want to know about the origins of the universe. How did this all start anyway?

Amanda (05:21): Right.

Debbi (05:25): So how would you describe your books? Are they kind of like crime fiction? Where are they in the spectrum of who-dunnit to stop the bad guy before it happens?

Amanda (05:35): So they’re legal thrillers.

Debbi (05:37): Legal thrillers.

Amanda (05:38): And so the protagonist is a lawyer named Camille Delaney. And the reason I started, I wrote the first book was because I was a trial lawyer and I was super frustrated with how we value human lives in the legal system. If you’re a young bank president and you die, you’re worth millions of dollars. But if you’re a 65-year-old retired person and you died because of malpractice, you’re worth way less than that. And it bothered me because when I was a nurse, whoever comes into the hospital, they’re important, you don’t treat bank presidents different than you treat old people or vice versa. And every human life has the same amount of value in the medical system. So I end up in the legal system where people’s value is basically based on what they can earn. And it really bothered me, and I was medical malpractice lawyer for many years and I wanted to write an article or inform people about this injustice, and I thought, nobody’s going to read a dumb article about the value of human life in the legal system.

(06:37): Who’s going to read that? And I thought, well, maybe I could write a fiction book and it’s going to be about an old guy who dies, and it’s going to be about the protagonist who is struggling with trying to communicate to the insurance company and the defendants that the widow deserves more money than just the amount of money you’d give to some old guy who died. So the whole purpose of the book was to sort of expose this really horrible way that the legal system has with dealing with human lives.

And then the next book was about a baby who died because they do the same thing to babies. They say, oh, you could always have another one. And it’s like, what are you talking about? So the second book is about a baby who died, and it’s a mystery, so you’re trying to figure out, it’s a fun mystery, but at the end of it, I’m hoping that the readers are like, wow, I never really thought about that before. So I use the legal thriller sort of genre to talk about inequities in the legal system.

And then the third book is about women in prison who have been separated from their children and the importance of reuniting women with their children when they’re in prison and after they get out of prison. And so the whole and that book when you get finished with that it’s like, oh my God, I had no idea the struggles and the impact on our society and our communities when we incarcerate moms.

(08:00): Their kids become at risk, and then those kids are more likely to get into trouble in the legal system in the future. And so this book, while it’s a story about a kidnapped baby that the protagonist and her private detective have to find the baby all along the way, you’re learning things about the criminal legal system and how messed up it is. So.

Debbi (08:20): Yeah, for sure.

Amanda (08:21): That’s the high level what these books are about.

Debbi (08:25): Did you find that changing from writing legal briefs and documents to writing fiction required any kind of adjustment in the way you wrote or thought about writing?

Amanda (08:37): You know, not really, because I never really thought about this before, but if you’re writing a good trial brief or a good motion, you have to convince the reader that it’s true. And you have to write a, so I am a family law lawyer, so when I’m talking about, when I’m writing a motion or doing a trial, it’s about a family and a child and money and finance and all these things that are kind of a little bit exciting. I mean, that sound kind of smutty and dramatic and emotional for most lawyers, but it’s really pretty fun and you are writing this family’s story to present it to a judge.

And so it’s different in terms of, obviously you have a lot longer in a book, but it’s very similar in the way of, I mean, having been a lawyer for so long, I think it makes me kind of a better writer because I’ve had to tell true people’s stories to judges both in writing and verbally for the past 30 years. So it’s a good question, but it’s really, I’m sure if I was a lawyer for banks or Microsoft or something, I wouldn’t have the same thing to say, but when I’m telling family stories, yeah, absolutely.

Debbi (09:43): That’s true. That’s very true. I was going to say, my tendency was to overexplain things at first. It’s like, no, no, you don’t have to explain that the sky is blue because of, I didn’t do it that badly, but it was just.

Amanda (09:58): Yeah, it’s a lot.

Debbi (09:59): Yeah. Gosh, I’m thinking like a lawyer, not like a fiction writer at this point. So I’m thinking–

Amanda (10:06): We’re not exactly writing fiction, but we’re writing stories and we’re writing stories. If you’re good at it, you convince a judge that you’re right.

Debbi (10:14): That’s it. It’s not the same thing as writing fiction, but you draw on storytelling ability. That’s what it comes down to. And that’s one of the things that always attracted me about law school. I thought, what a great place to learn more stories.

Amanda (10:33): Well, and all the people that you meet and all of the stories that you hear and they all weave in, every time you write a book character, there’s a little bit of somebody in there. Right? They’re not just didn’t come out of nowhere.

Debbi (10:45): Exactly. Yeah. Do you have a plan in terms of how long you want to write the series or where you would like it to go?

Amanda (10:54): Well, I’ve got a million stories. So over the years, I wrote the first Camille Delaney mystery like 20 years ago, and I got a New York agent and the whole thing, and then it kind of fizzled, and then I re-upped it during COVID and got a publisher. And so I had to update that book.

So the first two I had written a long time ago, the third one I just wrote in the past several years, but between when I was a trial lawyer and now I’ve had a huge opportunity to get to know people in the criminal legal system because I started this nonprofit that helps people when they get out of prison. And so I’ve learned about inequities in the legal system that I couldn’t have ever have imagined. Because I’m like a privileged white lady divorce lawyer. I’m not someone who spends a lot of time in prisons or I wasn’t.

(11:41): And now that I am, and I learned the stories of the people and how it got them there, I feel really compelled to fictionalize them because I think it’s so much easier for people to develop empathy and to relate to a character who’s going through a real life type problem from the perspective of writing fiction.

And so the book I’m working on right now is going to be a domestic violence survivor who kills her abuser, because that’s really, you go into the women’s prison and ask those women, how many of them have been sexually abused? 85% of ’em. They’re all trauma survivors. And what are we doing putting them in prison? I don’t understand. It’s like they don’t belong in prison. They belong in therapy.

Debbi (12:25): Seriously. Oh my gosh. Are you familiar with a publication? I think it’s called The Marshall Report? I’m trying to think of what it’s called.

Amanda (12:36): Is that part of the .. yeah, yeah, I think so.

Debbi (12:37): They’re always reporting on prisoner situations.

Amanda (12:43): Well, there’s a million of them. And you could just think of all the stories that you can tell about people whose lives have taken a, Brian Stevenson, I don’t know if you know who he is, but he is a super famous lawyer who started the Equal Justice Initiative and he helps represent people in death row. And he says, we’re all better than the worst thing we’ve ever done.

(13:07): And it’s true. So when I meet people who are either in prison or who have recently come out of prison, they’re basically not that different than you and I, but they may have done something really wrong. Or most of the women in prison are there because they’re sexual abuse survivors.

They can’t afford therapy because they’re not in that demographic, like maybe we are where if you were abused or something, you go to a therapist. So they end up ultimately getting on street drugs. And they say that when I first took meth, it made me feel safe and I felt comfortable, and I felt, first time I felt like I was okay. And so they self-medicate with street drugs, which obviously is a horrible path to go down because then you end up doing property crimes to support your street drug habit, and then you end up in prison.

But you’re not there cause you woke up one morning and decided to break into a car, you’re there because you have this horrible childhood and horrible childhood experience. And I feel like we all need to understand that better.

Then their children. Then you take the mothers away from their children and then their children become at risk in our society because those are the kids who end up in trouble. So it’s a community safety issue. So anyway, so I write these stories about kind of real, they’re not true stories, but they’re real life stories.

Debbi (14:25): Informed by things that you’ve experienced.

Amanda (14:29): And then the other part about it for me being a lawyer and writing is because some people will say, you must have to do so much research. And I’m like, I don’t have to do any research.

I’ve been in the courtroom. I know exactly when I’m describing a courtroom and the wire hangers and the weird, that floor that’s made of the, I can’t remember, the linoleum floors and the mismatched chairs and the pews that are kind of sticky, because they’ve been there for a million years. I mean, I’ve done that for so many years.

Most of the stories that I tell are stories that I’ve heard from my friends. And so once in a while, I had to do research in this last book because I’ve never done a CR-7 motion to vacate a criminal record. So I had to talk to my friend who runs the Innocence Project up here in Seattle to help with some of the technical stuff.

But it’s fun for me to write courtroom scenes because since Zoom, we’re all lawyering on Zoom now, and so we don’t go into the courtroom as much. So it’s kind of bittersweet to write the scenes of the lawyers in the courtroom and the audio visual equipment and tripping over the wires and all the crazy things that happened during a trial. So they’re pretty real.

Debbi (15:37): So most courtroom proceedings now are taking place on Zoom?

Amanda (15:42): In Seattle, in family law, we’re all on Zoom.

Debbi (15:45): Wow.

Amanda (15:46): We went on Zoom during COVID there.

Debbi (15:47): So much has changed.

Amanda (15:49): We went on Zoom during COVID, and then this is kind of a funny story. So one of the judges I was talking to, he was saying, you know how the courtrooms are set up where the judge sits up here and the witness sits over here, and then the jury’s over there, so the witnesses are sitting facing away from the judge because they’re supposed to be talking to the jury, but in family law, there’s no jury.

And so the witnesses sit here and the judge sits up here and the witness talks to the lawyer over there. And the judge was saying, I spent 20 years listening to family law cases, looking at the back of the witness’s heads, and now on Zoom, I see them full on face, and I can get a much better feel for the people looking them in the face on a Zoom than I ever could in the courtroom. I thought I had never thought, it was really weird.

Debbi (16:30): Yeah, that’s a great point, and it’s a very interesting point. I hope writers are listening and taking notes here. If you’re in Washington State, at least, in domestic law, take notes.

Amanda (16:41): Another thing is access to justice, because in family law, it’s hard to get, I don’t know if anybody knows, and most courthouses are downtown, and you got to park, and if grandma’s going to come and testify or somebody like that, and you got to get ’em downtown and you got to get ’em in a parking garage and you got to get ’em down the street and up the elevator and through the security in the courthouse, and then she sits out in the hall for an hour waiting for a turn versus grandma’s sitting in her living room and you call her up and say, turn on your camera.

We’re on Zoom now, and she’s on and off in 15 minutes. And so the judges have kind of decided in family law it’s an access to justice thing, that it’s easier for people to access the legal system on Zoom than it is to have to go through all of the hoops to actually get down to the courthouse. Isn’t that interesting?

Debbi (17:28): Yeah, that’s very interesting. It also saves the client a little bit of money.

Amanda (17:32): A lot of money.

Debbi (17:32): If you bill by the hour,

Amanda (17:35): Imagine you’re paying an expert witness like $800 an hour to sit out in the hall up in the courtroom until they testify. Yeah, it’s totally different now.

Debbi (17:46): Wow, this is mind blowing for me now. I feel like I have to get in touch with some lawyers in my own area and see what they’re doing differently.

Amanda (17:54): Yeah. See, I don’t know. It’s family law for sure. So.

Debbi (17:57): Interesting. Very interesting.

Amanda (17:59): And also speaking of that, in a domestic violence case, you don’t have to see your abuser in the courtroom.

Debbi (18:06): Yes.

Amanda (18:07): You don’t have to be standing in the courtroom. You’re on Zoom, and you can turn your camera off and ignore them. And so it’s really a good thing.

Debbi (18:13): It really is a plus. Yeah, it’s a real plus. That’s amazing. It’s really interesting to hear how technology has changed things in a good way in that respect.

Amanda (18:27): Probably doesn’t make very good legal scenes in a book though.

Debbi (18:29): Oh, well. Yeah. But somebody might have to write it in if they happen to. I don’t know. Somebody’s camera could go haywire, people could screw with it, and they could have cat ears, whiskers. I got to ask, what authors have you found most inspirational for your own work and that you admire?

Amanda (18:51): I just go back to 101 Lawyer like Grisham and Ludlum, and those guys, they’re like the icons, and this is kind of how it rolls out. So I’d say those would be the ones.

Debbi (19:06): And what are you working on now?

Amanda (19:09): So right now, two things. I’m working on the fourth book in the series, which is going to be about a domestic violence victim who kills her abuser. And then I’m also working on, I decided I wanted to learn about screenplays and stuff, and so I thought maybe my third book would make a good movie. And so I ended up getting connected to this movie producer who also, interestingly is formerly incarcerated. So he was very, very interested in this story, and the more we worked together, the more we decided it’s probably better for a TV series because it’s like this Camille Delaney series can go on forever. So he connected me to a friend who’s a TV writer, and so I’ve been learning about TV screenwriting, which is way different than writing a book, as you probably know.

Debbi (19:56): Oh, yeah.

Amanda (19:57): And so he was like coaching me for about six months and going through all this and doing the pitch and all that kind of stuff. At the end of six months, he says, well, I’m trying to figure out where we should go next. And I said, well, I’m open. I don’t know anything about this. And he goes, well, how about I become your partner instead of your coach, because I think this is good and I can turn it into something good. And I’m like, well, thank God, because I’ve reached my capacity of figuring out how to write a TV show. So anyway, so I’m working with him on that. And I know that’s a total long shot crap shoot. But who knows? Maybe I’ll figure it out.

Debbi (20:29): You never know. You just never know. As William Goldman said, nobody knows anything. You never know what might hit or whatever.

Amanda (20:41): I think there, seems like there’s always a market for lawyers. It’s sort of like Erin Brockovich meets The Lincoln Lawyer. It’s kind of like that.

Debbi (20:49): Erin Brockovich meets.

Amanda (20:51): The Lincoln Lawyer, which is …

Debbi (20:52): The Lincoln Lawyer? Yes. Oh my gosh, that sounds very promising. I like that pitch. That’s good. I’m working on something that’s kind of like Erin Brockovich meets Suburgatory.

Amanda (21:05): Oh, dear.

Debbi (21:06): Kind of. It’s different. It’s interesting. It’s a short screenplay that I’m hoping.

Amanda (21:12): Oh, cool. Yeah. I saw you’re a screenwriter, so you probably, I’m very new to this, so it’s different.

Debbi (21:18): Very, oh my God, I have spent the literally the last 15 years learning this craft, and it is very different. It’s so similar in certain ways, yet very, very different.

Amanda (21:32): Everything has to be so tight and you can’t talk about internal dialogue. It’s all got to be dialogue and action and people’s faces. Now I can see why actors are so important. Like, oh, they communicate a lot more than you. If they’re good at it, you don’t even know they’re doing it. Right.

Debbi (21:48): Exactly. Exactly. What’s really interesting is I just directed my first short film.

Amanda (21:53): Oh, wow. Tell me about it.

Debbi (21:54): I got to actually work with the actors, so it was the best experience of my life. I really enjoyed it. It was tough, but it was something that I really wanted to try.

Amanda (22:05): That’s cool.

Debbi (22:06): I feel like that’s just opened up a new something for me. I don’t know what exactly We’ll see right now.

Amanda (22:13): What kind of film?

Debbi (22:14): It’s a short film, about 10 minutes long, about a priest who was a former assassin, basically who turned to the priesthood to basically hide from the people he was working for. And 20 years later, somebody comes to him to confess something, and it’s basically turns into a confrontation where he has to atone for his sins in a sense, kind of face what he’s done, face the consequences of what he’s done.

Amanda (22:47): Wow.

Debbi (22:47): And it’s called “Absolution.”

Amanda (22:50): That’s intense.

Debbi (22:51): Yeah, it was pretty intense.

Amanda (22:55): Yeah. That’s cool.

Debbi (22:55): But it was, it’s short and I’m in post-production at this point, which means I’m going to be editing it.

Amanda (23:04): Wow, good for you. Technology, more technology skills.

Debbi (23:08): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’m doing things that I never would’ve thought possible or I even imagined doing. When you said about going to law school, I did not go to college thinking, gee, I’m going to go to law school after this. I took journalism ultimately, and it’s like, okay, I don’t really want to be a reporter. What do I want to do? And I happened to meet, my husband’s cousin is married to a lawyer. I just happened to have a talk with him and he was telling me about his work, and I thought, gee, that sounds like I’m going to be bored. I didn’t want to be bored, but I wanted to be paid.

Amanda (23:51): I think people that don’t go to undergraduate school to be lawyers, people like you and me, we make better lawyers because you have a different perspective because you’re not sort of brainwashed into this whole, the kids that come up out of, what do they call it, pre-law classes or I came out there, I didn’t know what the constitution hardly even was. I was all in hard sciences and journalism sort of, you’re in writing, so it gives you a different perspective on the law if you didn’t come up as a sort of true believer. It gives you like, wait, what you’re doing it? Why are we doing that?

Debbi (24:25): Exactly. It gives you a whole different perspective on the system, the process, everything. And I also wrote more concisely than anybody I could think of in my law school class. When I was working at EPA, there was a supervisor who would “red pencil” everybody’s stuff, tighten this, tighten this. She would just look at my stuff and go, you write, you are an exemplary writer.

Amanda (24:53): And that’s what lawyers do. That’s such a big part of our job. So [cross-talk] a writer is amazing. That’s awesome.

Debbi (25:00): Choosing the right words is so important. She said.

Amanda (25:05): Ditching the adjectives.

Debbi (25:07): Oh my gosh. Yes. It’s more work than people imagine, I think, being a lawyer. It just is. Well, I just want to thank you so much for being here. Oh, is there anything, do you have any advice to give for people who would like to get into writing? I always like to end up with that question and another question.

Amanda (25:26): Yeah. I would say that to me, find something that you’re pissed off about because that will compel you to want to write something that is interesting and persuasive. Because for me, it was, I get really pissed off about the inequities in the criminal legal system or in the legal system in general, and it pushes me to want to, it’s writing with a purpose for me. I could never probably just write a book about a family or something unless I had a personal family issue that compelled me. But I think if you have something that you want to communicate about that you’re pissed off about, I think that’s a weird way of saying it, but really I think that gives you this. Then you have a mission, then you’re on a mission.

Debbi (26:10): Yeah.

Amanda (26:11): Your writing is more interesting and compelling, because there’s a reason why you’re doing it.

Debbi (26:16): Yes. You found your why. That’s another thing they talk about a lot in screenwriting. What is your why? Why are you writing this?

Amanda (26:25): Why does a character do that? I was working with this coach. I know you got to go, but he was saying, we would go through this. Why, why, why, why? And finally, one day he says, do you kind of feel like you’re in therapy? And I’m like, yes.

Debbi (26:37): Yes. It is a bit like tearing your guts out when you do this stuff.

Amanda (26:42): Yeah, it is.

Debbi (26:42): Is there anything you’d like to add before we finish up?

Amanda (26:48): Well, I don’t think so. It’s been super interesting. It’s always nice to talk to a fellow lawyer, author, writer, screenwriter type person. So.

Debbi (26:54): Amen. Thank you.

Amanda (26:55): We have so much in common, but this has been super fun, so thanks for having me.

Debbi (26:58): Fantastic. Well, this is wonderful. I’m so glad you decided to sign up here and be on. So thank you very much for being here today. My pleasure.

Amanda (27:10): Thanks for having me.

Debbi (27:11): It was my pleasure. Believe me, to everyone who’s watching or listening, don’t forget that we have a Patreon page and on Patreon you get all sorts of extras if you become a patron. Bonus episodes, ad-free episodes and more. Also, check out the Crime Cafe 9-book set and short story anthology, which you can find on my Patreon page. Until next time, when my guest will be Patrick Moore, take care and happy reading. Be seeing you.

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