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change the facts. You can only rearrangethem to make a story that better enhances your client’s position, emphasizing certain things, deemphasizing others. You make sure the facts that you want people to believe are the most compelling ones. The facts that hurt your case are the ones you either explain away or hide away. That’s telling a story.
    Lawyers work incredibly long hours, and we sell our lives in half-hour increments. Until I finally stopped lawyering in ’95, my writing schedule was similar to that. For ten years, I wrote from ten p.m. to two a.m., six nights a week. Draconian, yes, but you find the time where you can. It wasn’t hard for me. After a day at work, I had so many stories in my head, I couldn’t wait to get home and write them down.
    Starving writer: not an option
    Growing up in the South, we had some really fine short story writers, like Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and Lee Smith. I naturally gravitated toward that form. I started trying to get my short stories published in high school and continued on through college. I collected a lot of rejection letters.
    So I bought a book about how to write scripts, and I managed to get an agent, which wasn’t easy to do, coming from Virginia. In 1991, while I was billing two hundred dollars an hour as a lawyer, I had a script, and everyone in Hollywood was loving it. My agent said it was going to be a big sale.
Big.
He called me back at midnight and told me that Warner Bros. had passed, which made all the other studios figure there was something wrong with it, so they all passed on it, too.
    That was a crushing blow. There had been so much hype,and I’d believed it. By then I’d been writing a long time. Not that I ever thought I’d make a living as a writer. Even when you got a short story published, the most they’d give you was free copies of the magazine. Not much help for the bank account.
    Once our first child was born in 1993, I knew the starving writer route wasn’t ever going to work for me. I was the breadwinner, and if I couldn’t make any money off the writing, I had to keep making a living as a lawyer. I thought, “It’s not going to happen for me. I’ll be one of those writers who writes for fun and never gets published.” But that didn’t mean I was going to stop writing.
    I took my best shot
    I studied the book industry. I read lots of thrillers and mysteries to see what I was up against. I knew I needed an agent, so I started watching for news stories about first-time novelists signing big book deals. Then I’d go to the bookstore and read that book’s acknowledgments page to see who the agent was.
    I got seven agents’ names that way. I wrote each of them a short query letter: Dear Sir or Madam, I’m a lawyer in DC, I wrote a political thriller, and I guarantee that if you read the first page, you won’t stop till you get to the last page. Sincerely, David Baldacci. I thought half of them would read the manuscript just to prove me wrong.
    I was hoping to hear back from just one of them, but I heard back from all seven. I went up to New York and met with them. The agent I found is still my agent today.
    I did a couple of days’ worth of revisions, and then, on a Monday night, my agent sent the manuscript to a bunch of publishers.On Tuesday morning, I was sitting in my law office, and he called me up and said, “Hey, if I sell this manuscript, are you going to be able to quit and write full-time?”
    I said, “Well, I’ve been waiting to do that for the last sixteen years. So yes, that would be very nice.” And he said, “Hey, that’s good. Because I sold the book.”
    The chairman of what was then Warner Books had read it overnight and faxed in a preemptive offer: a multimillion-dollar advance for one book. It turned out to be a great deal for the publisher, and a great deal for me as well.
    A baby called book
    It was surreal. You have to realize that nobody except my wife, my parents, my