QUESTIONS FROM READERS

TeaSage@aol.com: In STAR WITNESS Stanley Roth tells Joseph Antonelli "that he always knew the ending before he started on the beginning." Do you know how your books will end before you begin writing them, or do the endings evolve and change as you develop the plot? Also, do you make an outline of the book before you begin the actual writing?

D.W. Buffa: I'm afraid that unlike Stanley Roth I don't always know the ending before I start the beginning. I did not really know the ending of STAR WITNESS until I was far into the book and I realized that the movie Roth made about the trial had to appear to tell what really happened without actually proving it. I did not make an outline before I started STAR WITNESS. I've never been very good at that. I knew what I wanted to write about and let things develop from there. Things really do take on a life of their own. In STAR WITNESS, for example, Jack Walsh, the victim's father, became a much larger character than I had thought he would. The other thing that happens is that you develop a certain attitude toward some of the characters. I like Stanley Roth a good deal more than I thought I would.

camcmichael@satx.rr.com: How do you discipline yourself to write? Do you write daily on a moderated schedule or do you work intensively like Stanley Roth? How long did it take you to write STAR WITNESS? Do you begin with the end in mind like Stanley Roth?

D.W. Buffa: It is not difficult. I write every day for several hours. I learned a long time ago to do it first thing, and not put it off. I write long hand with a fountain pen and I do that for a reason. It helps me concentrate in a way I don't seem to be able to when I am looking at words on a computer screen. I do use a computer, however, to type what I have written, if only because no one else can read my handwriting. There is a point when the writing takes over and the story takes over and all you are really doing is putting down on paper what you hear in your head.

There are times when I have worked like Stanley Roth, going halfway through the night, but that is usually when I am revising something I have already written. STAR WITNESS took about four and a half months to write. I did not know for certain how it was going to end until I was more than half way through it

johno99@comcast.net: How did a lawyer learn to write this well? Who are your top writing influences? I smell Hemingway and O'Hara.

D.W. Buffa: I began to write a long time before I became a lawyer. I started trying to write fiction ten years before I was first published. I read Hemingway and O'Hara but I haven't made any conscious attempt to model myself on either one of them. I was always more drawn to Fitzgerald, than to Hemingway or O'Hara. One result of our tendency to categorize everything is that we forget that THE GREAT GATSBY is one of the great novels about crime. Another great "crime novel" is Faulkner's SANCTUARY. Notice that neither one of them makes you guess who did it. And then consider this: a book that is really worth reading is a book you would want to read twice. But if the only reason you read it was to find out who "done it," you would never have any reason to find that out twice. Finally, if that were really the test, no one would have read more than the first few pages of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. I write the novels I do because I am interested less in what people have done than in why they have done it. One of the reasons I wrote STAR WITNESS was because I wanted to explore what would happen to someone who has risen to the top of things and realizes that it isn't enough, that what other people consider success is not even close to what he wants to do. I wanted Stanley Roth to be, not disenchanted, but discontent, driven to do something at least as good as Orson Welles did with Citizen Kane.

jeannegarden@juno.com: I would like to know if you researched law or the judicial process for the book.

D.W. Buffa: I was a criminal defense attorney for nearly ten years and learned something about what goes on in a courtroom. Let me quickly add, however, that there are those who would say that the best courtroom drama ever written is "Witness for the Prosecution," written by that famous non-lawyer, Agatha Christie. It would certainly be sufficient to sit in a courtroom and watch lawyers conduct a trial to learn enough to write a good book about a criminal case. I learned a great deal about the way jurors think and act, and used it in STAR WITNESS, not just from having been involved in a hundreds of criminal cases, but from having served as a juror myself a few years ago in California. It gave me a rather different perspective than what I had had before. There are descriptions of the physical discomfort of jurors in STAR WITNESS. I am not sure I could have written that without having had to sit for hours in a crowded jury box in hard stiff chairs.

ReoneK@aol.com: Did you go to law school? You definitely pick your stories from the headlines and make them seem utterly real.

D.W. Buffa: I was a criminal defense attorney for nearly ten years. Though I never tried a case in Los Angeles, I wanted to write a novel that was set in Hollywood because Hollywood --- the motion picture industry --- has become the center of the American mind, the place that draws everything toward it and shapes the way we think and the way we look at the world. There is a reason why more people now want their children to grow up to be movie stars than want them to become President. Hollywood, not the White House or the halls of Congress, is where you will find the power to change what people believe. Stanley Roth, accused of the murder of his movie star wife, tries to use that power to change what people think about him.

browell@mchsi.com: Being a former practicing criminal lawyer, do you find that elements of cases that you have participated in in the past find their way into your novels?

D.W. Buffa: The first trial in my first novel, THE DEFENSE, was based on a case I had, and there is something in the third novel, THE JUDGMENT, that resembles something I did. The most significant way in which that experience has been utilized is in the way I have tried to describe what a courtroom lawyer does, the way he thinks and the way he feels about what he does. One of the things I learned is that cross-examination can be used not just to elicit information, but to show a jury the real character of a witness. In STAR WITNESS, Antonelli cross-examines the actor, Walker Bradley, as a way of showing the jury the kind of life the victim, Mary Margaret Flanders, lived. And while I never went quite so far as Antonelli does in STAR WITNESS, there is usually a certain by-play that goes on between the defense attorney and the prosecutor, the casual remark, the studied look, the otherwise innocent gesture that, if you're good at it, will make the jury think less of her and more of you. Antonelli does this all the time.

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