Phillip Margolin at the Hoffman Center

Over 75 people attended the Manzanita Writers’ Series event on Saturday, July 18.  

Phillip Margolin, legal thriller author from Portland, entertained the crowd with anecdotes about his writing life.  The story of how he connected with his agent made the aspiring authors among us groan.  As fate would have it, he re-connected with a buddy from law school–actually his next door neighbor in the dorms.  It turns out he worked as legal counsel for the largest literary agency in New York and connected Margolin with an apprentice agent at the firm.  He’s still with the same agent today.

Margolin admitted, though, that it wasn’t all so easy.  Upon delivering his first novel to his editor, he was told that it wasn’t publishable.  The hard work of revising was just getting started.   He hadn’t taken a single creative writing class, nor was he interested in pursuing an MFA in writing.  He claimed that he learned many aspects of the craft from one novel to the next.  Over the years, the path from first draft to something “publishable” is not as arduous as it had been that first time.  But, revision is still a major part of the process.  

When asked which writing programs were the best, Margolin suggested that writers should simply pursue their craft for the love of it.  ”Go to school to learn something that’ll pay the bills and put a roof over your head,” he urged.  From his experience, very few authors make a living at writing.  ”Just sit your behind down and write,” he said.

Using his experience as a criminal defense attorney, over 30 of them homicides, Margolin has written 14 novels–all of which made the New York Times Best Seller list.  He finds his ideas in his own experiences, from intriguing cases, or in the newspapers, and never starts a book until he knows how it’s going to turn out.  The initial notion for his latest book, Fugitive, actually came to him in the ’80s and took years to finally develop.  ”I have all sorts of files and when I find an idea, I just toss it in.”