A Time to Kill wasn't written on a sabbatical or an advance. Grisham wrote it in the cracks of a working life, a page at a time, over roughly three years. The math was the whole strategy.
A Trial He Couldn't Shake
The story started in a courtroom. In the mid-1980s Grisham sat in on a trial in Mississippi and started imagining how the case might have gone differently. That what-if became the seed of the novel. He set himself a target that sounds almost too small to matter: one page, every day, no exceptions.
It took three years of really early mornings, and working late at night, and a lot of lost sleep, to finish the story.
John Grisham, 2003 interview
Pages Wherever He Could Get Them
Grisham wasn't writing in a quiet study. He was a practicing attorney and a sitting state legislator, so the manuscript got built in fragments. He wrote before work, late at night, and during dead time at the State Capitol in Jackson while the legislature ground on. Much of the legislative-session writing happened from a motel where lawmakers stayed. The pages piled up on legal pads, one at a time, until there was a book.
The reward wasn't instant. The finished manuscript was turned down by a long line of agents and publishers before it found a small print run, and the novel only took off after his second book broke through. For the full arc from there, read the full John Grisham writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Pick a daily number you can't miss. One page is nothing on a good day and survivable on a bad one.
- Build the book in fragments. Grisham proved a novel can be assembled from stolen ten and twenty-minute windows.
- Don't wait for ideal conditions. He had a law practice, a legislative seat, and a family, and he wrote anyway.
- Expect the no's. The book that launched a 300-million-copy career was rejected repeatedly first.