“Returning to the desk, I jot down some more notes for my novel.”

Easy Waters, “One Day in the Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” Conundrums: Stories of Law & Justice

Who gets to imagine a story beyond the one an institution keeps about them?

In “One Day in the Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” E returns to his desk after helping another person locate legal cases. There is more work waiting. There are always questions, documents, and decisions. But the next thing he writes belongs to a different project.

“Returning to the desk, I jot down some more notes for my novel.”

Some more notes. The phrase tells us the work has already begun. E is returning to something, carrying it forward a little at a time. His novel exists within the day before anyone else has read it.

Earlier, he has been reading a murder mystery. He observes, with a writer’s competitive confidence, that he might do as well as the people whose books he reads. The remark has humor in it. It also contains an ambition.

He wants to make fiction.

This matters in a story so occupied with the law. E spends much of his day reading accounts through which courts have interpreted people’s actions and determined their futures. A legal record has its own arrangements of character, motive, evidence, and consequence. He studies those arrangements because lives depend on them.

At the desk, he begins to make arrangements of his own.

A novelist chooses where to begin, whose consciousness to enter, what a reader will know, and when the reader will know it. Those decisions require work. An idea must become a scene. A voice has to hold. A detail earns its place through what it allows the reader to see.

The narrative does not show us the pages of E’s novel. It shows us his intention and the recurring act of attending to it. We should respect the limit of that view. We do not know what he has written. We know that he takes the writing seriously.

That seriousness can be easy for outside readers to overlook. Writing by people in prison is often approached with expectations about what it should disclose: testimony about confinement, evidence of change, an account of the offense, a lesson for someone else. Such work can be valuable. The writer may also want to invent a character, construct a mystery, or attempt a form for the pleasure and difficulty of making it.

An artistic life deserves room for those choices.

E’s novel is not presented as a reward for completing the other tasks. It happens among them. He makes notes, answers a question, retrieves a book, and returns to his own work. The interruptions become part of the rhythm through which the project must advance.

Many writers will recognize that rhythm. The conditions here give it particular weight. Privacy, quiet, materials, and control over time are limited. Even a brief return to the page can require persistence. The existence of the notes should prompt attention to those conditions as well as admiration for the person making them.

For educators and organizations supporting writing in prison, taking the artistic work seriously means offering more than encouragement. It means access to books, sustained discussion of craft, useful criticism, opportunities to revise, and ways to preserve a manuscript through the disruptions of institutional life.

It also means reading with care. A work of fiction deserves engagement with its language, structure, and imaginative decisions. The writer’s circumstances inform the work’s creation; they do not relieve a reader of the responsibility to consider what has been made.

The small phrase “some more” carries us toward a future the story leaves open. There may be another page, another revision, another return to the desk. Completion is uncertain. The undertaking is already real.

E is a reader and a jailhouse lawyer. In this moment he is also a novelist at work. The sentence gives that part of his life its place.

He jots down the notes. The story he is making can continue.

Join the Conversation

What would it mean to support writing in prison as an artistic practice?

About the Conundrums Quotations Project

CQ-044 explores a quotation from “One Day in the Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” in Easy Waters’s Conundrums: Stories of Law & Justice. The project reads individual lines closely to examine the larger questions of law, justice, memory, and the human spirit they open.

Justice, Literature & Memory — Delivered to Your Inbox

Essays from the archive and new writing on race, literature, history, incarceration, freedom, and the American criminal legal system.