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Elmore Leonard RIP - 10 rules for writing
In honor of Elmore Leonard who died today - 10 rules for writing a thriller
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
Almost half of them are the opposite to Fleming
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
Almost half of them are the opposite to Fleming
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Comments
@Dragonpol-He was 87. I don't think he would have been any good as a Bond writer. His style was way too different from Fleming's, his universe and characters too. Leonard was not about larger than life plots and larger than life villains, but about low life thugs and small-time, badly coordinated, badly conceived crimes that were still destructive.
Sorry, @Ludovico. Please forgive my general ignorance regarding Elmore Leonard but I am new to him.
That's ok.;-) Anyway, you'll see when you read him, he is very different from Fleming. The 10 rules Perdogg listed I wouldn't follow religiously, but they certainly worked for Leonard.
Every writer will have his/her own rules when it comes to writing. It's whatever work best for them.
Making these rules pretty much useless to other writers as they are mostly non-transferable then?
I´m proud to say I have all of his novels up in my shelf. There is no better investment!
RIP Elmore! Thanks for all the immensely good times I had and that I am still happily looking forward to with one of your novels!
He wrote all of his novels with a pen. No computer or even typewriter.
I was now and then thinking about the idea of Leonard writing Bond. I guess it would have been a stunning novel, but no Bond novel ;-). For my taste, he was the best writer since Hammett and Chandler, and I´m not just thinking crime. But you sure have to dig his style in order to like him, he´s very unique.
I would tend to say so, yes. It´s a bit like AC/DC, at first sight it looks terribly easy, but those who try mostly fail. Like anyone trying to write like Fleming so far miserably failed. I think those rules are only a small part of the reason for Leonard´s quality of writing.
I wouldn't say this. I think Leonard's rules work beautifully for crime fiction in general. Maybe one should say the rules should be what works best for the reader. What is admirable with Leonard is his efficiency: a few bits of dialogues are enough for you to picture the character, his physical presence, his mannerism, his behavior, his personality, etc.
I would like to add that Elmore Leonard, while mostly incorporating crime in his stories, had more love and heart in his books than most writers on the planet (not that I read them all), regardless of what they wrote about.
And let's not forget the rule he used to sum them up: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Yet those rules of his that you highlight there, @boldfinger - "8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things" -are the antithesis of what Ian Fleming did with his James Bond novels and short stories, so perhaps I was wrong to link him with the future of the James Bond continuation?
This also sounds like how John Gardner wrote his Bond novels and indeed his own novels - he would take a character or situation and write the novel and its plot from that beginning, which I believe is quite an odd way for an author to write a book, but it seemed to work for him.
Leonard was the king of cool. I doubt he would have properly portrayed an Englishman, but suave guys getting girls, shooting baddies and saying cool things were never written better. And make no mistake, Leonard doesn´t mean not to portray characters or locations, quite the opposite in fact. He had an amazing talent to make people and places come alive with very few words.
I think it is because in many ways Ian Fleming was a XIXth century writer, with long, detailed descriptions, larger than life villains,, romantic hero, etc.