Queen’s English Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing
If you are a fan of Elmore Leonard as I am, you may enjoy this excerpt from his ten “rules” of writing; he says:
“Easy on the adverbs, exclamation points and especially hooptedoodle!
“1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
“2. Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreward. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. (Leonard approves the prologue in John Steinbeck’s ‘Sweet Thursday’ which is an exception. In it Steinbeck says, ‘sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle [but] I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.’)
“3. Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But ‘said’ is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ‘she asseverated,’ and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
“4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said’ . . . he admonished gravely.’ To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ‘full of rape and adverbs.’
“5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
“6. Never use the words ‘suddenly’ or ‘all hell broke loose.’ I have noticed that writers who use ‘suddenly’ tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
“7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop.
“8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. In Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ what do the ‘American and the girl with him’ look like? ‘She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.’ That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
“9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
“10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: think paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.”
In summary, he says, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. . . I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. . .”
Now, get out there and write your novel (or at the very least get your hands on one of Leonard’s novels; especially good are the unabridged audio versions).
— Ken Butera