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The 10 Rules for Writing
Elmore Leonard
These are rules I’ve picked up along
the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing
a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s
taking place in the story. If you have a facility for
language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases
you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can
skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
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. The reader is apt to leaf ahead
looking for people. There are exceptions. 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 foreword. But these are
ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is
backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s ”Sweet
Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in
the book makes the point of what my rules are all about.
He says: ”I like a lot of talk in a book and I
don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy
that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what
he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out
what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like
some description but not too much of that. . . .
Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of
hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or
sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I
wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. 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.”
This rule doesn’t require an explanation. 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. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the
flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories
”Close Range.”
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. 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 or write landscapes in the style of Jim
Harrison. 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.
And finally:
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: thick 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.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
11. If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. 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. (Joseph
Conrad said something about words getting in the way of
what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of
a particular character — the one whose view best
brings the scene to life — I’m able to
concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you
who they are and how they feel about what they see and
what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in ”Sweet Thursday” was
title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of
what they cover. ”Whom the Gods Love They Drive
Nuts” is one, ”Lousy Wednesday” another.
The third chapter is titled ”Hooptedoodle 1”
and the 38th chapter ”Hooptedoodle 2” as
warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying:
”Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights
of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the
way of the story. Skip them if you want.”
”Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was
just beginning to be published, and I’ve never
forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.
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THIS WEEK'S
WRITER'S QUOTE:
"Writing is the only thing that,
when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something
else." Gloria Steinem
