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Jun 14, 2024 · The most important rule: If it sounds like writing, rewrite it. Leonard ends Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writing with a single rule that sums up all the others: If it sounds like writing, rewrite it. This is pretty sound advice for when you’re editing. You want your prose to be immersive. If it reads like writing, it won’t be.
- Never open a book with weather.
- Avoid prologues.
- Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
- Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.
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.”.
- Never Open A Book with Weather.
- Avoid Prologues.
- Never Use A Verb Other Than "Said" to Carry Dialogue.
- Never Use An Adverb to Modify The Verb "Said" . . .
- Keep Your Exclamation Points Under Control.
- Never Use The Words "Suddenly" Or "All Hell Broke loose."
- Use Regional Dialect, Patois, sparingly.
- Avoid Detailed Descriptions of characters.
- Don't Go Into Great Detail Describing Places and things.
- Try to Leave Out The Part That Readers Tend to Skip.
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.
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...
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.
. . . 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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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:
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 does...
Elmore Leonard 10 Rules for Good Writing Elmore Leonard started out writing westerns, then turned his talents to crime fiction. One of the most popular and prolific writers of our time, he's written about two dozen novels, most of them bestsellers, such as Glitz, Get Shorty, Maximum Bob, and Rum Punch. Unlike most genre writers, however ...
Aug 29, 2013 · On August 20th, the world lost a great of the writing world, Elmore Leonard, who has influenced writers worldwide. An American novelist and screenwriter, his earliest novels, published in the 1950s, were Westerns, but Leonard went on to specialise in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Among […]
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Oct 10, 2023 · Any writing advice from Elmore Leonard though, terse or verbose, is worth the money, so I carried it to the counter. For those unfamiliar with the legendary writer’s name, you might be familiar ...
