more absolutes. I hate absolutes

[erastes]

I guess they'll put on my gravestone "never say never".  (Actually - if anyone's listening. I want one word. "Tanstaafl")

I've never heard of Elmore Leonard but I'm sure someone has, but these are his "rules" for writing.

I hate rules for writing    

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.
 
This is rather clever - as he covers himself by back tracking and saying "well it's ok if you don't go on about it." Weather is essential, and why the hell not? Obviously no-one would be as mad as Thomas Hardy to describe a moorland for two pages, but if my protag is outside, then yes I'd like to know how the weather is, thank you. Perhaps it's because I'm English.  It's all to do with atmosphere.  But maybe that little thing is out of fashion too.  And if you are "leafing ahead to look for people" then stop reading books with words - get a comic instead.

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.

crap. pure unadulterated crap.  A prologue is NOT backstory, not necessarily. The best kind of prologue has (seemingly) no relevance to the first chapter and will only become relevant towards the end.  Although Pratchett doesn't name his chapters, he writes the BEST prologues.  Again, sometimes they can be the best kind of teaser, and another way to invoke that most dreadful of sins. Atmosphere.

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.

Oh puhleeze.  I agree that Dumbledore "ejaculating" to Harry was slightly over the top, but how fucking BORING would it be if all we got was "said."  VERY. That's how.

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."

Now I don't get this.  Is he saying that one shouldn't say "he said gravely" or "he admonished gravely." As he's already said that "He admonished" is not allowed, and should in fact be "He said" then I'll have to go with the former.  Sometimes - and I mean sometimes (I agree that every single verb with an adverb is nauseating, (but still books are sold with these things in)) you can't avoid it.  Why do adverbs exist if they can't be used?  Less is often more, but you can't always use "he said" and get the full meaning out.  There's a world of difference to "he moved steathily" to "he moved"

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.

So what do you do when your character is shouting?  or are all your characters supposed to be on Mogadon? 

Let's see. (incorporating his earlier rules, too)

Losing his temper with the servants who were attempting to fit his sword, he yelled, "Get out! I'll finish it myself!" The footmen fled.

or

Losing his temper with the servants who were attempting to fit his sword, he said, "Get out. I'll finish it myself." The footmen fled.

Comments? which one do you prefer? 

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.

I agree with suddenly. I've found, from betaing, that people use suddenly and merely a lot, but "all hell broke loose" is just a cliche and I don't understand why he lumps it together with suddenly. I'm not fond of cliches, but they can (and have to be) used at times.  Just use them sparingly.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. (and use commas, sparingly, too, : Erastes)

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.

as much as I loathe Hagrid's accent - a prime point of the dialect being killed for ever, please never tell Hardy and many others of this.  If you can't write dialect convincingly - don't do it. If you can - and Hardy COULD -  then do.  And I disagree with his point about Proulx. I haven't read the piece he mentions but Brokeback is written in dialect, quite unlike anything I'd seen before.

"Aguirre got no right a make me do this."

"You want a switch?" said Ennis. "I wouldn't mind herdin. I wouldn't mind sleepin out there."

"That ain't the point. Point is, we both should be in this camp. And that goddam pup tent smells like cat piss or worse."

"Wouldn't mind bein out there.Tell you what, you got a get up a dozen times in the night out there over them coyotes. Happy to switch but give you warnin I can't cook worth a shit.

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.

Again, it's all relative, imho.  It depends what you are writing.  It depends on what you think your readers want to see.  I personally want to know that (for instance) Harry has scruffy black hair, green eyes, Ron has red hair, a long nose and freckles etc etc.  My mental picture is nothing like either the illustrations or the films, but I wouldn't have a mental image if all I knew of Harry was him taking his hat off.  If you are a Person's POV either deep third or first, that character will notice the appearance of the other person - after all everyone's perceptions of everyone else are based on appearance!  Most definitely in sci-fi, or romance you NEED to know what your character looks like. 

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.

I partially agree with this.  If you are in a scene and suddenly you get a full on description of what's on the breakfast table with a list of foods a mile long (as I recently encountered in a novel I'm critting) then it pulls you out of the story. The flow is, as he says, the important bit.  It doesn't matter that there are eggs and bacon and toast and kidneys and porridge when the main action is going on around the table not on it.  However, I recently read a perfect little scene where a  character poured a glass of brandy for himself and his companion, and the detail and the break in the flow worked perfectly - because the character was doing exactly that - using the excuse to go to get a brandy rather than to continue his conversation for a moment.

As for description - it has to do with relevance. What would someone like Miss Haverham be - and her house and her surrounding be without a long description of her house and her wedding feast? 

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.

I bet I do, if it's pointless.  What I tend to skip is "hard science" in a book.  However I wouldn't want ANYONE to take it out just because I'm too thick to understand it. 

I can't comment more on this "rule" because the phrase "too many words" makes me want to brain this man with a copy of Janet and John do Tolstoy.  "See Russia.  See Napoleon invade Russia.  See many characters. They have many names.  See the Russians fight. See the French freeze. see Moscow burn.  Burn Moscow Burn."

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

And I quote from Neil Gaiman's Blog today "Remember that none of the rules you've been told apply when it's just you and a blank sheet of paper. "

Right on.

Comments

[fleshdress.livejournal.com]

I find Elmore Leonard quite an entertaining writer, nothing fantastic but not absolute piffle either. He writes crime generally, I think, but a certain type of crime novel.

I don't think any Points for Writing can be taken as absolutes. I disagree with quite a few of his, but equally, I had to pause and consider each one, holding it up to my own work and seeing if there was anything I could take from it. I found the list interesting in that respect, but I also found your response to it interesting too. Easily pleased, I guess. :)

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Ah - crime, yes, well, that makes sense. Although Chandler was a great one for description and no-one complained much about that.

As I say, I just dislike anyone who says "thou shalt" or "shalt not"

I'd be sitting there glaring at Moses going "Sez who?"

*G*

i prefer "Get out!"

[dubaiyan.livejournal.com]

Those rules say more about EL's genre than writing as a whole methinks...[not being pejorative about EL, just saying]

Re: i prefer "Get out!"

[erastes.livejournal.com]

It makes little sense without the exclamation points, i think.

I didn't know he wrote crime, but then I don't read any of that genre except for Chandler and Damon Runyon....

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

Elmore Leonard writes hard-boiled crime fiction -- he's quite well-known in those circles.
Not my kind of storyteller at all, but he's won awards and is a long-time author in the field.

Now, I do agree with some of what he says, but not all. For example, I avoid most synonyms for "said" unless I really need them (sometimes someone's gotta shout or whisper or sing or scream... ) but I subscribe to the theory that people skip over "said" the same way they skip over "the" -- it's boring, but it's also not going to pull the reader out of the story and wondering what the heck someone "ejacuated". :-) But that's ME. I don't expect everyone to follow that. (Unless I'm copyediting them. Then I get grumpy. But that's paid work, so ...)

But again, and always, the rules depend on what you want to achieve in your writing -- do you want to look brilliant and have everyone admire your way with words? Do you want to tell a story and not get in the way? Do you value lapidary prose? Do you want to be the next Hemingway? Do you want your writing to mimic the sound of the era you're setting the story in? Etc. So no rule is going to be "one size fits all".

[reddwarfer.livejournal.com]

If there were any hard and fast rules of writing, disregarding grammar for the moment, then there wouldn't be writers publishing these books all of the time.

Truth is, almost any writer can use the worst of writing sins and have it work if they are good enough.

I do like the idea of not describing characters too much, because it's something that is overused in fanfic in general, where you have a five paragraph diatrabe on the colour of everyone's hair and eyes.

[kenazfiction.livejournal.com]

Wow. According to Elmore Leonard, I should just pack it in.

Self-important blowhard.

I've only read a couple of his books and they're just not my cuppa (hard-boiled crime stuff, with some humor), and clearly he applies most of his rules pretty consistently to his own work, but I think he needs to retitle this as "Rules for Writing Like Elmore Leonard."

Maybe if I were writing straightforward contemporary American fiction, these rules would serve as reasonable guidelines, but for anyone trying to write genre fic, fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism, or anything beyond the narrow confines of contemporary American fiction, these rule are at best useless and at worst will kill the soul of a story.

Try and imagine Lord of the Rings without weather, or description, or adverbs. The whole damn thing would be 100 pages long!

[irreparable.livejournal.com]

I was trying to think of a coherent way to put this, but you said it far better than I could.

[julesjones]

Thing is, most of his rules work well as *guidelines* -- they're things you should be thinking about. But as absolutes they're rubbish. And that's the problem with an awful lot of these "how to write" articles. They take things that are useful guidelines for some writers some of the time, and turn them into Thou Shalt lists for all writers.

The rasfc way of dealing with this sort of thing is to pointedly quote Kipling at anyone trying to lay down absolute rules.

"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
"And-every-single-one-of-them-is-right!"

[themostepotente.livejournal.com]

Elmore Leonard wrote 'Get Shorty.' They made that into a movie with John Travolta.

Personally, I think every writer should do what works best for them. I disagree strongly with rules #3 and #4.

Who wants to read nothing but 'said' throughout? Ugh. And I'm the queen of adverbs. I'm sure you've noticed that while betaing.

[rwday.livejournal.com]

Absolutes are rarely good things. Every writer is different, and every book is different. I guess what lists like this might be good for is to make us think about our writing, to consider these issues and make our own decisions.

[semioticwarrior.livejournal.com]

I've only read one book by Leonard. I didn't care for it. I didn't get a sense of place, nor did I really care what happened to the characters.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I find all writing rules to be useful when applied like cayenne pepper:
a little works, too much kills the dish.

When your 12 year old says "there are too many adverbs in this book," (HP& the Order of the Phoenix) there are probably too many adverbs.

Said is a perfectly good word. It is invisible, like character names. But every now and then a character needs to suggest or hint or tease or protest or hiss.

And I don't want a page long description of a character that reads like an RPG sheet. I want a taste for what he looks like, not his life story or a count of hairs in his beard.
"Passers-by saw a tall, thin man, his long reddish-brown hair tied back in a green velvet bow, dressed in a coat and breeches that--while not the height of fashion--were at least clean and neat. Observers, mostly ladies from behind their fans and under the edges of parasols, could watch him amble from shop window to booth, his sharp green-brown eyes above a sharper nose and both taking in the morning and the life of the city."

I agree on exclamation points. A few here and there are fine. One on every page gives a false sense of urgency and drama. And if you're clumping them together "!!!!!!" you have a problem. (but even clumping workes, if one character is prone to it in zir writing.) (I used four on a page once, but that's because they were shouting between ships and tempers were running very very high)

And yes, keep the dialect sparing. Give us the flavor, the rhythm of the words and the choices. I put down Huckleberry Finn because of too much dialect. Because if you's gwine ta go on and on lahk Miz Mitchell do in Gone wid de win', I's gwine to putcher book raht daown.

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

Argh. Just argh. I wonder if they keep to their own rules, and if people actually read + like their books if they do.

[lyras.livejournal.com]

I prefer Orwell's suggestions, especially no. 6:

"One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

These strike me as very sensible - with the caveat: you can break any of these rules, but you must know what you are doing.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

I like Orwell's rules better too.
I agree that EL's rules will help you write more like him. He seems to have been heavily inflicted (sic) by Hemingway. I have read a couple of his books. He doesn't write rainy gritty gray Hammet-style hardboileds at all. (Those would be more atmospheric.)
He writes minimalist slangy disillusioned Florideans apparently left over from the fallout of Miami Vice. He manages it in an impressively shorthand manner, whbich is an accomplishment by itself. He can make a bright sherbet-colored stucco exterior sound like the most depressing dump you've ever seen. He does some interesting things in recognizing new stereotypes. The fact none of us liike them is almost beside the point; it's something like watching a car wreck.
That probably says more about his style than anything else I could say.