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

[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.