Elmore Leonard's Rules

            When I was in Professional Writing graduate school at USC, one of my professors said, “Elmore Leonard is to literature what Las Vegas is to society.”  Clearly, he was not a fan.

            Elmore Leonard carved out a huge following in bestselling crime fiction.  And, while popular authors do not always please the literary crowd, you have to give them credit for knowing how to craft a story that will sell.  Elmore Leonard recently passed away, but left a large body of work, and some pretty good advice for other writers.  Today, I thought I’d share his List of Ten* with you:

     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.

     Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

     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.

            And then he wrote, “My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.  If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

            And that last suggestion—Number Eleven, really-- is the one I most want you to heed.  Writing should flow, should captivate the reader, and should never reveal your effort.  You may have worked on a line for hours, days, weeks—but the reader should never see your sweat.  When writing sounds forced, overly formal, pedantic, or unnatural, scrap it.  Go back and start over.  Don’t ever let it sound like writing.

 * Excerpted from the New York Times article, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle”