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jonscott9 's review for:
Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing
by Elmore Leonard
This 3-star rating seems almost obligatory. Ugh, so Rolling Stone of me.
Be that as it may, this is an entertaining little jam of a book, 85 pages, with a charming, well-timed illustration or a blank every other page. (I can get behind that.)
Leonard is the author of crime/caper thrillers the likes of Out of Sight and Get Shorty, and plenty of his stuff's been filmed. This list is primarily for fiction writing, novels, but is well worth keeping in mind regardless of what you read and/or write.
His rules:
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues. ("They can be annoying, esp. a prologue following an introduction that comes after a forward.")
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. ("I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with 'she asseverated,' and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.")
4. Never use an advert to modify the verb "said." ("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.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. ("Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. ... I bet you don't skip dialogue.")
My fave's probably that last one. It immediately summoned to mind That Chapter in Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, an otherwise perfect read.
Leonard tags on one more rule, summarizing them all:
"IF IT SOUNDS LIKE WRITING, I REWRITE IT."
Brilliant.
"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."
I enjoy how he calls out a couple fellow writers by name. Ballsy. But you can do that when you're a success of his brand. He also name-drops all the right authors -- Hemingway, Steinbeck, Atwood, Wolfe, Proulx, and so on.
Be that as it may, this is an entertaining little jam of a book, 85 pages, with a charming, well-timed illustration or a blank every other page. (I can get behind that.)
Leonard is the author of crime/caper thrillers the likes of Out of Sight and Get Shorty, and plenty of his stuff's been filmed. This list is primarily for fiction writing, novels, but is well worth keeping in mind regardless of what you read and/or write.
His rules:
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues. ("They can be annoying, esp. a prologue following an introduction that comes after a forward.")
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. ("I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with 'she asseverated,' and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.")
4. Never use an advert to modify the verb "said." ("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.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. ("Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. ... I bet you don't skip dialogue.")
My fave's probably that last one. It immediately summoned to mind That Chapter in Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, an otherwise perfect read.
Leonard tags on one more rule, summarizing them all:
"IF IT SOUNDS LIKE WRITING, I REWRITE IT."
Brilliant.
"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."
I enjoy how he calls out a couple fellow writers by name. Ballsy. But you can do that when you're a success of his brand. He also name-drops all the right authors -- Hemingway, Steinbeck, Atwood, Wolfe, Proulx, and so on.