Elmore Leonard’s 11 Rules For Writing Fiction

Discover Elmore Leonard’s 11 rules for writing fiction and learn how to write sharp dialogue, build characters, and keep readers hooked.

Elmore Leonard was an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. He was born on 11 October 1925 and died on 20 August 2013.

Leonard began his writing career with Westerns before turning to crime fiction and thrillers. His best-known works include Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Pronto: A Novel, 52 Pickup, and Rum Punch, which was adapted into the film Jackie Brown. His collection, The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, celebrates his early work in the western genre.

Leonard received several honours for his writing, including the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award in 1992.

He was best known for his fast-paced stories about criminals, which combined sharp humour, detailed characters, and realistic dialogue. His distinctive style influenced generations of crime writers and is reflected in his 11 rules for writing fiction.

Elmore Leonard’s 11 Rules For Writing Fiction

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 leap ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. 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 OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ‘I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.’
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’. 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 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’.
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.
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.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 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 flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
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.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
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.
11. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

The Last Word

Elmore Leonard’s writing rules offer practical advice for creating engaging fiction. His focus on realistic dialogue, believable characters, and tight storytelling shows how less can often be more. Study his 11 rules to sharpen your writing.

Source for Image: Peabody Awards, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Source for rules

by Amanda Patterson

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