Elmore Leonard’s 11 Rules For Writing Fiction

Elmore Leonard’s 11 Rules For Writing Fiction

Writers Write is a resource for writers. In this post, we’ve included Elmore Leonard’s 11 rules for writing fiction.

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

He started writing westerns, but went on to specialise in crime fiction and thrillers, many of which were adapted for film.

His best-known works are Get ShortyOut of Sight, and Rum Punch, which was filmed as Jackie Brown. He was born 11 October 1925 and died 20 August 2013. He won the 1992 Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Mystery Writers of America.

He was well known for creating funny, detailed, well-paced stories featuring criminals. He was also known for writing incredibly realistic dialogue.

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.

Source for image: Peabody Awards, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elmore_Leonard.jpg

Source for rules

 by Amanda Patterson

If you enjoyed this, you will love:

  1. 10 Things William Faulkner Had To Say About Writing
  2. Cheryl Strayed’s Advice For Beginner Writers
  3. Jeanette Winterson’s 10 Rules For Writing
  4. Annie Proulx’s 5 Rules For Good Writing
  5. Writing Advice From The World’s Most Famous Authors

TIP: If you want help writing a book, buy The Novel Writing Exercises Workbook.

Posted on: 11th October 2018
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