Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

(Every writer should know and think about these rules. I don't agree with them 100%, but I'm probably in the 95% percent camp. It couldn't hurt readers to think about these rules, too. I especially agree with rule 4, "Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue." This is an annoying habit in genre fiction, a holdover from pulp writing.  I propose an adverb jihad.)

ELMORE'S RULES
These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

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.

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.
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. 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. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

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 to get 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 flavor 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, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

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.
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.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
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.
What Steinbeck did in “Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”
“Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

Word Mashups, Cut-ups and Plagiarism

The young German writer, Helene Hegemann, made the news recently because of her popular and largely plagiarized novel, "Axolotl Roadkill." Hegemann admits to using other writers’ words, but argues that by putting “all the material into a completely different and unique context” that the book is a legitimate work of art. In a way, she’s arguing that her technique is similar to what musicians do with remixes and mashups of other musician’s songs.

The arguments surrounding Hegemann’s novel aren’t new. One of the great mashup writers (right up there with Burroughs in my opinion) was my friend, Kathy Acker.

Kathy once told me that her early writing began with rewriting the stories of Victorian murderesses, but telling their stories the first person. By turning dark Victoriana into modern “autobiography,” complete with the art and personal politics of our time, she charged the stories with a new power, taking them out of the safe realm of history and putting the killers and their miserable lives in the seat right next to readers in their college dorms, hipster cafes and bars. She also mixed sections of real autobiography with her literary cut-ups, further blurring the line between pure art technique and genuine confessional.

William Burroughs is probably the most famous writer to mashup other writers’ texts by incorporating their words into his novels using what he called “cut-ups.” I won’t describe the technique, but let Burroughs tell you himself in a scene from a British documentary about his life. You can find the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NU3dIdqIBw

Two of my favorite Acker books are Great Expectations and Blood And Guts In High School. In the books she mixes autobiography and sexual politics with texts by and rewrites of Dickens, Melville and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

You might also like her science fiction novel, Empire of the Senseless. Even the title is Kathy’s brand of twisted “plagiarism,” a play on the title of the book Empire Of The Senses by Octave Mirbeau, best known for his novel, The Torture Garden. Mirbeau’s political satire and mix of violence, beauty and sexuality sets the tone for Empire of the Senseless, which take place in an ultra-violent post-apocalyptic Paris. Empire of the Senseless is part a twisted take on Huckleberry Finn and part Neuromancer. Gibson’s famous cyberpunk novel is the source of many of the ideas and attitudes for Empire of the Senseless. One of the novel’s two major voices is Abhor, a heavily modified woman, and the same mix of tech and female biology as Neuromancer’s Molly.

Kathy Acker’s work (and even Neuromancer, with its remixes of action movies, music, pulp literature and high art) is proof of the Ecclesiastes quote, “There is nothing new under the sun.” All the stories have already been told. All the words you’ll use have been used before. The value in the words Acker appropriated lies in what she did with them. Of course, not all literary mashups are equal, but neither are all novels. If you read science fiction and/or fantasy you might want to read the books and see a very different take on the material. If you want to be a writer in the twenty-first century, you need to read Kathy Acker. Even if you hate her work and reject her methods, you still need to read her. However much you like or dislike her novels, she will make you think differently about how books and words work.

Remembering to Forget

I found out that an old friend, someone I went to high school with in Houston, won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism last week. I haven’t thought about the guy in years. Hearing about him brought back a lot of memories of school and the years I lived in Texas, a place that exists for me mostly as snapshots, old Polaroids scattered across a bar room floor. In fact, a lot of my Texas memories are about bars. And the winding road through Memorial Park. Downtown late at night. Back then, the streets were so deserted they could have filmed the outdoor scenes from I am Legend there and no one would have noticed. The few longer and moving memories, the ones more like old home movies than still photos, are mostly of simple things. A long bike ride through the backcountry on a scorching summer afternoon with friends. We poured the last of the water from our canteens onto our shirts so the water would cool us as we rode. I remember walking through a frozen forest of spindly gray trees at dawn with my friend Andy and his father. My father was long dead so his dad would occasionally invite me along on father and son trips. That morning we were deer hunting or as I thought of it, “Wandering lost and freezing in the woods until I wanted to put the rifle in my mouth and blow some sunshine out the back of my head.”

For some reason, most of my memories of New York are in winter. I was born in Brooklyn and when I think about the place it’s always covered in white and usually in the early morning before most of the neighborhood is awake and the snow is an unbroken undulating slice of Antarctica dropped down on Sixth Avenue. One year a blizzard hit and the snow obliterated the cars and the first floors of all the brownstones in the neighborhood. You couldn’t leave your house unless you had access to the outside steps from the second floor. I remember a summer when the street was choked with floating bottles, paper and broken pieces of lumber as they were swept into the storm drains when freak monsoon rains hit. I seem to remember New York only in terms of mini-catastrophes that I could see from my bedroom window.

Texas was always a slightly alien place to me so when I think of it, it’s more like remembering Nepal or Thailand. Memories of New York feel like home, but they’re much older and I was much younger and I’m certain they have much less to do with who I am as an adult than my years in Texas.

Sometimes I wish that I could sort and categorize my memories for easy access with a chip implant on the back of my skull. A hardwired Excel spreadsheet that would allow me easy access to the exact the memory I wanted when I wanted it. Of course, having easy instant access to all of memories is probably the best way strip them of all meaning. Maybe our memories are most important because of their capacity to surprise us. I remember standing on the street in front of my mother’s house in Houston when a certain breeze carrying a certain floral scent hit me and I swear that for a split second I had been transported back in Chinatown in New York when I was six. My mother and I were going to a friend’s house. The streets were long and crowded and a lot of the stores in the neighborhood were out of business and covered in graffiti. What I remember most vividly were the old phone booths. They were bright red and, this being Chinatown, shaped like pagodas with curled dragon tails extending from the corners of their roofs. Then the breeze shifted and I was back in Houston.

If, in the end, we’re really the sum total of our memories I think it might be better if we didn’t hang on to them too tightly, but let them wander in and out of our consciousness the way cats will wander up to you, brush against your leg for a minute and then walk away. Later, the cat will return, sit on your lap and stay there all afternoon. Then it will disappear for hours, asleep in one of those secret places that only cats know about. If you try to hold a cat too tightly it will squirm way, so it’s best to let them come and go on their own, knowing that they’ll always return. In the long run, it's probably better to have memory cats in our heads rather than memory chips. The chips are more convenient, but cats are more elusive and surprising and I think that the more we know and learn, the more important it is that we can surprise ourselves with memories that remind us of who we really are.

Critics aka Write Your Own Damn Book

I have a crank theory that goes like this: If you’re going to be a book critic, you have to write and publish at least one book. I believe this for a simple reason: If you’re going to devote a hillock of your precious brain cells to giving thumbs up or down to other people’s work, you should have the balls to put yourself on the line.

It’s a special moment in a writer’s life the first time you read a carefully crafted review explaining how you, your book, all your previous and future books, your pets, your girlfriend and/or wife, your pickled punk collection, the shank you carved from grandma’s femur and your Jack Ruby novelty cheese grater are worthless shit and should be scraped off the planet with a white hot trowel. You forget good reviews in 10 minutes, but the rotten ones stick with you for years. Every critic should know the special joy of that feeling.

I admit I’m prejudiced. I’m a writer. It’s how I make my living. I’m on the writer’s side. And that doesn’t go just for writers I like. I’m on the side of writers whose work I hate. I’m on the side of writers I hate personally. I’m on the side of the most venial, money-grubbing bastard writers alive. I’m pretty much always on the writer’s side. Maybe not Hitler. He wrote one crappy book and then killed a lot of people. Fuck him.

These days I try to avoid reading most of my reviews, but when I stumble across a crap one I tend have the same response: Write your own damn book. And make it a good one. That's the best way to put any writer in his or her place.

The Wunderkammer Kiss Off

I think I’m a hoarder, though I like to think of it as compulsive archiving. Back in the 90s, before the web was a one-stop strip mall for the planet’s collective memory (and Id) I wrote two editions of The Covert Culture Sourcebook. They were catalogs to underground and hard-to-find books, music, movies, zines, sex toys, weapons, tech gear, etc. When each book was done, my office would be jammed floor to ceiling with boxes of this stuff. I kept most of it for years. I felt like the curator of a kind of PT Barnum wing of the Smithsonian. Even after two books, I still held on to the most interesting material and kept dozens of boxes in storage. However, after moving house a couple of times it became too much to cart around. Ninety-nine percent of it had to go. What hurt the most were the old print zines and obscure music, back in the days of what was known as Xerox Culture and Cassette Culture. All those old bands no one has ever heard of or will ever hear of. All the stories, art and batshit ravings of people so obsessed with sharing their worldview that they assembled the material, laid it out (sometimes with ancient Mac paste-up software and sometimes scotch taping post-it size scraps of paper to larger sheets) and hauled it down to Kinkos to run off a few dozen or few hundred copies.

Of course, there’s plenty of indy and underground culture spread out across the web, and there’s a thousand times the volume of material compared to the bearskin and obsidian knives world of the 80s and early 90s. But there was something sad and beautiful in all those print zines and plastic cassette. Someone had to run them off, pack them in Jiffy bags and haul them to the post office, pounds of them at a time.  I’m still sorry that I let that stuff go. I’ll always feel like I lost a little piece of our pre-digital crazy ass collective unconscious.

Goddam Novel Bullshit

I have Sandman Slim 3 worked out in my head and basically ready to go, but I can’t start writing yet. I don’t have a title or an opening paragraph. I don’t know why, but I can’t start writing a book without a title, even if I know I’ll change it at the end. And I can’t get past the title until I find the first paragraph. The voice and rhythm of those first hundred or so words sets the tone for the next hundred thousand. I’m stuck and will be able to find me beating my head against the wall for the next couple of days.

I might go with Aloha From Hell for a temp title. It’s an old Cramps song and has the right feel for what I want to do. Now all I need is an opening. I was thinking of “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” but I don’t know who Buck Mulligan is and what the hell is a “stairhead”? Fingers crossed that “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch” isn’t taken.

Vanishing Point

I suffer from chronic insomnia, which seems pretty common for writers and other manic-depressives. It’s not the worst ailment imaginable. My arms and hands work. My eyes work most of the time, though when the insomnia kicks into Perfect Storm mode, it can be hard to focus on individual words on the screen. The upside is that I get a lot of work done at night, when there are few distractions. The downside is that I’m out of sync with the world. This sometimes makes everyday human chores like grocery shopping or getting to the PO box to pick up packages more of an adventure than they should be.

I’ve always been a night person. As far back as I can remember, the strange solitude of night has always been where I’m most comfortable. In the dark, the edges of objects soften and merge into each other. Everything is possible. Night is one long all you can eat liminal buffet. Even dawn and the early morning are pleasant when they’re the end of your day instead of the beginning. I remember bright and transparent dawns driving along I-10 through New Mexico and Texas. Reverse Wizard of Oz moments, the world moving from back and white to brilliant colors.

In the desert, you can’t help but wonder about the few other cars you pass at those odd hours. Why have those people been driving all night through the heart of fuck-all? It feels like you’re all going somewhere and you’re all lost at the same time. Normal people don’t travel like this. They stay in motels, set alarms clocks and get wake-up calls. They don’t drive twelve, fifteen hours straight through two or three states. I’ve been known to drive thirty hours straight, popping pills and mainlining coffee. I don’t recommend this. When you finally get where you’re going, you’re a little crazy and completely disconnected from your body, what I call the Roadtrip Lobotomy. You walk funny and can’t feel theg round beneath your feet. Your back and eyes ache. You can understand the radio, but when people try to talk to you their words come out like a Burroughs cut-up. It’s not the worst feeling if your destination is somewhere dark and quiet, where you can lie down and remember how to be a person again.

Dawn driving isn’t as interesting these days. In San Francisco, half the goddam county is up before dawn and racing off to their terribly important jobs. The road to Silicon Valley is full of giants. The billionaire geniuses that built the 21st century. You can’t help but feel the weight of their importance, wealth and self-assurance when all you want is to feel the road, listen to the hum of your tires and see not nothing, just less. I need to get back to the desert. Not to camp, but to drive fast and straight and to not stop. I missed going to Trinity Site this month. I’ll try to get there in the Fall. Driving all night to wander across a blasted landscape of green-black radioactive glass sounds like the perfect vacation to me.