Elmore Leonard by mtkr used under CC BY-NC 2.0
Writers love to offer lists of rules for writing, especially if they’ve got a book to promote and a major newspaper offers them some free advertising. We’ve critiqued Vonnegut and Gaiman, and now it’s the late Elmore Leonard’s turn. Leonard mostly wrote westerns, crime fiction, and thrillers, which are a bit outside the traditional Mythcreants wheelhouse, but it’s important to branch out from time to time.*
1. The First Rule
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 than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
My first rule when writing a first rule about writing is that you shouldn’t include stereotypes about Indigenous people, to say nothing of the outdated nomenclature. Even if the rule’s substance is great, presentation like that will put people off.
So, how about this rule’s substance? It’s not great! Stories should open with conflict, as that’s what hooks readers. It’s true that a lot of conflict-free weather will make for a boring start, but weather isn’t unusually bad here. You can just as easily make a boring first chapter by focusing too much on terrain description or even on people who don’t have any meaningful conflict.
This rule also precludes using weather as your conflict. A storm or drought can make for excellent conflict, so long as you use better description than “a dark and stormy night.” Granted, there should also be people in this weather, as you want to introduce your protagonist as soon as possible, but that’s still starting the story with weather!
While we’re on the topic of conflict, any weather you start the story with should still have it, even if you’re really good at describing snow like this Lopez guy apparently is. On their own, skillful descriptions of weather can provide novelty, but adding conflict will also help you build tension, which is just as important.
Conclusion: Mostly useless.
2. The Second Rule
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.”
Someone must have told Leonard about my crusade against prologues, because this is a rule after my own heart. At least, the first part is. He’s right that prologues are often little more than backstory, and if that backstory is important, it can be established within the story itself. No need to have a special backstory section that’s isolated from the main story. Although, to be clear, it’s usually not a good idea to condense all of a character’s backstory into a flashback scene later in the story either. Backstory needs to be trickled in where it’s important for readers to know; otherwise, it’s difficult to keep track of.
But that’s only one of the many mistakes writers make with prologues. Another common one is to prop up a slow beginning by stuffing the prologue full of meaningless action. Or the prologue might be spent establishing an unnecessary narrative framing device. The list goes on, but the foundational issue is always the same: a prologue takes place before the story starts, and if the story hasn’t started yet, there’s no reason for the reader to care.
The second half of this rule is very weird. I’m sorry, Elmore, but a prologue doesn’t suddenly become good if the author includes some writing advice you agree with. Maybe that’s supposed to be a joke, but the first rule’s aside about a specific author seemed serious, so it’s hard to tell. The writing advice in question is also very bad, but that discussion will have to wait until we get to the rule that focuses on it.
Conclusion: Useful, if confusing.
3. The Third Rule
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.
This rule is on the right track, even if “never” is too strong a word to use here. Non-standard dialogue tags are usually a bad idea, largely because they’re intrusive. They interrupt the narrative’s flow and make you reinterpret a line you’ve already read. There are much better ways to get across how a character is speaking, in both the dialogue itself and the description around it. If you do that work, then an unusual dialogue tag is just repetitive.
New writers need to hear this because fancy dialogue tags are really tempting. It’s hard to properly communicate how a character is speaking, while fancy tags are easy to use. Why bother showing that a character is angry when you can just say they “raged”? Meanwhile, the costs are hidden: you need skill and experience to judge how badly a reader’s immersion will be broken or how the repetition of a fancy tag actually reduces the scene’s impact.
That said, there are situations where a tag other than “said” is called for, and new authors should be aware of those too. Those situations aren’t nearly as common as first draft manuscripts might lead you to believe, but they do happen. In particular, “asked” is often appropriate, or perhaps “shouted” to indicate volume. Thankfully, it’s much easier to learn the few exceptions than it is to make “said” the default in the first place.
Conclusion: Useful, with a caveat for absolutism.
4. The Fourth Rule
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”.
Whoa, ease up there, Elmore. No need to conflate a type of word you don’t like with sexual violence. Before that poor choice of words brought the mood crashing down, I was actually enjoying this rule, even if it is a bit repetitive with the previous one. What can I say? I love a good dialogue-tag joke like we’ve got in the first sentence here.
As for the adverbs, this is another situation where the advice is usually right, but it’s delivered in absolute terms that erase a lot of nuance. In the vast majority of cases, adding an -ly adverb to your dialogue tag is a bad idea for the same reason using fancy dialogue tags is a bad idea. There are much better ways to communicate how a character is speaking. Either adverbs won’t get the job done or they’ll be repetitive with other measures you take.
The parenthetical aside about using adverbs in other ways does make this advice more complicated. The term “adverb” applies to a huge swath of words in the English language, some of which are very useful and shouldn’t be discounted. New writers do tend to overuse them, but such a broad admonition isn’t helpful, even in the role of pushing back against bad tendencies.
Conclusion: Useful, but you have to pick out the bad bits.
5. The Fifth Rule
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.
With each rule, we slip further and further into the territory of good ideas that are stated badly. It’s true that, for writers, exclamation points are a sometimes food. In addition to indicating excitement, they emphasize a sentence as being of particular importance. Once you learn that, it’s tempting to emphasize everything, which of course only results in nothing being emphasized.
Even so, the numbers Leonard gives here are absurd. 100,000 words is a lot, even by the standards of epic fantasy doorstops. At this exchange rate, we’d have less than six exclamation points for all of The Fellowship of the Ring. I promise it’s okay to use more exclamation marks than that! How many more? I’m not sure, which is why I haven’t included exact numbers in any of my writing advice.
The numbers are what makes this rule worse than previous ones that also went too far in pursuit of a good idea. Absolute statements like “never use adverbs” aren’t very actionable, so it’s unlikely they’ll sabotage anyone too badly. But this rule gives you a rubric to judge how well you’re following it. A quick ctrl+f will tell you how many exclamation points are in the manuscript, making it more likely that Leonard’s fans might actually rob themselves of a useful tool.
Conclusion: Largely useless.
6. The Sixth Rule
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.
It increasingly feels like every rule starting with “never” could have been combined together to save us all some time – especially since this rule apparently doesn’t require explanation. Great. Unfortunately, critiquing it does require explanation, so here we go.
Inexperienced writers often deploy the word “suddenly” because they think it gives the impression of something happening quickly or without warning. They can be forgiven for thinking that, given the definition of “suddenly” in the dictionary, but the word doesn’t actually work that way. In fiction, if you want something to seem sudden, don’t add any warning that it’s about to happen. Adding the word “suddenly” doesn’t make something any more sudden than it already was. It can even have the opposite effect, as it adds another word the reader has to get past before something happens.
There’s a similar problem with “all hell broke loose.” On its own, the idiom isn’t very descriptive, so you’ll probably have to explain in what way hell broke loose. Once you’ve done that, the idiom is redundant. In most cases, cutting to the chase is better. Though, once in a while, idioms like this one can add some flair to your description, so eliminating them entirely is a reductive exercise.
Conclusion: Useful, if repetitive.
7. The Seventh Rule
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.
I wonder why this rule merits the more reserved “sparingly” rather than simply telling us to never use dialect. More than halfway through the list is a little late to discover the concept of nuance, but I’ll take what I can get, especially since Leonard is right! Writers should indeed be very cautious about spelling out dialects and accents in dialogue. His explanation is a bit out there, though.
According to this rule, spelling out a character’s French accent is an act of ultimate temptation. Soon you’ll be wrapped up in the seductive arms of writing “f” whenever an East Londoner uses a “th” sound. I suppose there are some writers who find that kind of thing alluring, but for most of us, the real reason not to spell out accents is that it’s very difficult to do so authentically, and the risks for failure are high.
Accents and dialects are complex, often with their own rules of grammar that are invisible to outsiders. To portray them properly, you need a lot of expertise. Watching a few Youtube videos isn’t going to cut it. Any mistakes will sound very silly, and they might play into harmful stereotypes. Asian Americans and African Americans in particular are often mocked for the ways their accents or dialects differ from standard English. That’s not something any good writer wants to be a part of.
Conclusion: Useful, but not for the reason Leonard thinks.
8. The Eighth Rule
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.
We were doing really well, and now we’ve crossed over into a bizarro world where up is down, cats live in peace with dogs, and you’re not supposed to describe your characters. What is happening?
I should clarify that describing your characters is good, actually. How much should you describe them? That depends on a lot of factors, but if you’re avoiding any “detailed descriptions,” then you probably need more. In general, character description scales with how important the character is and the story’s length. Background characters can be described in broad strokes, but the protagonist needs more detail.
Leonard’s example, Hills Like White Elephants, is a short story of less than 1,500 words. When you’re barely past the level of flash fiction, it makes sense to skimp on physical description. But most stories are much longer than that, and writers will be badly served by reducing their main characters to one or two hat-related observations.
Conclusion: Completely useless.
9. The Ninth Rule
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.
Well, we’ve already been told not to describe characters, so it’s only fair that locations get the same treatment. But hey, this time we’re told specifically to avoid “great” detail. I guess that’s something? Apparently there’s an exception for if you’re really good at describing scenery, which is super helpful as writers are famously good judges of their own skill level.
This rule gives no indication of how much description is too much. You just need to figure that out for yourself. Leonard could simply have written “don’t use too much description” and it would be just as helpful. If I sound a little annoyed, it’s only because I’m tired of advice that is little more than an admonition to do a good job.
Yes, it’s definitely possible to have too much environmental description – looking at you, Tolkien. Overloading the reader with descriptions of trees can certainly bring the action to a standstill, and that’s something authors should avoid. But it’s easy to go the other way as well, not giving readers enough description to ground them in the story. At that point, it feels like the plot takes place in a blank white void, which isn’t any better than the reverse extreme.
Conclusion: Absolutely useless.
10. The Tenth Rule
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.
You ever get to the end of an assignment and find you’ve run out of things to say, but there’s still half a page that needs to be filled out? That’s where we are in these rules. No one intentionally puts in sections they think the reader will skip, so telling them to remove such sections is a pointless exercise.
The only guidance this rule offers is to look for “thick” paragraphs. Double entendres aside, what exactly makes a paragraph count as thick? More than five lines? More than ten? Maybe there’s a definition in Leonard’s book, but here we get nothing.
A story can absolutely suffer from paragraphs that are too long or too many long paragraphs in a row. Variety is important in wordcraft as well as in plot, and too many sentences without a line break is just hard to read. But it takes skill and practice to figure out which paragraphs are too long. With this rule, confident writers will breeze past any problems in their manuscripts, while uncertain writers will second-guess themselves whenever a paragraph hits its second line.
Conclusion: Totally useless.
11. Secret Bonus Rule
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
This final rule doesn’t get a number, but it’s included at the end like a denouement, and it’s a real doozy. For the first time, I’m completely stumped. I have no idea what this means. Sure, dialogue can sometimes sound stilted and artificial, but how would written description sound like anything other than writing?
What’s it supposed to sound like, Elmore? An oral storytelling tradition? Should my writing sound like the horn section of a brass band? I can only imagine Leonard frantically rewriting every manuscript in a recursive loop as each fresh draft sounds more like writing than the one before.
Conclusion: Who even knows anymore? Reality is an illusion, the universe is a hologram, buy gold!
Five out of these eleven rules are at least somewhat useful. That’s better than Gaiman’s score, but Vonnegut is still the champion with a 50% usefulness rating. Perhaps one day we’ll find an author who can score as high as a C. At least Leonard’s rules are mostly craft focused, which gives us something to analyze instead of constantly repeating that process advice is highly subjective and depends on an individual author’s needs.
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I’d be a little more generous here. For instance, rule number ten – “thick paragraphs with too many words in them” is weird, but before that, I think this advice could be useful for many, though not everyone.
It’s true, as you often repeat, that you can’t REALLY put yourself in the shoes of a reader when you’re actually the writer. But you can still make an effort to look at your manuscript more like a third party would, and it need not be COMPLETELY futile, just because you can’t go all the way.
When you write, it’s easy to get too focused on what you think should be in the story because it’s necessary information for later, or you just love that part of your world and want to tell readers about it, etc. Sure, the Mythcreants advice would be to look through your manuscript for sections without conflict and either add conflict or cut all of these, and to ask questions whether this or that is necessary for the throughline, etc. But some people, like me, are fond of many stories that do wander a bit and do have scenes from time to time that have almost no conflict… It might be tempting to think, then, that if I’m writing a story that menders and sometimes lack conflict it’s because I write what I myself like to read.
And AT THIS POINT I think that for SOME people it could be helpful to go through your manuscript and think “is there anything in here that I would skim over if I was a reader, with no previous attachment to this world, these characters and my own purple prose?”
Also, I think rule number 11 could be useful for people who aren’t immediately stumped by it… ;-) I read it and immediately thought it refers to any writing that hinders immersement in the story, because it reminds you that “this is just a written story and nothing else”. It could do so for several reasons – stilted and unnatural dialogue, as you mention, is one way. Badly used clichéd descriptions is another. Describing things “in the wrong order” rather than the order in which the PoV character would naturally notice things is a third. Etc. There are tons of writing problems that have this effect.
Now, I think Mythcreants have a specific article about every single problem I can think of. But for a writer who reads this site, it might be useful to first go through the manuscript and think “does anything in here sound stilted/unnatural/too much like “typical writing” for immersion to occur?” Then, if you find that this happens in descriptions of new environments the character might find themselves in, go look for articles about that. If you find that it happens in dialogue, go look for dialogue articles. Etc.
A few of his rules boil down to “Don’t do this, unless you’re very good at it”
Which is extremely helpful advice as writers are *famously* good at judging their own skill level.
You can absolutely include weather in the hook so it makes sense.
“The whole situation arose because the storm made it impossible to deliver the package in time.” Don’t you want to know about the ‘situation’ and the ‘package’ now?
I’m 120% there for ‘don’t phonetically write accents or dialects.’ It’s probably a lot easier for a native English speaker, but every late-1800 and early-1900 story where the poorer half of the populace speaks in a phonetically described accent leaves me with a big, fat question mark over my head, because the combination of ‘it’s been about 100 years since half of those words were used that way’ and ‘what the heck are they actually trying to say with those not-words?’ is extremely hard to read for a non-native English speaker, even one on a high level, like me.
It’s also hard for native speakers! I’ve been stumped by more than a few attempts at dialect.
Ironically, the writing craft on these writing rules is terrible. Leonard doesn’t make things clear, rambles, belabors his point when he’s not failing to make it, and spends far too long on very specific examples.
Look at rule #1: five long sentences, including “yeah this one author gets a pass for some reason.” The rambling confuses and undercuts his point.
For comparison, Vonnegut’s rule #6:
“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”
You may not agree with it, but you will understand it. It’s simple, intuitive, and I don’t have to look up a story or author I might have never heard of.
Applying the same technique to Leonard’s rule #1, we get
“Never open a book with weather. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people.”
There, done in two short sentences, no “but that’s if it’s just for atmosphere, if you start with a character’s reaction to the weather, that’s okay” clutter or author I’ve never heard of who gets a pass.
Vonnegut is definitely the best one so far. I dream that one day we will find someone better, but it may never come to pass.
I looked up the ideas of Lester Dent that I vaguely recalled from somewhere, but that turned out to be a story structure (specifically for writing pulp adventures) and not writing rules.
So I’ve got a novel where Chapter 1 is spent watching our hero wake up and shower, Chapter 2 is spent watching him eat breakfast, Chapter 3 is the walk to school, and Chapter 4 is getting stuff from his locker and going through the halls to his first class. Hints of a plot will start when he eats lunch.
The paragraphs are short, our hero and his surroundings are never described, and the opening line is about a rooster crowing rather than the weather.
According to Leonard’s rules of writing, I’m good.
Yeah sounds good, print it.
First you better figure out if you’re the clone of one of those authors he mentions – if you are, you might need to describe every tree on their way to school!
Maybe Leonard’s rules against describing people, places, and things too much come from his crime/pulp genre background. His works are set in 20th century and he believes his audience will basically have a good idea of what he is talking about without richly detailed descriptions.
For speculative fiction writers, most of the audience, needs more detailed descriptions because we are encountering things and places that don’t exist. Although, you can argue that a lot of the tropes are so common that most speculative fiction readers know what an elven city is supposed to look like unless you are doing a deconstruction with elves living in an industrial slum rather than a glorious nature city of crystal.
The anti-description advice could also be because most authors who do very detailed description tend to use purpose prose and a lot of cliches. “His red hair was the color of flame and his eyes as green as emeralds” and stuff like that. So the anti-description advice could be seen as anti-purple prose/cliche advice for anybody who isn’t as naturalistic as Emile Zola.
Yeah, I was also thinking that some rules probably makes more sense if you use his own genre and time period as a background? My guess is that he’s got rule 1 because it was a fairly common problem in westerns, at the time he wrote these writing rules, that people tried to set the scene and the atmosphere by having long boring descriptions of scenery and weather before anything really happened in the story.
Interesting that he doesn’t like prologues, since I would say crime writing is one of the genres that can best get away with them.
Are you thinking of a first chapter where we see the victim get murdered before cutting to the protagonist investigator? Cause that’s an interesting situation.
I was thinking more of body discovering. But either way, it’s common enough to start outside the main investigative POV that I don’t think crime novels create false expectation or investment for the prologue character to be central to the story going forward. And/or crime readers are more forgiving of such things.
Of course they also introduce the *crime* and the crime will be central going forward. So maybe it’s down to how the genre baits its hooks.
(Now I put it like that, I wonder if this is related to how the prologues I’ve liked in spec-fic have all been short pieces of world-building without a character POV).
I was going to ask if this kind of thing is an exception to the ‘no prologues’ thing. For example, most crime TV shows open with either A) The last few minutes of the Victims life before they die, or B) Some random people going about their normal business before they stumble upon the body. The former case is a useful storytelling tool, allowing the audience to be privy to certain information Protag is not. The latter is less necessary, though I personally like the little slice-of-life-interrupted-by-random-horror vignettes that the technique creates.
See I wouldn’t actually classify those things as prologues, even though they are often labeled that way, because in most mystery stories, the crime itself is the story. In that scenario, the crime being committed is when the story starts, even if the protagonist isn’t there to witness it. As opposed to, say, showing a chapter from the victim’s regular life a week before they get murdered.
That doesn’t mean such cutaways are a good idea, necessarily. If the rest of your story is a close narrated, single POV, then it’s probably not worth breaking that convention in the first chapter. It also delays meeting the protagonist, which you don’t generally want to do. But it doesn’t have the problem inherent in prologues of taking place before the story actually starts.
For example: the novel Three Parts Dead (minor spoilers) starts with a “prologue” in which a secondary character witnesses his god die. The god’s death is the main mystery. Why did he die, who killed him, etc. So starting with it is actually starting when the story starts.
The novel is also told in third person omniscient, so focusing on secondary characters isn’t as much of a cost. Ironically, the next few chapters are unnecessary backstory for the protagonist, making them feel like the real prologue.
lol, that was a very namedroppy list of rules.
I like the way the first rule is basically, “Never do this thing. If you do it, don’t do it for the wrong reason. Also, it’s okay to do it if you’re good at it.” So much for “never”….
As someone mentioned above, Leonard was a pulp novelist, and these books were meant to be consumed with little thought or effort. With this in mind his last ‘bonus’ rule perhaps makes more sense.
He seems to be recommending that an aspiring Pulp-Fiction author doesn’t try to make their writing sound or look like ‘writing’, ie: laboured, high-falutin’, serious, ponderous. He favoured a down-to-earth, clear and fast paced style, considering it best for that genre. Quite right too.
His rules become more relevant in the context of his literary taste and times.
I enjoy your acerbic tone and dismissals, but perhaps they are not in all cases completely deserved.
One thing I hate about prologues in crime stories is when the author hides a vital clue in what’s supposed to be a prologue, leaving readers who skipped, or skimmed over, the prologue with no chance of working out the solution to the mystery.
In one book I read, the prologue was about a young couple being shown around a house they were going to buy, then the story started with a housewarming party. The wife (I think – it’s been years since I read it) turned up dead a couple of days later, and the guests at the party were the suspects – she’d been having an affair with one of them, giving a motive to her husband, the other man, and the other man’s wife, there was something about some dodgy business deal the dead woman’s husband had been mixed up in. The murder took place when the house was locked, so there was a whole plot thread about who could have had access to the spare keys.
The final solution was that the murderer was NONE of the suspects that the book had been about – but the estate agent who’d shown them around the house in the prologue! Based on a couple of vaguely flirtatious remarks he’d made, and the later discovery that the murdered wife had had an affair (and was therefore the sort of woman who had affairs) the reader was supposed to guess that she was having an affair with the estate agent, who, of course had plenty of opportunity to get a spare set of keys before the couple had even moved in!
Regarding rule 7 i’m trying to make a decission about the topic. In my book, my MC is talking through a translator to a congolesse warlord. They are talking in french, (i’ve decided to just tag in what languages are speaking as my MC will be talking to germans, russians, welsh…)
The question is, should i translate a term in congolesse or leave as is? My reasoning is that if the warlord said it that way instead in frech, the translator should keep it that way, even if he knows the meaning.
I’d say if you simply state that your characters are speaking in a language, translate the language completely – unless it’s a word which doesn’t exist in the language you’re writing in (‘Kummerspeck,’ for instance, has no English equivalent, even though you can describe what it means). It’s one thing if you use an endearment and want to keep it in its original language, but every regular word should be translated.
For those who are curious, asseverate means “to declare or state solemnly or emphatically.”
You are probably not curious, but I couldn’t read on until I’d googled it. So I guess Elmore Leonard was good for something.