Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.Ĩ You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. This latter means: there's no free lunch. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.ħ You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. Pain is distracting.Ħ Hold the reader's attention. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.Ĥ If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.ĥ Do back exercises. Therefore: take two pencils.Ģ If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.ģ Take something to write on. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)ġ Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.Įlmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing is published next month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.ġ Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).Ģ Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no inessential words can every essential word be made to count.ģ You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.ġ0 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. 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.ĩ Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.Ĩ Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.ħ Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. This rule doesn't require an explanation. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.Ħ Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".ĥ Keep your exclamation points under control. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.Ĥ Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said". But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". The line of dialogue belongs to the character the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."ģ Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. 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. 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. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. 2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword.
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