Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing [Annotated]

Excellent!!

 

I binged on Elmore Leonard around 1992 or 1993, maybe that's the problem -- too much in a short period. Got sick of him, never read him again. Got tired of his "great dialogue," it seemed to get in the way. I think "Freaky Deaky" did me in. It seemed he often violated his Rule 7. (Use Regional Dialect, Patois, Sparingly.) But like the rest of us, Elmore Leonard probably hasn't been preserved in amber for 15 years. Maybe he's changed his mind about a few things.

 

What you are about to read is a story.​

It was a dark and stormy night.

"They's a rain a-comin'," the child whispered lispingly in the clotted patois of the Gulf lowlands.

"Ye're aye right, sonny!!" bellowed his father gravely.

Suddenly, all hell broke loose!

The father - a tall, sallow Scot with green eyes (one each on either side of a sharp, narrow nose set between angular freckled cheekbones) and red hair on his head, brows, lashes, and beard, had very large ears indeed, and the wide, size 13 feet of a native Highlander, to say nothing of the long, strong, slender hands of the professional zitherist he was - grimaced. His face, a pinched rictus of sudden fear at the breaking loose of hell, was nicely set off by the three-button two-piece suit of gray glengary flannel he had donned that morning, along with a proper pinpoint oxford shirt buttoned down at the collar in stark white Egyptian cotton, to better emphasize the rich aubergine of the four-in-hand Shantung silk tie he'd chosen for himself, which itself was set off by a perfect pocket square of vermillion brocade. His shoes, thick-vamped cap-toed bluchers in cordovan from Church's of London, gleamed richly in the deadly firelight.

But again, all hell was breaking loose.

The room in which they both stood was a rectangular cube. Six-sided, it was thus defined at its outermost boundaries by four walls (one for each ordinal compass point), a floor and a ceiling. The length of the room was slightly greater than its width, which accounts for its designation as a rectangular cube, rather than a cube equal on each plane, which would of course be a cube most accurately described then as square. The ceiling was ten feet above the floor; the floor some ten feet below the ceiling as the crow flies. There were four windows. Confusingly, there wasn't a window set into each of the four walls, as a reasonable person might expect, but rather one wall had two windows, another had one window, and yet another had but one as well. Thus were the four windows distributed across only three walls. This left one wall windowless.

This wall held instead a door. It was neither fully opened, nor fully closed. It might be said that it was ajar.

Across from that door was a table. The table, its legs turned in the French Empire style but with a polished top inlaid with rococo scrollery more in the Venetian manner, was not important.

Hell continued breaking loose.

The wind howled and the rain came down.

"Aye, boy! Wha's happened? All hell's broke loose a-sudden!" shouted the father imploringly.

"Cain't rightly say, Pa," drawled the youngster unctuously. "They's left out the parts that folks doan read!"

 

On the sheer brilliance of this post alone, jgmacg, I think you might make at least 2nd team All-Alma this season. At the very least.

 

yes, that was absolutely magnificent.

 

I fucking bow to thee.

 

jgmacg, that really is goddamn wonderful.

 

Classic, sir.

 

That strikes me as very British, as if I'm reading something Monty Python or Douglas Adams wrote. I especially loved that the table was unimportant.
I honestly would read a novel written like that.

 

If only Snoopy could have followed "It's a dark and stormy night." with something like that...

 

Bulwer-Lytton would slash his wrists, enviously.

 

Frank R. is right in that Leonard DOES use a lot of dialect or patois. But Leonard does it so well.

On the other hand, I would take one step further the advice on exclamation points. I very rarely see the need for them. Maybe once a year per staff writer would be right?