Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Good Writing
“Just try to keep it moving without showing off”
In a 1999 US TV interview, Martin Amis hailed Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard as a master of prose writing, citing his “perfect pitch”.
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“It’s usually a musical expression,” Amis said, “but he has it in prose, more than other great popular writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Chandler. Page after page goes by — and this is not true even of Henry James and Conrad — where there are no kind of nasty little repetitions or rhymes or elbows or kneecaps sticking out. It’s a wonderfully smooth, continuous prose.”
He was right. I recently read ‘Earthly Powers’ by Anthony Burgess and was driven half-mad by his repetition of the phrase ‘venerean strabismus’ (misaligned eyes) which served mainly to demonstrate that he knew what it meant.
There is no such smugness in Leonard’s work. He used words as tools to shape character and story and could set a scene in a single sentence. He was also peerless when it came to dialogue — there would be no ‘Royale with cheese’ from Pulp Fiction without Dutch. We lost the great man in 2013 but his legacy lives on. Expect to see more TV and movie versions of his books in the years to come.
When confronted with Amis’s gushing praise, he was typically self-effacing. “I just try to keep it moving without showing off,” he said.
So with that in mind — and for those who are not already familiar with them — here are Leonard’s 10 Rules for Good Writing.
