Note: Elmore Leonard, the crime writer who gave us Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, and Glitz, died at his home in Bloom­field Vil­lage, Michi­gan. He was 87. If you nev­er had a chance to read Leonard, you can start with “Ice Man,” a 2012 sto­ry that appeared in The Atlantic. It’s free online. You can also get a feel for his writ­ing by revis­it­ing a post writ­ten here by Mike Springer last year. It gives an overview of Leonard’s tips for aspir­ing writ­ers. And, in so doing, it pro­vides valu­able insight into how Leonard approached his craft. Elmore Leonard’s Ulti­mate Guide for Would-Be Writ­ers is reprint­ed in full below.

“If it sounds like writ­ing,” says Elmore Leonard, “I rewrite it.”

Leonard’s writ­ing sounds the way peo­ple talk. It rings true. In nov­els like Get Shorty, Rum Punch and Out of Sight, Leonard has estab­lished him­self as a mas­ter styl­ist, and while his char­ac­ters may be lowlifes, his books are received and admired in the high­est cir­cles. In 1998 Mar­tin Amis recalled vis­it­ing Saul Bel­low and see­ing Leonard’s books on the old man’s shelves. “Bel­low and I agreed,” said Amis, “that for an absolute­ly reli­able and unstint­ing infu­sion of nar­ra­tive plea­sure in a prose mirac­u­lous­ly purged of all false qual­i­ties, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard.”

In 2006 Leonard appeared on BBC Two’s The Cul­ture Show to talk about the craft of writ­ing and give some advice to aspir­ing authors. In the pro­gram, shown above, Leonard talks about his deep appre­ci­a­tion of Ernest Hem­ing­way’s work in gen­er­al, and about his par­tic­u­lar debt to the 1970 crime nov­el The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Hig­gins. While explain­ing his approach, Leonard jots down three tips:

• “You have to lis­ten to your char­ac­ters.”
• “Don’t wor­ry about what your moth­er thinks of your lan­guage.”
• “Try to get a rhythm.”

“I always refer to style as sound,” says Leonard. “The sound of the writ­ing.” Some of Leonard’s sug­ges­tions appeared in a 2001 New York Times arti­cle that became the basis of his 2007 book, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writ­ing. Here are those rules in out­line form:

You can read more from Leonard on his rules in the 2001 Times arti­cle. And you can read his new short sto­ry, “Ice Man,” in The Atlantic.

The Celebri­ty Lec­ture Series was estab­lished at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty in 1988, and it has “fea­tured some of the most illus­tri­ous schol­ars, crit­ics, nov­el­ists, poets, and cre­ative artists of our time.” Now, thanks to a spe­cial online archive, you can revis­it these lec­tures pre­sent­ed by the likes of Amy Tan, Arthur Miller, Joyce Car­ol Oates, Kurt Von­negut, Jr., Mar­garet Atwood, Maya Angelou, Nor­man Mail­er, Paul Ther­oux, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Susan Son­tag, Tom Wolfe, Car­los Fuentes, August Wil­son, E.L. Doc­torow, Edward Albee, Isabel Allende, Gar­ry Wills, Jane Smi­ley, John Irv­ing, John Updike and Joseph Heller. Just click on any of the links above and you can stream the audio lec­tures for free online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

7 Nobel Speech­es by 7 Great Writ­ers: Hem­ing­way, Faulkn­er, and More

The New Yorker’s Fic­tion Pod­cast: Where Great Writ­ers Read Sto­ries by Great Writ­ers

Six Post­cards From Famous Writ­ers: Hem­ing­way, Kaf­ka, Ker­ouac & More

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

Joyce Car­ol Oates is often described as Amer­i­ca’s fore­most woman of let­ters. Since 1963 she has pub­lished more than 50 nov­els and a great many short sto­ries, plays, essays, poems and chil­dren’s sto­ries — all of unusu­al­ly high qual­i­ty. Her pro­duc­tiv­i­ty has been leg­endary, almost from the start. When her for­mer Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty class­mate Robert Phillips inter­viewed Oates for the Paris Review in 1978, he recount­ed a rumor that cir­cu­lat­ed cam­pus about how she would fin­ish a nov­el, turn it over, and begin com­pos­ing anoth­er one on the oth­er side–only to throw the man­u­script away when both sides were cov­ered and begin again. Oates did­n’t deny the rumor. “I began writ­ing in high school,” she said, “con­scious­ly train­ing myself by writ­ing nov­el after nov­el and always throw­ing them out when I com­plet­ed them.” But sheer vol­ume was nev­er the point, as Oates told Phillips:

Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is a rel­a­tive mat­ter. And it’s real­ly insignif­i­cant: What is ulti­mate­ly impor­tant is a writer’s strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few last­ing ones — just as a young writer or poet might have to write hun­dreds of poems before writ­ing his first sig­nif­i­cant one. Each book as it is writ­ten, how­ev­er, is a com­plete­ly absorb­ing expe­ri­ence, and feels always as if it were the work I was born to write.

Oates has won many hon­ors for her work, includ­ing the Nation­al Book Award, the Pen/Malamud Award, the Nation­al Medal of the Human­i­ties, and a life­time achieve­ment award from the Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle. Her lat­est nov­el, The Accursed, is a Goth­ic tale of a super­nat­ur­al curse vis­it­ed upon Prince­ton, New Jer­sey, the town where she lives and teach­es. Last month the New York­er vis­it­ed Oates at her home in Prince­ton. The short film above offers a rare look inside the writer’s pri­vate world. Oates talks about her work rou­tine, her inter­est in lan­guage and struc­ture, and her sense of her own per­son­al­i­ty. “I can basi­cal­ly write almost all day long with inter­rup­tions,” she says in the film. “It’s not real­ly that I sit down to write as if it were some extra­or­di­nary act. It’s basi­cal­ly what I do.”

You can read online Oates’ ear­ly short sto­ry, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. It was writ­ten for Bob Dylan in 1966.

via Page-Turn­er