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 way people read on the internet has encouraged the provision of “tips,” especially presented as short sentences collected in lists. While we here at Open Culture seldom ride that current, we make exceptions for lists of tips by authors best known for their long-form textual achievements. Richard Ford (The Sportswriter books), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections and Freedom), and Anne Enright (The Portable Virgin, The Gathering) here offer ten suggestions each to guide your own writing habits. Though presumably learned in the process of writing novels, many of these lessons apply just as well to other forms. I, for example, write mostly essays, but still find great value in Franzen’s instruction to treat the reader as a friend, Enright’s point that description conveys opinion, and Ford’s injunction not to write reviews (or at least, as I read it, not reviews as so narrowly defined).
Some of these tips have to do with technique: Ford advises against drinking while writing, Franzen advises against using “then” as a conjunction, and Enright advises you simply to keep putting words on the page. Others have more to do with maintaining a certain temperament: “Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night,” says Ford; “You have to love before you can be relentless,” says Franzen; “Have fun,” says Enright. And as any successful writer knows, you can’t pull it off at all without a strong dose of practicality, as exemplified by Enright’s “Try to be accurate about stuff,” Franzen’s doubt that “anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction,” and Ford’s “Don’t have children.” Can we draw out an overarching guideline? Avoid distraction, perhaps. But you really have to read these authors’ lists in full, like you would their novels, to grasp them. The lists below originally appeared in The Guardian, along with tips from various other esteemed writers.
Richard Ford
1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.
5 Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.
6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.
7 Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)
8 Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.
9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.
10 Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.
Jonathan Franzen
1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2 Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
3 Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
4 Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6 The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8 It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10 You have to love before you can be relentless.
Anne Enright
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
Cormac McCarthy has been—as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, dubbed him—a “disciple of William Faulkner.” He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I’d always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well. But in his very rare 2008 televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy cites two other antecedents: James Joyce and forgotten novelist MacKinlay Kantor, whose Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Joyce’s influence dominates, and in discussion of punctuation, McCarthy stresses that his minimalist approach works in the interest of maximum clarity. Speaking of Joyce, he says,
James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.
So what “weird little marks” does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief summary of his stated rules for punctuation:
1. Quotation Marks:
McCarthy doesn’t use ’em. In his Oprah interview, he says MacKinlay Kantor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stresses that this way of writing dialogue requires particular deliberation. Speaking of writers who have imitated him, he says, “You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks, and write in such a way as to guide people as to who’s speaking.” Otherwise, confusion reigns.
2. Colons and semicolons:
Careful McCarthy reader Oprah says she “saw a colon once” in McCarthy’s prose, but she never encountered a semicolon. McCarthy confirms: “No semicolons.”
Of the colon, he says: “You can use a colon, if you’re getting ready to give a list of something that follows from what you just said. Like, these are the reasons.” This is a specific occasion that does not present itself often. The colon, one might say, genuflects to a very specific logical development, enumeration. McCarthy deems most other punctuation uses needless.
3. All other punctuation:
Aside from his restrictive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his stylistic convictions with simplicity: “I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.” It’s a discipline he learned first in a college English class, where he worked to simplify 18th century essays for a textbook the professor was editing. Early modern English is notoriously cluttered with confounding punctuation, which did not become standardized until comparatively recently.
McCarthy, enamored of the prose style of the Neoclassical English writers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semicolons, remembers paring down an essay “by Swift or something” and hearing his professor say, “this is very good, this is exactly what’s needed.” Encouraged, he continued to simplify, working, he says to Oprah, “to make it easier, not to make it harder” to decipher his prose. For those who find McCarthy sometimes maddeningly opaque, this statement of intent may not help clarify things much. But lovers of his work may find renewed appreciation for his streamlined syntax.
There’s an old story — Orson Welles called it “the greatest Hollywood one-liner ever made” — that when someone attending the 1958 funeral of Harry Cohn, the fearsome president of Columbia Pictures, asked how it was possible that such a huge crowd would show up for Cohn’s funeral, Billy Wilder quipped: “Well, give the people what they want.”
The story is almost certainly apocryphal. The line may have been spoken by someone else, at a different Hollywood mogul’s funeral. But the fact that it is so often attributed to Wilder says something about his reputation as a man with a razor-sharp wit and a firm grasp of the imperatives of popular movie-making. In films like Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, Double Indemnity and Sabrina, Wilder used his formidable craft as a director to tell stories in a clear and efficient way. It was an ethic he picked up as a screenwriter.
Wilder was born in Austria-Hungary and moved as a young man to Germany, where he worked as a newspaper reporter. In the late 1920s he began writing screenplays for the German film industry, but he fled the country soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Wilder made his way to Hollywood, where he continued to write screenplays. He co-wrote a number of successful films in the 30s, including Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn and Ball of Fire. In the early 40s he got his first chance to direct a Hollywood movie, and a long string of hits followed. In 1960 he won three Academy Awards for producing, writing and directing The Apartment.
Wilder was 90 years old when the young director Cameron Crowe approached him in 1996 about playing a small role in Jerry Maguire. Wilder said no, but the two men formed a friendship. Over the next several years they talked extensively about filmmaking, and in 1999 Crowe published Conversations with Wilder. One of the book’s highlights is a list of ten screenwriting tips by Wilder. “I know a lot of people that have already Xeroxed that list and put it by their typewriter,” Crowe said in a 1999 NPR interview. “And, you know, there’s no better film school really than listening to what Billy Wilder says.”
Here are Wilder’s ten rules of good filmmaking:
1: The audience is fickle. 2: Grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go. 3: Develop a clean line of action for your leading character. 4: Know where you’re going. 5: The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer. 6: If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act. 7: A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever. 8: In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing. 9: The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie. 10: The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then — that’s it. Don’t hang around.
Note: Readers might also be interested in Wilder’s 1996 Paris Review interview. It’s called The Art of of Screenwriting.
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John Updike once said of his task as a writer, “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me — to give the mundane its beautiful due.” In book after book, he did just that.
With a sharp eye and a searching intellect, Updike reconstituted the details of everyday life into fluid, lyrical prose. “He turned a sentence better than anyone else,” said Ian McEwan in reaction to Updike’s untimely death in 2009. Philip Roth added: “John Updike is our time’s greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable.”
In June of 2004, Updike sat for an interview with the Academy of Achievement, a Washington-based non-profit group dedicated to inspiring young people to succeed. In a wide-ranging conversation, Updike is asked whether he has any advice for writers just starting out. “You hesitate to give advice to young writers,” Updike says, “because there’s a limit to what you can say. It’s not exactly like being a musician, or even an artist, where there’s a set number of skills that have to be mastered.” Nevertheless, he goes on to make several suggestions:
To the young writers, I would merely say, “Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say — or more — a day to write.” Some very good things have been written on an hour a day. Henry Green, one of my pets, was an industrialist actually. He was running a company, and he would come home and write for just an hour in an armchair, and wonderful books were created in this way. So, take it seriously, you know, just set a quota. Try to think of communicating with some ideal reader somewhere. Try to think of getting into print. Don’t be content just to call yourself a writer and then bitch about the crass publishing world that won’t run your stuff. We’re still a capitalist country, and writing to some degree is a capitalist enterprise, when it’s not a total sin to try to make a living and court an audience. “Read what excites you,” would be advice, and even if you don’t imitate it you will learn from it. All those mystery novels I read I think did give me some lesson about keeping a plot taut, trying to move forward or make the reader feel that kind of tension is being achieved, a string is being pulled tight. Other than that, don’t try to get rich on the other hand. If you want to get rich, you should go into investment banking or being a certain kind of a lawyer. But, on the other hand, I would like to think that in a country this large — and a language even larger — that there ought to be a living in it for somebody who cares, and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
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.”
Click above for a larger version of page one and click here to see page two.
I recently made the mistake of crafting a letter of complaint that sounded much more temperate than I felt. On the advice of my husband, I deleted anything smacking of emotion, limiting my grievances to incontrovertible fact. A month later and I am still waiting for a reply.
Wish that I had let it all hang out, as Mark Twain did in the above 1905 letter to J. H. Todd, a snake oil salesman whose “Elixir of Life” was alleged to cure even the most terminal of medical conditions. How satisfying it would have been to indulge in phrases like “idiot of the 33rd degree” and “scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link”!
Having answered phones in customer service, I can attest that there are times when such phrases are misdirected. This was not one of them. Subject yourself to a thorough reading of the Elixir’s claims (a typography challenge on order of a Dr. Bronner’s label) and you will share the author’s outrage.
Charlatans could be dealt with lightly in literature—witness Huckleberry Finn’s self-proclaimed Duke—but having lost children to two of the diseases Todd’s potion purported to cure, Twain refused to let Todd off the hook in real life. His “unkind state of mind” is as bracing as it is warranted.
Though I doubt he got a reply either.
Transcription:
Nov. 20. 1905
J. H. Todd
1212 Webster St.
San Francisco, Cal.
Dear Sir,
Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me. A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.
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