How to Break Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing
which is mostly secretly hating on women given the bisection of the time period he was writing...
Prologue: Avoid prologues like in Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
Like a dark and stormy night, never open a book with the weather like Sir Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lyttonâs Paul Clifford
âNever use a verb other than âsaidâ to carry dialogueâ he announced gravely and then added but Virginia Woolf does it in Mrs. Dalloway: âKreemo,â murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker.
âNever use an adverb to modify the verb said!â like Emily Bronte âSit down,â said the young man, gruffly. âHeâll be in soon.ââEmily Bronte, Wuthering Heights.
Keep your exclamation points under control! You are never allowed more than two! Two! Per 100,000- words of prose. Donât be like poor Ms. Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, then: âOh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!â
Suddenly all hell broke loose under the admonishment of Elmore Leonard who was very gravely hating on 19th century writers (particularly women) and their predecessors when he said one canât use suddenly not all hell broke loose. Donât be like Ms. Jane Austen then? âHe was then, he said, on his way to Longbourn on purpose to inquire after her. Mr. Darcy corroborated it with a bow, and was beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on Elizabeth, when they were suddenly arrested by the sight of the stranger, and Elizabeth happening to see the countenance of both as they looked at each other, was all astonishment at the effect of the meeting.ââJane Austen, Pride and Prejudice uses âSuddenlyâ 16 times.
He askingeu as whiteu person to not be speakingeu in diarect. âNow she had got a start, and she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didnât think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.â - Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
One should not describe the long paragraph on âThomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sirâperemptorily ThomasâThomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrindâno, sir!ââHard Times by Charles Dickens
As he is hating on 19th century writers, talking about the long winding brook that passed behind Mrs. Lyndeâs house that suddenly was disciplined by her very manner would be too much like naturalism, and thus poor Anne Shirley could not talk about the The White Way of Delight in L.M. Montgomeryâs Anne of Green Gables.
Oops I skipped this part.
Context
Elmore Leonard lived roughly from the Modernist era to the Post Modernist era which looked at parring back prose, though often to extremes, often blaming probably unfairly the likes of Mark Twain. When he wrote these rules this was in full swing. This is not in the era where women finally got some rep in the writing section of the shelves.
For context, it's more likely women in the 19th century were likely to use adverbs and were more into the naturalist movement. The later Modernist movements, especially as genre solidified and took shape (as argued by Lucy Worsley), there was a huge backlash against the Naturalist movements which encompassed, you guessed it, a large swath of women and more "look to the future" types. As men won the discourse a bit on story, story structure and "proper story" (cue my eyeroll here), a lot of the rules written were specifically to lock out earlier sets of "backwards ways of writing" and also targeting women a lot. So there were a lot, lot, of treaties up through the 2000's on "precision, cut the fat, no adverbs" which honestly, if you know the range of literature is pretty much aimed squarely on hating how women were taught to write.
BTW, it's a lie, though, that Mark Twain was the King of Precision as many tried to argue about him and retcon into his history, which the Mark Twain Foundation often has to fight with false quotes attributed to him. While we're talking about men, there were naturalists that survived, like Tolkien who spends a fair amount of time on English countryside descriptions (Yes, descriptions, not detail), and the laughable Pre-Raphaelites, whom even LM Montgomery took a few swings at, though at the same time she admired them.
The rule is if it works for your story, helps build your tone and theme, emotion, etc do it. That's it. The quotes and references in context, you can see WHY they did as they did, and it's not a great master that can only do it, which is the usual retort. Nope. You can do it too, you just have to know why you're doing it and effectively communicate that to the reader. Though I do wish the patience of a Victorian reader sometimes as a reader and also with readers...
