[REVIEW] Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing
Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is a short book and this is going to be a short review.
Chances are pretty good that you’ve already seen the ten rules online, as they were published in the New York Times a while back. This hardcover edition of the rules, complete with illustrations, adds nothing to the text that wasn’t there before. The pages are a thick card-stock and they rush by as you read the few words on each one.
The illustrations are by Joe Ciardiello and have a strong New Yorker feel to them. They are all black-and-white line drawings except for one at the end of the book that’s given color. As 10 Rules is clearly targeted for the gift market, the illustrations add an extra dimension to what otherwise would have been a simple list and not appealing for its purpose.
Leonard’s advice remains solid and can be taken as gospel or just as recommendations. Those who choose to adopt all of his rules will find themselves writing prose that hews pretty close stylistically to his work. This might be a good thing or a bad thing depending upon your perspective. Since Leonard is one of the most successful crime/mystery authors working today, his advice carries some significant weight.
As a reference tome, though 10 Rules isn’t something to buy for yourself. It’s obviously meant to be a gift for a writer, as I mentioned, and I don’t doubt it would be appreciated as such. Chances are pretty good that it will be read once or twice and then never read again, but such is the fate of most gift books, anyway. At the very least there will have been good advice given and (hopefully) received.
One night in Vegas.
The following vignette comes from a project that didn’t even make it past the outline stage. It was called Vegas, Detka! and involved an old-school gangster who becomes involved with a young member of the Russian mob. Together they try to revive the spirit of the Mafia-run Las Vegas that disappeared a long time ago.
Unusually, the idea for book came to me in this vignette, not the other way around. Occasionally a little snippet of something will occur to me and I just have to write it down, regardless of its use. This turned out to be just enough to take up 500 words and no more, but I kind of like it.
I thought I’d never get made. I did a stretch in Attica back in ’67 for knocking over an after-hours joint with some guys. When the cops asked me who I was with, I just said Who? With? Me? Nobody. They put me away for 13 months on that one.
If you think keeping your mouth shut buys you anything in this world, you’re wrong. I did my time, got out and figured it’d all come showering down on me like the grace of God, but no one had nothing to say to me. It was just, “Welcome back, Sammy,” and that was that.
Maybe somebody else would have talked after that. Thirteen months is a long time, you know. But I never told nothing to nobody whenever, and I got busted twenty, maybe twenty-five times after that. Got to the point when the cops wouldn’t even bother questioning me because they knew I wouldn’t answer no question with the truth; they’d just process me and put me in the cage.
I turned 40 in ’82 and they gave me a real nice party. And truth to tell, I was never hurting for work in all that time. I was married, then divorced and I had a couple of kids in Catholic school, but I always made the bills. I just wanted to be made. Who wouldn’t want that?
A lot of people put a lot of cash in my pockets at that party. The last man was Jack Anastasio. He gave me a fat envelope and he said, “You’re over the hill now, Sammy. Why don’t you think about sun and sand?”
Sun and sand meant Florida to me, but I didn’t get tickets to Miami. Good Lookin’ Jack sent me out west to Vegas. Las Vegas when it still belonged to us. Las Vegas when it still meant something.
I went out there and I did my thing and still I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t think about getting made anymore, and that’s when it happened. It was a Thursday night in October ’87. Everybody came. Even Good Lookin’ Jack flew out. I’m not ashamed to tell you I cried.
And then we all went to see a show: Frank Sinatra at the Bally’s Grand. I remember Frank sang “Mack the Knife,” and then Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin hit the stage. It was the last time they were all under the lights together and I was there and I was made.
That was the best night of my life.
The complete bulls— book of UFOs.
I mentioned this the other day when writing about Operation Repo and I thought it was worth expanding upon.
Despite the fact that I’m 99.99% sure it’s all a bunch of hokum, I do enjoy reading about and watching documentaries on the Roswell Incident. There’s something endlessly fascinating about the way the story has developed like a bunch of Russian nesting dolls; every time you think you’ve gotten to the last layer, another one is revealed.
If there is any truth to the story of recovered UFO fragments, it’s long been buried under a thick, thick mantle of bullshit. Witnesses continue to crawl out of the woodwork, and at this point it’s almost as if the whole spacecraft and its alien crew were paraded down the middle of Main Street at high noon for the entire population to see. It’s just gone too far.
I occurred to me when reading Stanton Friedman’s book, Top Secret/Majic, for the third or fourth time that it would be pretty easy to write one of these books and unmoor it from fact completely. And by that I mean fabricate a UFO incident out of whole cloth and then write it up as if it were as “real” as any of these other incidents. An enterprising writer might even commission some talented artist to mock up documents that could be included on insert pages in the book. Not good enough to hold up against someone seriously looking to authenticate them, but good enough for the purposes of the reader.
The Method
Every writer has his or her own method for producing words. Some sit for a specific length of time at their keyboard. Some write a specific number of words. Some just write when and how much their whimsy demands.
I’m a word-count writer. However long it takes, I will write X number of words before quitting for the day. That doesn’t mean I can’t write more than my quota, but I must hit the minimum or I’m not finished yet.
The number of words I require of myself has changed over the years. For a long time it was just 250 words, which is the rough equivalent of a single, typewritten page. Then I bumped it up slightly to 500 words after I heard that Terry Pratchett wrote that much every day. But both of these seemed to be too little; I wanted to see more progress on a daily basis. So I went higher.
I went to 1,000 words a few years ago and that seemed to work out all right. It was enough that I felt like I was making a difference, but not so much that I felt overwhelmed. At 1,000 words/day a novel-length manuscript could be finished inside of three months. That’s a decent interval.
Lately I’ve tried to ratchet things up just a bit more and write 2,000 words in a day. This is working out less successfully than previous increases. The rate of production appeals to me — a complete novel in just over a month! — but I’m finding that I don’t always have the creative steam to make it through eight pages of manuscript in a single sitting. Does that make me lazy? Probably.
I’m resigned to the fact that there are writers out there who can produce thousands of words a day, every day, and complete either many novel projects or a few exceedingly long ones. I’m just not one of those guys. At the same time I envy them a little bit their productivity. I mean, who wouldn’t want to write five, six, seven thousand words in a day? But my method works for me, and that’s all that matters.
Blame it on the ninja.
I blame Ninja Assassin, really. If I hadn’t seen that, I could probably think of something else besides flashing blades, flying shuriken and death from the shadows.
As I said in that review, I’m a child of the ’80s and so I’m genetically programmed to consume ninja action voraciously. And Ninja Assassin is only the latest thing; do not get me started talking about the Tenchu franchise, because I will talk your ear off.
I’ve had a couple ninja-riffic projects in the past, neither one of which came to fruition. They were both comic ideas and one actually got to the art stage before I lost my artist to a paying gig.
The first of the two is my favorite. It’s called Giri and has to do with a woman who was trained at her yakuza father’s request to be a ruthless assassin. Now broken from him, she returns to Japan on the occasion of his death and proceeds to lay waste to his enemies. I might still resurrect that as a novel because I haven’t written pure action in a long time.
The second is called Zero-Zero. It takes place in retro-futuristic feudal Japan where samurai rule and ninja prowl the night. The title character, Zero-Zero, is a member of a clan of ninja who have the capability to remove memories from their brains via a voluntary process, so as to better keep secrets. It’s only when Zero-Zero becomes aware that someone has been altering his memories without his knowledge that he becomes a man on a mission.
I suppose Zero-Zero could also become a novel if I wanted to test my boundaries as a writer. Three of the first four novels I wrote were cyberpunk when cyberpunk was no longer a going concern. Reviving some of that neon-soaked sensibility might be just the thing.
But Giri… ah, Giri. I don’t think I’m going to fall out of love with this idea any time soon. Swordfights and martial arts battles and guns blasting? That’s all good stuff. Yeah, I think Giri might be in my future soon.
I think I am going to blame it on the ninja.
