You know how gifted artists can suggest a face \u2013 and a mood, a character, a personality \u2013 in just a few swift lines?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, writers can do the same. So today\u2019s email is just a \u201cstand and admire\u201d type affair. Two writers. Two vastly different techniques. But some surprising commonalities in the way they work\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dialogue with Big El<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n How about this from Elmore Leonard:<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘Man, all the photographers, TV cameras. This shit is big news, has everybody over here to see it. Otherwise, Sunday, what you have mostly are rich ladies come out with their little doggies to make wee-wee. I mean the doggies, not the ladies.’ A girl in front of them smiled over her shoulder and Ordell said, ‘How you doing, baby? You making it all right?’ He looked past her now, glanced at Louis to say, ‘I think I see him,’ and pushed through the crowd to get closer to the street. ‘Yeah, there he is. Black shirt and tie? A grown-up skinhead Nazi. I call him Big Guy. He likes that.’<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘It’s Richard,’ Louis said. ‘Jesus.’<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The speaker is a guy called Ordell. This is the second page of Rum Punch<\/em>, so the reader has no prior knowledge of the character. But that little paragraph? It says so much. It says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The whole paragraph is barely 100 words, but it\u2019s told us so much already about Ordell \u2013 and already locked us into the story, because we know that anything involving Ordell and Nazi Big Guy is going to involve violence and a lot of unpredictability and fireworks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Big El\u2019s tips for humans<\/u><\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Interior Monologue, with Mrs Robinson<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is a completely opposite technique from Marilynne Robinson \u2013 a technique so opposite, that Elmore Leonard would never use it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I’d walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n No dialogue here. It\u2019s all interior reflection. And John Ames, the narrator here, is about as far from Ordell as you could possibly imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But we have the same themes at play here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was originally going to pick a third novelist to compare as well, but I\u2019m intrigued enough by the basis similarity in approach here \u2013 unpredictability plus a lot of reliance on the reader figuring things out for themselves \u2013 that I wanted to see how I approach the same issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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