Rain, full stop, new paragraph

Last week, we sat down with Kurt Vonnegut and talked rules for writing. He smoked a lot and cracked pistachios, and there was a little green pistachio chip stuck in his moustache during our discussion of rules 4-7, but we had a good time. My hangover the next day … not so good.

Today, I report on my chat with Elmore Leonard who, to my surprise, spent much of our dialogue wandering around in the costume of an 1812-era naval commander and roaring things like, “Make it so, Mr Webb” and growling about an ill-set mainsail. I had no hangover after that, but my hands did smell of burned gunpowder for some days after.

El’s rules of writing are:

1. Never open a book with weather

Phooey. That’s silly. Open a book with weather if you want to. I did once, just to annoy him. Take a look at the email subject line if you want to guess what I wrote.

But – purposeful. Writing about weather can’t be just a way to write yourself into the book. There has to be purpose to it. Purpose to everything always.

2. Avoid prologues

Well, yes–ish.

I think there are roughly two kinds of prologue. One is just an apology for a boring opening. So you have a battle scene by way of prologue that basically says to the reader, “Please stick with me over the next 50 pages, because there will be something exciting to follow, I promise.” I have once written a prologue rather like this and for roughly that reason. Big El thundered at me for that one, and promised a ‘carronade of grapeshot’ if I should do it again.

But the other sort of prologue is one that changes the meaning of the text the reader is about to read. A classic example here is from Donna Tartt’s A Secret History, where the narrator reveals a murder that hasn’t yet taken place. That means the next 100-odd pages are spent thinking, ‘How does this group of friends collapse to the point at which it murders one of its number?” The book became a Whydunnit, not a Whodunnit.

Even Big El let that one go without a threat of being fired on.

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue

El, honestly? I mean, yes, mostly use ‘said’, I agree. But ‘never’? That’s absurd. So, here’s a bit of Fiona dialogue where I twice use words other than say:

‘Tea for two,’ I tell the waitress.

She asks if we want anything to eat.

‘What do you want, sweetheart?’ I ask my companion, but don’t expect, or get, an answer. ‘A bacon roll, maybe,’ I say to the waitress. ‘That’d be good.’

It’s ridiculous to suggest either of those verbs feels wrong or wordy or out of place.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.

And OK, now this is silly. I just checked one of my books and – well, I hardly ever use an adverb, but I did find this:

Aaron removes my hotel from Caernarfon. ‘You can’t put a hotel there,’ he says, with an edge of impatience. ‘You’ve got to get the property first.’

And this:

Coad’s face undergoes another change or two. Shadows chasing over ocean.

He says softly, ‘Because they’re not crazy. And I am. You want to know what I think.’

Now, to be fair, I searched the word “says”, and I started at the beginning, and these were the first examples I found, and the second of them (the first true breach of EL’s rule) was 44,000 words in.

So do I breach that rule often? No. Is it fine to breach it occasionally? Of course.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose

Ha! I thought I was going to agree with that one, but I don’t, or not quite the way Elmore’s telling it here.

In the same 109,000 word novel I’ve been checking, I found 15 exclamation points. All of those were in dialogue – things like “Duh!” or “Fuck’s sake!” Those things would I think have been just plain mispunctuated without an exclamation point. But outside dialogue? I essentially never use an exclamation point. Two or three per 100K words sounds excessive to me. But inside dialogue? And if the punctuation is there simply to note a manner of speaking rather than as a way to ‘create’ drama? Well, just use them. No one dies.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

I have definitely never used the phrase ‘all hell broke’ loose in one of my books. I don’t need to check them to know that.

But suddenly? Poor old suddenly? What’s wrong with it. Here’s an example from the same book that involves (sorry) Crime Scene Investigators trying to get an internal body temperature from a heavily frozen corpse:

In the end, the CSIs got a power-drill with a 10-mil bit and drove it through Rheon’s frozen back. By the look of it, they had to push through about an inch of frozen crust before getting to the tissue below. When the bit suddenly slid into the soft viscera, a splatter of blood and bowel contents spurted out, hitting the CSI across goggles and paper suit. He swore. I laughed. Watkins looked angry and impatient, which is probably just her way of laughing.

Now that’s not a way to add fake drama to a scene. It’s just a way to explain the movement of a drill bit that moved first slow, then fast. The word is perfectly OK.

That’s now four rules which are basically silly and the two before that were dubious. What does that teach us? Well, that a genuinely great writer may end up saying some slightly silly things when paid to write a column for the New York Times. That doesn’t make him less of a writer, though.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

This is true. There’s a modern tact here, which works well. Accents shouldn’t be denoted phonetically (So “Eet ees ’orrible, no?” sounds, today, like an incredibly patronising and diminishing way to write French-accented speech, for example.) But that’s about the phonetic transcription of an accent.

But if you have a character who uses regional dialect – then what is that character meant to speak other than that dialect? I had a character, Caff, a sailor who was born and bred on the Orkney Isles. I had him speak Orcadian, which is like a deep Scottish mixed with Viking and left to simmer for 1000 years. So we had chunks of speech like this:

That [turning the ship] sounds straightforward enough but Caff, who explains all this, is clearly anxious about the manoeuvre. ‘Thoo dohnt wahnt tae be skelp while turning,’ he says, as his hands show a big wave hitting the ship side-on as it turns. ‘If tha’ happens, we’ll hae oor bahookie in th’ sky in twa shakes o’ a hoor’s fud.’

I’m not going to translate that because there’s language there to make a matron’s ears blush rosy pink, but if you want a regional dialect, then use a damn regional dialect. Just honour it, and don’t patronise it.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters

Hmm. Well, I think that’s a little evasive, isn’t it? Any worthwhile description of anything finds its substance in the detail. So if I say, “She was five foot six, with dark shoulder length hair, and looked to be in her thirties,” I’ve given you three data points that amount to almost nothing.

But if I mention her “whatever-you-want smile” and say nothing about height or hair colour, you already have something – because of the detail. So maybe Leonard is saying, “Don’t just yammer on forever about how someone looks”, and OK, that’s true – but you shouldn’t yammer on forever about anything.

Here’s a wee passage with two ultra-brief character descriptions that do use details but don’t yammer on. Both micro-descriptions are just fine:

[Julie-Ann says,] “Then, I wasn’t sure, did you want to see Mr Coad?’

Mr Coad.

War hero. Nutjob. Prisoner.

No, I do not want to see Mr Coad. I want to get the fuck out of here and to never come back.

I don’t say anything.

Julie-Ann hovers, a whatever-you-want smile fixed in place.

I don’t even know how people like that maintain those smiles, those attitudes. I mean, I’m perfectly able to make nice with people, but if I offer them something – coffee or tea? do you want to see Jared Coad, yes or no? – I sort of expect them to make up their minds. I won’t just offer that wide, bland, take-as-long-as-you-want smile and keep it there.

I stare. Keep staring. And, when even J-A’s confidence starts to wobble, say, ‘Yes. Please. Jared Coad. Great.’

Julie-Ann shows me a place to make tea. Takes me down to the hospital kitchen, where a youth, late teens or very early twenties, finds me a sachet of porridge. The guy has a chest broad enough to fit a Lowland ox and the sachet is tiny in his hands.

When I presented that passage to Elmore Leonard, he read intently, then looked away, then roared at a Captain of Marines to attend to his station.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Well, c’mon, El! We’ve basically just had that rule and we didn’t think a lot of it. Just don’t yammer on. Yes, OK. We’ve got the point. Move on.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

This is the one rule that people tend to remember, as much for how it’s phrased as for what it says. And it’s a good one. But how that rule applies will vary vastly from author to author. A Sally Rooney book looks very not like an Elmore Leonard book and neither of them looks anything like a Gillian Flynn book or, come to that, like one of mine. So yes, write in a way that holds the reader, your alpha and omega, the same for El as it was for Kurt, and as it is for me, and as it is – I’m sure – for you.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Rain, full stop, new paragraph

OK – I want any passage that you like which breaks at least one of Elmore’s rules. The more you break, the more points you get. But, if Elmore is right and the passage would be better with the rule unbroken, then you lose. You LOSE, d’you hear me? Mr Leonard will give you a full broadside, with marines shooting at you from the rigging. Please post in this Townhouse forum. 

Til soon.

Harry