Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, and Which Ones I Break

In a theater, the stagehands wear black. They move the furniture, haul the ropes and change the scenery in the dark, and if they do the job right, nobody in the audience remembers they were there. The play matters. The stagehand who wants applause is doing it wrong. Elmore Leonard wrote his rules for stagehands. (More on Elmore Leonard Day) Every one of them is about keeping the writer out of the light, so the reader watches the characters and forgets somebody built the set.

Leonard earned the right to say it. He started in Westerns, moved into crime fiction and wrote Get Shorty, Out of Sight, 52 Pick-Up and Rum Punch. That last one became the film Jackie Brown. The Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master in 1992. His dialogue is the reason a generation of crime writers learned to shut up and let people talk.

What are Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing?

He published them in The New York Times in 2001, in the paper’s Writers on Writing series, and they later came out as a small book. Lists on the web call them eleven rules, but Leonard numbered ten and then added one line that sums them all up.

The first two cover openings: never open a book with weather, and avoid prologues. The next two cover dialogue: never use a verb other than “said” with a line of dialogue, and never use an adverb to modify “said.” Then come three small habits. Keep exclamation points under control, two or three per 100,000 words. Never use “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.” Use regional dialect sparingly. The last three are about trimming: avoid detailed descriptions of characters, skip long descriptions of places and things, and leave out the part readers skip.

And the summary: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

I write novels, and I’ve ghostwritten plenty of books for other people, so I’ve had decades to test these against my own pages. So I’ve measured each one against my books.

Watch: Reacting to Elmore Leonard's 10 Writing Rules, Reedsy

Should you ever open a novel with the weather?

Not as a rule, and I don’t. The exception is a book where the weather is the story. If the hurricane is the antagonist, open with the hurricane.

What I open with is action. Virtually every one of my books starts with something happening, something dramatic, and then I go back and fill in how we got there with a flashback. The reader gets a reason to care before I ask for any patience. Leonard’s reasoning holds. Weather by itself is scenery, and a reader who opens a book is looking for people. He even allowed the exception I use: weather is fine when it’s a character’s reaction to the weather, because then it’s about the character.

Are prologues a mistake in fiction?

I break this one.

And I’ll keep breaking it.

Leonard’s complaint was that a prologue in a novel is mostly backstory, and backstory can go anywhere. He’s right about the bad ones. A prologue that dumps three pages of history before the story starts is a stagehand walking on mid-scene to explain the furniture.

Mine work differently. They’re short, and they’re teasers. A prologue sets up something the reader won’t understand yet, then the story starts and the reader spends the book waiting to find out what it meant. Shield of Ashes has four of them, and each one sets up a different plot line. By the time the threads meet, the reader has been holding all four questions the whole way.

The test I’d use: if the prologue could be cut and the reader would never miss it, cut it. If cutting it would remove a question the reader carries through the book, keep it. I’ve written more about the difference in preface, prologue, foreword or introduction.

What did Leonard say about “said,” adverbs and dialogue tags?

He wanted “said” and nothing else, because the line belongs to the character and any fancier verb is the writer sticking his nose in. He told a story about reading Mary McCarthy end a line with “she asseverated” and having to stop and go to the dictionary. That’s a reader pulled out of the book by a single word.

I mostly agree. I use said, answered and replied, and that’s pretty much it. Readers skip tags anyway, so a tag that carries meaning is a tag the reader will miss. I covered my own approach in detail in should you only use “said” in dialogue tags?

On adverbs, the rule I follow is narrower than his. Don’t use an adverb to tell the reader what the scene should have shown. “He said angrily” is the writer admitting the dialogue didn’t sound angry. Fix the dialogue. Now and then I’ll add some descriptive language next to a “said,” a gesture or a beat, but not adverbs as a rule. The longer case is in strong verbs do the work so adverbs don’t have to.

Exclamation points, “suddenly” and dialect

These three are easy.

I almost never use exclamation points. Leonard’s ration of two or three per 100,000 words sounds about right.

“Suddenly” I use very rarely, and these days I have a second reason to avoid it. It’s been flagged as a word that shows up all over AI-generated text, so a page full of “suddenly” now gets a reader wondering who wrote it. Leonard’s own reason still works: if something happens suddenly, the sentence should feel sudden without being told so.

Phonetic dialect is rare in what I write. Peacekeeper uses it in a few places. Leonard’s warning is the right one. Once you start spelling dialogue phonetically and loading it with apostrophes, it’s hard to stop, and the reader ends up decoding instead of listening.

How much should you describe characters and places?

Leonard said to avoid detailed descriptions of characters and to skip long descriptions of places and things unless you can paint like Margaret Atwood. (See a guide to description that does work) He pointed to Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” where the only physical description of the woman is that she took off her hat and put it on the table.

For characters, I’m with him. As a rule I avoid detailed descriptions because they aren’t necessary. When I do describe someone, it’s to show an emotion or something unusual about that person. In Peacekeeper, I show the reader Erica’s tattoos and piercings, once, so you know what she looks like. Then I leave it alone and let her actions carry the rest.

For places, I break the rule when the story needs it. If the characters are standing on an alien planet for the first time, the reader is standing there too, and the reader has never seen it either. Same thing after a nuclear warhead goes off. What does it look like? What does it smell like? Those passages run long because the reader needs to be there, and skipping them would cheat the moment.

The difference is purpose. Description that stops the story is scenery. Description that puts the reader somewhere new is the story.

Leave out the part readers skip

I follow this rule harder than any other.

I cut a lot of crap out of what I write.

Leonard’s advice was to notice what you skip when you read a novel. The thick paragraphs you can see have too many words in them. He called that padding hooptedoodle, a word he borrowed from Steinbeck. Then don’t write it.

I don’t put in extraneous words unless they’re doing a job, either moving the plot or building the scene. A passage that’s there because the writer enjoyed writing it is the first thing to go.

What did Leonard mean by “if it sounds like writing”?

He meant prose that calls attention to the writer. The clever metaphor, the fancy word, the sentence built to impress. If a line made him notice the author, he rewrote it until it sounded like a person telling the story.

My honest reaction to that rule is: how would you know? There’s no measurement. It’s the writer’s ear and nothing else.

And for some books, sounding like writing is the job. I’m working on one now called The Woke Virus, written in the style of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That style lives on the narrator’s voice getting in the way, on purpose, for laughs. I’m also planning stories that are more meta than readers would expect, where the characters know they’re in a story. You can’t write those with the stagehand hiding. The stagehand is in the cast.

So I’d put it this way. Leonard’s rule is right for the kind of book he wrote, and for most books. It’s wrong for a book whose entire game is the voice.

The reason behind every rule

Follow the reason behind each one. Writing rules in general strike me as a bit much. I write how I feel, in the voice of the character and the story, and I don’t write to a style guide. But Leonard’s list is different from most, because every rule on it answers the same question: is the writer getting in the reader’s way?

If the writer is in the way, the rule wins. When I’ve got a reason, a prologue that plants a question, a description that puts the reader on a planet nobody has seen, a narrator who’s supposed to be loud, I break it and I don’t apologize. My longer argument about rules in general is in why writing rules exist, and when to break every single one.

The Writing Hub collects the rest of my craft articles. If you’re working on a novel and want someone to tell you where the writer is standing in the light, my book coaching service is built for that.

Nobody leaves a good play talking about the people in black. That’s the job. Do it well enough and the reader only remembers the story.

From the author

Show Don’t Tell
Leonard wanted the writer out of sight. My book Show Don’t Tell explains how, with more than 100 before and after examples of telling rewritten as showing.

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