Elmore John Leonard Jr. was born in New Orleans on October 11, 1925. His father’s job with General Motors moved the family around until they settled in Detroit, and Detroit is where he stayed for the rest of his life. He served in the Navy with the Seabees in the South Pacific from 1943 to 1946, picked up the nickname Dutch from a Detroit Tigers pitcher, and went to the University of Detroit on the G.I. Bill.
He died at home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, on August 20, 2013, from complications of a stroke. He was eighty-seven and still writing. Between those dates he published dozens of novels and won the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master award in 1992. The National Book Foundation gave him its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 2012.
Hollywood turned his books into films that went from very good to embarrassing. He also wrote the most quoted set of writing rules of the last twenty-five years. I’ve followed some of them for my whole career and broken others on purpose, and I wrote up the full scorecard in Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, and which ones I break.
How did Elmore Leonard start writing?
He wrote before work, in the dark.
After college he took a copywriting job at Campbell-Ewald, the Detroit agency that handled Chevrolet. The job paid, and the writing he wanted to do didn’t.
So he set his alarm for five and gave himself about two hours before he had to leave for the office. The target was two pages. He also made himself a rule that he had to get something down on paper before he was allowed to put the water on for coffee, and he kept that routine long enough to build a career on it. The westerns he wrote in those early mornings sold to pulp magazines and then to paperback houses.
His first novel, The Bounty Hunters, came out in 1953. That same year a magazine ran a short story of his called “Three-Ten to Yuma,” and Hollywood filmed it in 1957 with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. The 1957 version of 3:10 to Yuma still holds up, and most of what makes it work came from a story of only a few thousand words. Hombre followed in 1961 and became a Paul Newman picture in 1967.
The lesson in that schedule is dull and true. Two pages a morning adds up to a full novel in well under a year.
Leonard didn’t wait for a sabbatical or a windfall. He found two hours nobody else wanted, protected them, and wrote two pages in them, over and over, for years. Most people who say they want to write a book never find those two hours. The ones who do find them get books out of them.
Why did Elmore Leonard switch from westerns to crime?
The western market dried up under him. By the early 1960s the magazines and paperback lines that had bought his stories wanted less and less of them, and a writer who’d made his name on Apache raids and stagecoach holdups had nowhere to sell them. His agents pushed him toward contemporary settings, and he spent the decade on freelance work that paid while he figured out what came next.
His first crime novel was The Big Bounce, published in 1969. It collected eighty-four rejections from publishers and producers before anybody took it.
Eighty-four. A writer with a decade of published books behind him heard no from eighty-four people about the novel that started the second half of his career. Anybody who quits after five rejections should write that number on an index card and tape it above the desk.
What did Elmore Leonard learn from The Friends of Eddie Coyle?
Almost everything that made him Elmore Leonard.
Around 1970 his agent told him to read George Higgins’s novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a Boston crime story by a former prosecutor. The book is close to ninety percent dialogue. Scenes open in the middle of a conversation, the reader catches up, and the plot moves forward through people talking around what they want. Leonard said reading it made him feel as if he’d been set free.
Three things came out of that book and into his. He began opening scenes with the action already running. He also started switching point of view from scene to scene, so the reader could see what each character wanted, the villains included. And he grounded his crime stories in a real city the way Higgins grounded his in Boston. For Leonard that city was Detroit, and later South Florida, where LaBrava won the Edgar for best novel in 1984.
The point of view habit made the difference.
Most crime fiction of the period sat inside the detective’s head and kept the criminals offstage. Leonard put the criminals onstage and let them talk, and they turned out to be funnier, dumber and more human than anybody expected. He wrote whole chapters from inside the head of a man about to do something stupid, and the prose took on that man’s rhythm and vocabulary. The narrator disappeared. What was left was a character thinking in his own voice. That’s the move every one of his rules is built to protect.
What are Elmore Leonard’s ten rules of writing?
He published them in the New York Times in 2001 under the headline “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.” The last word he took from John Steinbeck.
The first two rules tell you never to open a book with weather and to avoid prologues. The next two say to carry dialogue with “said” and nothing else, and never to hang an adverb on it. Exclamation points get a ration of two or three per 100,000 words of prose, and “suddenly” and “all hell broke loose” are banned outright. Regional dialect goes in sparingly. Detailed descriptions of characters, places and things stay out, and the last rule tells you to cut whatever readers skip.
He summed all ten up in one line: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
The rules get passed around as universal law, and that’s the mistake. Leonard wrote them as a description of what he did and why, and the why is always the same. Each rule removes a place where the author’s voice can push in front of the character’s. Weather openings are the author setting a mood. Prologues are the author arranging the furniture. Fancy dialogue tags and adverbs are the author explaining how a line was said because the line itself didn’t do it. Every rule protects the illusion that nobody wrote the book.
Elmore Leonard’s rules all do one job. They keep the author out of the way so the characters can talk.Share on X
Which Elmore Leonard rules hold up?
The dialogue rules hold up best, and I follow them closely. My tags are said, answered and replied, and almost nothing else. I don’t use adverbs that tell the reader what the scene should already be showing. If a line needs “angrily” stuck to it, the line is weak and the fix belongs in the line. I covered the mechanics in detail in my rules for dialogue tags and adverbs.
The reason “said” works is that readers stop seeing it. The eye slides over it the way it slides over a comma, and the line of dialogue stays in front.
The exclamation point rule is right too. I rarely use them, and I rarely use “suddenly” either.
Character description is another rule I mostly keep. I describe a character once, and only when the description shows something about who that person is or what they’re feeling. Hair color and height are inventory. A woman who keeps her coat on in a warm room is information.
And the tenth rule, leaving out the part readers skip, is the one I’d defend hardest. I cut a lot. Every draft gets shorter. The parts that go are the parts where I was explaining something to myself, and readers can feel that kind of passage even when they can’t name it. They start skimming, and once a reader starts skimming you’ve lost the book.
Which Elmore Leonard rules should a writer break?
Prologues, for one. Leonard hated them because so many are backstory dumps. Mine aren’t, and I keep writing them. I use short teaser prologues that plant a question the book will answer later. Shield of Ashes has four of them. A prologue that runs a page and leaves the reader holding a question doesn’t slow anything down. It pulls the reader into chapter one.
Weather openings I agree with, for a different reason. Almost all my novels open with action and then drop into a flashback, so the weather never gets a chance to lead.
Place description is the other rule I break, and I break it whenever the reader needs to stand somewhere they’ve never been. Leonard set his books in Detroit and Miami, places his readers could picture without help. If I put a reader on an alien planet, or in the aftermath of a nuclear blast, they’ve got nothing to fill in the blanks with. A long description there does the job a short one can’t. The rule works for Leonard’s settings. It doesn’t travel to mine.
That’s my general view of writing rules. They’re a bit much when people treat them as law. I write in the character’s voice, and when the character’s voice wants something a rule forbids, the character wins.
What makes Get Shorty the best Elmore Leonard novel to start with?
It’s the book where the method is easiest to watch.
Get Shorty came out in 1990. Chili Palmer is a small-time Miami loan shark who flies to Las Vegas to collect a debt, follows the trail to Los Angeles, and ends up leaning on a horror film producer named Harry Zimm. Chili decides he likes the movie business. He starts pitching the story of the debt he’s chasing as if it were a screenplay, and the novel turns into a comedy about how much a shylock and a studio executive have in common.
Read it for the dialogue. Chili talks in short, flat sentences, says less than he knows, and lets the other person fill the silence. Every scene runs on people wanting something and talking around it. The narration barely exists. Leonard stays out of the way for three hundred pages and the characters carry everything.
The plot is thin by thriller standards. Nobody minds, because the people are so much fun to listen to.
The 1995 film with John Travolta understood that and works because of it. It kept the dialogue and the deadpan, and it trusted the audience to catch the jokes without anybody winking at the camera. My review of Get Shorty (1995) goes into what the screenplay kept and what it trimmed. Leonard followed it with a sequel novel, Be Cool. The 2005 film of that one missed nearly everything the first got right.
Why do Elmore Leonard adaptations succeed or fail?
They succeed when the filmmakers leave the dialogue alone.
The good ones are easy to name. Get Shorty, then Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown in 1997, adapted from Rum Punch. Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight followed in 1998, and the television series Justified ran from 2010 to 2015 on the strength of a federal marshal named Raylan Givens. All four took Leonard’s conversations more or less as written and built the pictures around them.
The bad ones tried to improve him.
They added action where he had talk, explained what he left implied, and turned his small-time crooks into movie villains. The result looks like a crime film and plays like a television movie, because the thing that made the book special got cut in the first draft of the script. Leonard had worked as a screenwriter himself, starting in the early 1970s, and he knew both sides of that trade. His favorite adaptations were the ones that trusted his ear.
The lesson for anybody adapting anything, including a memoir turned into a screenplay or a novel turned into a series, is to find the part the original did best and protect it first. Everything else can move.
What does not hold up in Elmore Leonard?
The late books repeat.
By the 2000s the formula was visible, and a reader who’s been through a dozen of them can predict the shape of the next one. The voices stayed sharp. The plots got looser and the endings got faster, as if he’d lost interest once the characters stopped talking.
Some of the dialect has aged badly. He wrote street speech for characters of many backgrounds, and he was good at it, but a modern reader will hit passages that land wrong. His own rule about using dialect sparingly reads like a note he should have taken more seriously in a few of the 1980s books.
And the women are uneven. Karen Sisco in Out of Sight and Jackie Burke in Rum Punch are terrific, smart and tough and running their own plans. Plenty of the others exist mainly to be looked at by the men telling the story. The point of view method makes that worse. When you write every scene in a character’s voice, you write his blind spots too.
How should you mark Elmore Leonard Day?
Read Get Shorty, or reread it. If you’d rather start with the westerns, the short story collections hold “Three-Ten to Yuma” and some of his best early work. If you’re a writer, take a scene you’ve already drafted, strip out every dialogue tag except “said,” delete every adverb, and read what’s left out loud. Most writers find that half the scene was propping up lines that didn’t need it.
Find your own two hours while you’re at it. Leonard built a career in a slot nobody else wanted, and a writer who claims one and defends it gets books out of it.
Then cut the part readers skip. You know which part it is. Leonard sits alongside the writers I’ve covered elsewhere on this site, from Ernest Hemingway to Orwell, and the full calendar is on the literary holidays page. If you’ve got a novel where the narrator keeps getting in the way of the characters, that’s the kind of problem I fix through my professional writing services.