8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants’’ what do the “American and the girl with him’’ look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.’’ That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
9. Don t go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the ten.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in Sweet Thursday was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle (1)” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle (2)” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”
About the Author
Elmore Leonard has written more than three dozen books during his highly successful writing career, including the national bestsellers Tishomingo Blues, Pagan Babies, and Be Cool. Many of his novels have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Valdez Is Coming, and Rum Punch (as Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown). He has been named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America and lives in Bloom-field Village, Michigan, with his wife.
ELMORE LEONARD
GET SHORTY
“Elmore Leonard is the King!”
Houston Chronicle
“A good, rootin’-tootin’ Elmore Leonard adventure with the usual suspects, the locker full of money, the wheelers, the dealers, the crazies, and the girl. Get Shorty gets Hollywood right where it lives and the joke is so funny, so infinitely tricky, so perfectly synchronized on so many levels that it’s apt to make you spin.”
Chicago Tribune
“A terrific caper . . . One of the most hilarious and cynical Hollywood revenge novels ever written . . . Fast and funny dialogue that puts a new twist on Oscar Wilde’s notion that life imitates art.”
Playboy
“Leonard gets better and better and better. He makes the rest of us mystery writers green with envy.” Tony Hillerman
“Leonard is our greatest crime novelist. . . . After you close this wonderful book, the title hits you one more shot, a delayed shot, and you realized you’ve had the touch put on you again, perfectly, by the best in the business.”
Washington Post
“His best! . . . Throw in double-deals, triple-takes, a murder or two, patented Leonard real-life dialogue and plot twists, and you have ol’ Dutch Leonard at his finest and most entertaining.”
Detroit Free Press
“The reigning master of hard-action crime fiction . . . Few fiction writers match the artful ability of Elmore Leonard, first to persuade you to read his next sentence, then to draw you into reading his next chapter, and finally to seduce you into reading his entire book.”
Cincinnati Enquirer
“Gut-busting satire.”
Chicago Sun-Times
“There’s nobody like Elmore Leonard. Get Shorty is as fast, lively, and funny as anybody would want.”
Cosmopolitan
“A terrific thriller . . . It has all the Leonard trademarks: offbeat characters, a nimble plot, and crisp, street-smart dialogue. . . . The kind of entertainment that usually makes Hollywood types talk about selling their souls (or their mothers).”
Orlando Sentinel
“The King of Daddy of crime novelists.”
Seattle Times
“A book that Raymond Chandler and Nathaniel West might have written if they had decided to join forces. . . . It is at heart a portrait of a community, less angry than The Day of the Locust but no less devastating in its tour of the industry’s soiled follies. . . . Leonard’s ears, eyes, and recall are nearly perfect.”
Los Angeles Times
“Entertaining, fast-paced . . . Superbly crafted.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Nobody but nobody on the current scene can match his ability to serve up violence so light-handedly, with so supremely deadpan a flourish.”
Detroit News
“Elmore Leonard may be the last hope for the written word.”
New York Observer
“Leonard at his most playful . . . The action scenes . . . maintain a perfect balance between horror and farce. And Leonard’s pacing remains quite simply the best in the business.”
Entertainment Weekly
“A master of narrative . . . A poet of the vernacular . . . Leonard paints an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworld.”
The New Yorker
“While Leonard excels at low-life suspense, he’s also a master fiction writer whose gift for dialogue and cunningly meandering plots any novelist would envy.”
San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
“Roundly satisfying . . . Chili Palmer . . . is a vintage Leonard hero . . . A perfect resolution puts punch in the title and will keep readers smiling for days.”
Publishers Weekly
“Leonard does crime fiction better than anyone since Raymond Chandler.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Vintage Leonard . . . Ranks among his best.”
Palm Beach Post
“Leonard is the best in the business: His dialogue snaps, his characters are more alive than most of the people you meet on the street, and his twisting plots always resolve themselves with a no-nonsense plausibility.”
Newsday
“Wonderful . . . Astonishing . . . Leonard understands Hollywood perfectly.”
New York Times
“His books defy classification. . . . What Leonard does is write fully realized novels, using elements of the classic American crime novel and populating them with characters so true and believable you want to read their lines aloud to someone you really like.”
Dallas Morning News
“Leonard is tops in his field. . . . In Leonard’s sleazy world you always meet interesting characters.”
New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Clever, entertaining . . . and for anyone not yet hooked, a good place to start.”
Boston Globe
GET SHORTY. Copyright © 1990 by Elmore Leonard, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Get Shorty: A Novel cp-1 Page 30