RIP Elmore

I just read on line that Elmore Leonard died. I can’t let that go by without recording this acknowledgement: everything I know about dialogue writing (which might be very little) I learnt from reading Elmore Leonard and copying what he did as best as I could.

He was the guy who said, if you’re doing your job right, you should never have to say anything more than ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ and that’s the absolute max.

I have tried, but failed to meet his standard.  At the beginning of a scene particularly, I always feel the need to tell the reader exactly ‘how’ my character says something.  I just can’t figure out how to write the words “‘Hello,’ he said’ in a way that categorically demonstrates love, anger, sadness, or surprise.  And it always seems so damned important to my story that you should get that nuance. Maybe I’m a control freak.

Elmore’s genius (apart from some plots and characters that were outright nuts) was that he could write pages of a scene involving half a dozen characters without so much as a single attribution and yet never leave you in any doubt who had said what.

He once published a unique version of ‘the Ten Rules of Writing’, three of which were: ‘Never open a book with weather’,  ‘Avoid detailed descriptions of characters’, and – very tellingly – ‘Leave out the bits your readers tend to skip’.

Apparently, he died while working on his forty-sixth novel.  I probably won’t even get to that total in short stories.  So RIP Elmore Leonard.

From your faraway pupil,  David Hood.