Advice You Can Take to the Bank

Posted 19 December, 2007 in Book Reviews |

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, by Elmore Leonard, illus. by Joe Ciardiello. William Morrow, $17.50 cloth, 92 pp., ISBN: 978-0-06-14546-1.

On July 16, 2001, the New York Times published an article entitled “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.” The article was written by Elmore Leonard, one of the greatest American prose stylists since Hemingway, and it contained his prescription for good writing. Leonard’s ten rules (actually eleven, if you count the last one) should be pasted on the wall of every would-be writer’s workroom. Rule one: “Never open a book with weather.” Rule three: “Never use a verb other than ’said’ to carry dialogue.” Rule nine: “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.”

These are admonishments (accompanied by Leonard’s acknowledgement that it’s okay in certain circumstances — and for certain authors — to break the rules) that can’t help but make prose better: cleaner, more direct, more efficient. Over the years I’ve used Leonard’s rules as teaching tools with students and authors I’ve edited, and I’ve employed them — to a greater or lesser degree — in my own writing. Leonard’s NYT article was a brilliant distillation of his theory of writing.

It was also, not incidentally for the current book under discussion, brief. 1,048 words to be exact. Now, while just over one thousand words may be an appropriate length for a newspaper article, it is not clear that it is an appropriate length for a book, even one as sparse as the current volume, which weighs in at a mere ninety-two pages. When I first heard about this book, I assumed that the author would bundle his rules with other pieces of writing, the way Kurt Vonnegut did when he reprinted his (equally useful) rules of writing in his essay collection, Bagombo Snuff Box, which in paperback runs to a more respectable 384 pages. At the very least, I assumed there would be some additional material to augment the original article, particularly given the fact that the article is readily available online in its original form.

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing does contain original material in the form of amusing caricatures of writers such as Steinbeck, Tom Wolfe, Margaret Atwood, and, of course, Leonard himself.

But the text simply reprints the NYT article, without adding so much as a word. Printed on heavy stock, the layout features pages that often contain only a single sentence, and the text is often awkwardly broken, such that material that was meant to flow together in the newspaper article appears on different pages of the book. The voluminous white space (nearly every verso page is completely blank) is perhaps meant to provide aspiring writers with a place to scribble notes and cavils with the author; to me it just looks like wasted space.

The volume is packaged as a gift book, with a price point that is relatively low for a hardcover edition. Appearing as it does right at Giftmas, when relatives and friends of aspiring writers are going to be searching for appropriate presents to give, this little book might make a suitable stocking stuffer. The advice contained between the covers is worth its weight in gold; but the book’s entire look and feel and raison d’être smacks of little more than a cash grab.

2 comments to “Advice You Can Take to the Bank”

Kerry, December 19th, 2007 at 12:37 pm:

• Wow. I’m glad I didn’t buy it, as I don’t need it, seeing as I cut the ten rules out of the National Post in 2001 (where it was reprinted, I guess) and I’ve had them close by ever since then. And I didn’t even know who Elmore Leonard was (and I still don’t) but these rules just struck me as inherently sensible.

patricia, December 19th, 2007 at 3:46 pm:

• All very true, but it’s just so darn purty. I’m a sucker for pretentious gift books.

Your comment:

Name (required)

Mail (requried)

Website

Security code (Required)*
To prove that you're not a bot, enter this code