{"id":99,"date":"2013-09-15T01:00:11","date_gmt":"2013-09-15T01:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=99"},"modified":"2021-08-29T21:51:58","modified_gmt":"2021-08-30T01:51:58","slug":"following-elmore-leonards-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/following-elmore-leonards-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Following Elmore Leonard’s Rules?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since his recent death, people have been posting and re-posting Leonard’s well-known rules for writers<\/a>, which added together seem to suggest that you should write in a very lean way.\u00a0 Kind of like Leonard himself.<\/p>\n

One of the rules is “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.”\u00a0 But does Leonard follow his own advice? Here are some passages about the thug Richard Nobles in the novel LaBrava<\/em>\u00a0 (aren’t those great character names?)<\/p>\n

He was thick all over, heavily muscled, going at least six-three, two-thirty.\u00a0 Blond hair with a greenish tint in the floodlight: the hair uncombed, clots of it lying straight back on his head without a part, like he’d been swimming earlier and had raked it back with his fingers.\u00a0 The guy wasn’t young up close.\u00a0 Mid-thirties.\u00a0 But he was the kind of guy–LaBrava knew by sight, smell and instinct–who hung around bars and arm-wrestled.\u00a0 Homegrown jock–pumped his muscles and tested his strength when he wasn’t picking his teeth\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

An ugly drunk.\u00a0 Look at the eyes.\u00a0 Ugly–used to people backing down, buying him another drink to shut him up.\u00a0 Look at the shoulders stretching satin, the arms on him–Jesus–hands that looked like they could pound fence posts.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Nobles, with his size, his golden hair, his desire to break and injure, his air of muscular confidence, was fascinating to watch.\u00a0 A swamp creature on the loose.<\/em><\/p>\n

I see plenty of rich, evocative detail there, and it’s all superbly well-chosen.\u00a0 We get bits and pieces of the physical that create Nobles as an individual who’s anything but noble.\u00a0 We also see him as a type known to LaBrava who’s assessing him, and the images are powerful (swamp creature, pounding fence posts).\u00a0 Better yet, we have a tremendously evocative portrait of Nobles’s impact<\/em> on people, the dangerously violent aura created by his mood and by his muscles.<\/p>\n

It’s easy to quote Leonard, but it’s far more interesting to read him and see how closely he sticks to his own rules.\u00a0 And then the question is, does it matter?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since his recent death, people have been posting and re-posting Leonard’s well-known rules for writers, which added together seem to suggest that you should write in a very lean way.\u00a0 Kind of like Leonard himself. One of the rules is “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.”\u00a0 But does Leonard follow his own advice? Here are some … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,23,28,30,31,2,29],"tags":[500,17,14,19,16,501,13],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-crime-novels","category-elmore-leonard","category-imagery","category-rules-for-writing","category-writing","category-writing-style","tag-characterization","tag-description","tag-elmore-leonards-rules","tag-novels","tag-style","tag-thrillers","tag-writing-rules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}