Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing

Elmore Leonard, one of America’s recognized masters of thriller/suspense fiction, primarily in the crime genre, wrote a piece for a New York Times column, “Writers on Writing,” in July 2001.

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He since published it in book form as Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, which you can get here on Amazon.

Leonard got his start by scraping out a living writing short stories and westerns (one of which, Valdez is Coming, is now considered a classic of the genre). He grew up in the Detroit area, and it’s only natural that he transitioned to writing crime fiction, where he displayed an unmatched virtuosity in capturing authentic street characters and slang in his novels.

Over 20 of his stories have been made into movies or TV shows. Westerns: Hombre and Joe Kidd, starring Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood, respectively, and more recently 3:10 to Yuma starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. Crime: Get Shorty starring John Travolta and Gene Hackman; Out of Sight starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez; Killshot starring Mickey Rourke and Diane Lane; the FX series Justified starring Timothy Olyphant; and so on.

Leonard didn’t achieve that kind of success because he was lucky; he earned his chops the hard way, from the ground up, and as he says about his little book: “These are the rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story.”

Anyone who writes fiction, or aspires to, will benefit from the advice based on his experience.

Here it is in summary form:

1. Never open a book with weather.

2. Avoid prologues.

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

I encourage you to read what he has to say about each of those rules, sparing as it is.

I keep a hardcover copy in my living room so I can read it from time to time. I find it always helps keep me on track.

The Gravy Train

My novel, The Gravy Train, is the story of a novice banker who tries to help an aging chairman buy his company back before the Wall Street sharks who drove it into bankruptcy can carve it up for themselves.

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Finn Keane is a starry-eyed, freshly-minted MBA who lands a job at Abercrombie, Wirth & Co., the hottest firm on Wall Street in a red-hot market. He’s assigned to work on his first deal under the firm’s biggest producer, Jack Shane. Finn is thrilled. The deal is an ambitious acquisition by northeast regional department store chain Kristos & Co. of the high-end retailer, Milstein Brothers Stores, that will create a nationwide retail department store juggernaut. Finn immediately bonds with Nick Christanapoulas, the chairman of Kristos & Co., who has handed the day-to-day reins of the 160-store chain he built to his idiot son-in-law, Stanley, who Shane talked into the ill-conceived deal.

Shortly after the deal closes, the economy tanks and the markets crash. The merged company defaults on the junk bonds that Shane orchestrated to finance the deal even before it makes its first interest payment.

It’s at that point that Finn learns that Shane isn’t only ABC’s biggest producer; he’s also its biggest SOB.

Immediately after the company is forced to file for bankruptcy, the Wall Street sharks close in, led by Shane, and things move quickly after that. Finn gets fired by Shane and he aligns himself with Nick. Finn and Nick team up with a streetwise old bankruptcy lawyer in an effort to help Nick buy the company back out of bankruptcy.

Finn and his rag-tag group face off against Shane, the creditors and their battery of numbers crunchers, led by one of the most sophisticated and brazen bankruptcy lawyers on Wall Street, who knows all the dirty tricks of the trade and then some.

As in all minnow-versus-whale stories, you wonder how the good guys can possibly win because the odds are so stacked against them. But even if they can’t, half the fun is seeing if they can at least land a few solid punches against the bad guys before they go down swinging.

The book is based in part on the first bankruptcy deal I worked on early in my career, and it has some colorful characters based on a number of the oddballs and SOBs I encountered in the course of it.

And the title of the book is taken from real life as well: it’s the nickname of the Amtrak train from New York to Wilmington, Delaware, the site of the court where many of the main bankruptcy cases are decided. It’s on the cars of The Gravy Train on the way to court where the lawyers, bankers and creditors committees who populate the bankruptcy world huddle together. They posture, haggle and yell at each other to cut the deals they present to the judges.

I hope you’ll give The Gravy Train a try. It’s a fast-paced read that will give you some insight into how the bankruptcy game works, and hopefully entertain you.

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Bull Street - My White Collar Crime Thriller #1

Bull Street is the first of my White Collar Crime Thrillers. It's the story of Richard Blum, a freshly-minted MBA who goes to Wall Street as a naive, novice investment banker and soon discovers he’s landed smack in the middle of an insider-trading ring. As Richard peels away the layers of the skulduggery he's uncovered, he finds out that all the insider trading surrounds the deals of his firm’s largest client, Harold Milner. Milner is the takeover maven of his generation who Richard has idolized for years. In fact, on Richard’s first big deal on the Street, Milner has taken him under his wing. So Richard can’t believe Milner is involved in the insider trading, but stops short when he thinks of telling Milner what he’s discovered.

What if Milner is part of the ring? What if he isn’t but if Richard’s disclosure to Milner leaks to the traders and triggers them to come after him because he knows too much? And then what about the Feds he finds out are sniffing around? Will the footprints he’s left with his own digging cause the Feds to think he’s a participant in the ring and put him in their crosshairs?

Not only does Bull Street have those thriller elements, it's a coming of age story about Wall Street told from an insider's perspective. That's because I wrote the first draft of it when I was a freshly-minted MBA who landed on Wall Street as a naive, novice investment banker. As such, the novel includes many of my jarring learning experiences as I cut my teeth in Wall Street's sharp-elbowed world. I started my career there in an era that saw major insider trading and securities fraud scandals: the likes of Ivan Boesky, Marty Siegel, Dennis Levine and Mike Milken paid huge fines and went to jail in those days.

And so among the usual outsized personalities, misfits and oddballs I encountered in my early days on Wall Street, I also met a number of crooks from that era, a few of them high-profile. Bull Street is fiction, but the grandiose egos, the bare-knuckles negotiating tactics and the questionable ethics of many of the men and women of Wall Street portrayed in the book are true to life.

I hope you’ll give Bull Street a try. It's the first of my White Collar Crime Thrillers, and like all of the books in the series, it offers a window into the world of Wall Street’s financial gamesmanship from the perspective of one who’s been there.

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From Antigua to Morocco

My latest White Collar Crime Thriller, Spin Move, is about a guy named John Rudiger who’s a fugitive financier living under an alias in Antigua. How Rudiger wound up in that position is a long story, which I laid out in a series of short stories and novellas called Rudiger Stories.

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The 60-second summary is that Rudiger is basically a good guy who was a money manager in New York named Walter Conklin with a $1 billion hedge fund around the time of the Internet boom. He specialized in technology stocks, so as you might guess, he was considered a wunderkind there for a while. The guy puffed himself up, in more ways than one, along with the markets. He married a sassy, big-busted social climber from Long Island, developed a taste for high-priced wines, bought a Park Avenue coop, opened a Park Avenue office with a personal Cordon Bleu-trained French chef, and even got pretty puffed up physically—ballooning from his All-American college football weight to over 300 pounds.

When the Internet bubble popped and the NASDAQ crashed, things fell apart for Conklin. It turns out his wife, Angela, was screwing one of his best friends and his CFO and partner at his hedge fund was screwing him even worse: he cooked the books to pump up Conklin’s already phantasmagorical returns in order to suck in more investors, and then when the market tanked he panicked, turned state's evidence and blamed it all on Conklin. That's what put Conklin on the run to South America for plastic surgery, a gastric bypass, and his John Rudiger alias in the Caribbean.

So now you’re caught up with how Rudiger wound up in Antigua.

Enter Katie Dolan.

Katie, a petite strawberry blonde with a lithe body and washboard abs, was raised tough-as-nails in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and had worked her way up from the streets to become a lawyer, first for the Manhattan DA’s office and then for Assistant U.S. Attorney Charlie Holden in Manhattan. Holden was the guy who arrested Conklin's CFO, and the reason Conklin skipped the country when he realized Holden was hot on his trail.

Katie landed in Antigua at Holden’s behest to try and get the goods on Rudiger, prove he was really Conklin and extradite him back to the U.S. for trial and jail. Pheromones flew when she saw his 6’2’’ tanned and muscled body and ski-slope nose. His hormones responded in kind.

Rudiger did Holden one better and co-opted Katie to go with him back to New York to pose as his ex-wife Angela to help him recover $50 million in bearer bonds he’d stashed in a safe deposit box.

Katie did Rudiger still one better, screwing him out of $30 million of the bonds, and thus begins our story, Spin Move.

It’s a year after Rudiger and Katie’s tryst in New York, and now the Antiguan officials are demanding ever more exorbitant payouts to maintain his cover. He’s running out of money.  Katie is holed up with her ailing father in Cape Verde, an Island paradise off the coast of Africa that conveniently lacks an extradition treaty with the U.S., an idea she took right out of Rudiger’s playbook. Despite her double cross, Rudiger is still hot for Katie, and he knows just where to find her when he leaves Antigua. But U.S. Attorney Charlie Holden is still hovering in the background, dead set on catching them both. Even worse, Katie’s been sucked in by a dashing, disreputable Swiss banker and he’s conned her out of Rudiger’s $30 million. Can they get it back and escape before it’s too late?

I gave Spin Move the elements of a classic thriller, with pace and jump cuts from Antigua to Morocco to Geneva to the UK, some secondary characters I had a lot of fun with, ongoing fireworks between Rudiger and Katie, a sneaky villain in a murderous Swiss banker, and some action that will hopefully stand up the hairs on the back of your neck.

Readers seem to agree; the reviews have been very positive.

I hope you’ll give Spin Move a try.

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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was on a roll until earlier this month.  He’d successfully prosecuted 85 insider trading cases, including sending Raj Rajaratnam, head of the Galleon Group of hedge funds, to jail for 11 years.  This month, Bharara lost against Rajaratnam’s younger brother, Rengan.  He lost in part because the judge threw out two insider trading counts, and along with them much of the evidence.  Commentators suggest that evidence would've caused jurors to convict Rengan if they had been allowed to hear it.

Still, think about it: 85 to 1.  That’s an amazing batting average.  It’s also startling that Bharara had 85 cases for which he was able to amass enough evidence that he could prosecute them.

I can remember back to a time when, as a young investment banker in the 1980s, I thought I'd seen everything with insider trading cases.  That was during the era when Rudy Giuliani had Bharara’s job as top Wall Street prosecutor.  It was the era when Ivan Boesky paid a $100 million fine and went to jail for trading on inside information.  When Dennis Levine got sent up the river for trading on inside information on his investment banking firm‘s deals, and for cutting his friends in on the action.  When Marty Siegel, who had tipped Boesky on his firm's deals—and took a (big) briefcase containing $700,000 in cash from Boesky for it one night—went to jail and lost everything in fines.  When Mike Milken paid a $600 million fine as part of a plea bargain on securities and tax violations.

In those days I was naïve enough to think that after that era’s firestorm of public outrage, fines and the perp walks that Giuliani invented—dragging traders out of their offices in handcuffs, or from their apartments at 6 a.m. to the sound of press cameras snapping away—that anybody with a brain would know the rewards for stepping over the line weren’t worth the penalties if you got caught.

It didn't take me long to get slapped awake to the fact that it's all part of human nature.  The combination of old-fashioned greed and thinking you're smarter than anybody else is a powerful cocktail that can induce entranced walks to the dark side.  People can’t help themselves.

I was still working on Wall Street when I started writing novels.  I relied on my experiences for most of my material, but I made up a lot of it.  In one of my early novels, Bull Street, I had the Feds use wiretaps to catch insider traders, a technique until then reserved for trying to snare Mafia dons.  Recently, wiretaps were an essential weapon in Bharara 's arsenal in bringing down Rajaratnam and his co-conspirators.  Also in Bull Street, I had the SEC use a sophisticated MarketWatch computer program, run on Cray supercomputers, to analyze an insider trading ring’s stock trades.  That’s the equivalent of a hand-held calculator compared to what the Feds are using today against insider trading activity.

In my current novel, Spin Move, John Rudiger is a fugitive financier living in Antigua, who was tricked out of $30 million by an ex-girlfriend, Katie Dolan.  As he's running out of money and the local officials are insisting on ever more exorbitant bribes to keep his alias intact, does he decide it's time to go straight?  Does he go back to the States and turn himself in, do his time?  Nope.  He's still hot for Katie, so it's natural he'd look for her, but that $30 million is also on his mind.  And when he finds out a conman has swindled her out of it, he uses all his skills to come up with an elaborate scam to get it back.  He can't help it.

In my recent novel, Mickey Outside, Mickey Steinberg is getting out of a cushy white-collar federal prison camp after a slap-on-the-wrist sentence because he turned state's evidence.  His short sentence notwithstanding, he's been stripped of his securities licenses, banned from Wall Street for life, divorced by his wife and he's broke.  Has he learned his lesson?  He hatches a scam with another ex-con to sell a near-perfect forgery of a stolen van Gogh masterpiece in the shadowy underground market for stolen art.  Human nature.

I'm not going to spoil Mickey Outside for you, but there's a point where Mickey has to decide if he stays on the other side of the line or goes straight.  What does he do?

Somebody who's read my earlier Rudiger Stories with my John Rudiger character, called a book to my attention entitled How to Become a Professional Con Artist.  It’s an eye-opener.  I knew that Three Card Monte wasn't invented on the streets of New York in the 1980s, but I had no idea that scams like the Pigeon Drop, Change Raising, the Lotto Scam, the Oak Tree Game, or the Double-Play had been around for centuries.

So I guess I'm never going to run out of material as long as human beings are greedy enough to cheat, and suckers are equally greedy enough to allow themselves to get duped by con artists.  You can’t make this stuff up; you don’t have to.