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.

Rudiger Stories

About two years ago I wrote a short story, Rudiger, and a blog about it, Mark Knopfler, Rüdiger and Me (read it here), that introduced the character of John Rudiger, fugitive financier. I titled the story and created John Rudiger based on emotions evoked by a song called "Rüdiger" by Mark Knopfler (See Knopfler perform it here.) In Rudiger, John Rudiger is living under an alias in Antigua.  He ran off with close to $100 million from his hedge fund and is now down to his last $2 million. Katie Dolan, a lawyer with the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, is sent to Antigua to try to get enough evidence to extradite Rudiger back to the U.S. to stand trial. Rudiger recruits her to help him retrieve $50 million of bearer bonds from a safe deposit box in New York.

Since then I’ve gotten to know Rudiger better, including writing a novel about Rudiger’s exploits after the Rudiger short story, Spin Move (see below).

I’ve also released two short stories and two novellas that are prequels to the Rudiger short story. The short stories are Rudiger Comes Alive and Rudiger in the Islands.  The novellas are Rudiger in Peril and Rudiger on the Streets.

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All five Rudiger stories are available in the collection, Rudiger Stories, or individually.  The collection is priced at $3.99 and the individual stories are $0.99 each. I hope you'll give them a try. I had great fun writing them, including enjoying some oddball secondary characters in Rudiger's new home in Antigua.

The five Rudiger stories are a total of 95,000 words, comparable to a full-length novel.

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In Rudiger Comes Alive, hotshot Wall Streeter Walter Conklin is a wunderkind hedge fund manager who runs a $1 billion technology fund. He’s on a roll until his CFO cooks the books to overstate their results to raise more money. The only way out for Conklin is to insist his CFO keep cooking them until he can equal those returns. But the Feds are on to him, so Conklin needs to act fast before they can throw him in jail—just as the NASDAQ crashes from its historic highs. In the end, Conklin needs to come to terms with the markets, his smart-mouthed wife, and Charlie Holden, Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York.

Rudiger Comes Alive is a 13,000 word short story, chronologically the first of the Rudiger stories.

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In Rudiger in the Islands, Rudiger adopts Antigua as his new home: he’s building a house and settling in to the islands way of life.  Then Charlie Holden, Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York, gets a tip and sends one of his staff lawyers down to get the goods on Rudiger and extradite him to stand trial.  In order to outwit Holden and his man, Rudiger needs to establish his credentials as an Antiguan national, so he enlists the help of the double-dealing local police—who will sell their allegiance to the highest bidder.  Rudiger is forced to think on the fly to adapt to the machinations of both parties as he improvises to try to stay out of jail.

Rudiger in the Islands is a 20,000 word short story, chronologically the second of the Rudiger stories.

Read a sample of Rudiger in the Islands

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In Rudiger in Peril, Rudiger has settled into Antigua as his new home. He gets a surprising phone call from Charlie Holden, Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York, who’s been trying to extradite Rudiger back to the U.S. to stand trial.  Holden tells Rudiger his former partner and CFO has been murdered in the U.S. by one of Rudiger’s hedge fund investors who lost millions and is out for revenge.  And the investor’s hired killer is now in Antigua stalking Rudiger.  Rudiger is forced to align himself with Holden as an unlikely ally as he tries to figure out which of his investors could be after him and help Holden stop him—before the hitman catches up with Rudiger.

Rudiger in Peril is a 28,000 word novella, chronologically the third of the Rudiger stories.

Read a sample of Rudiger in Peril

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In Rudiger on the Streets, Rudiger has finally settled into a peaceful existence in Antigua. No more Wall Street Journal articles revisiting his financial scandal. No more attempts by the U.S. Attorney to extradite him. No more local police hassles about his alias. But his repose is shattered when his housekeeper gets scammed out of her life savings by two cons. Rudiger’s plan to get even take him into the belly of Antigua’s underworld, where he enlists the help of a ghetto crime boss. There, he’s forced to rely on the dirty tricks he learned in his youth on the mean streets of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. And once he plunges into this world of double-dealers, swindlers and murderers, he realizes there’s no turning back.

Rudiger on the Streets is a 24,000 word novella, chronologically the fourth of the Rudiger stories.

Read a sample of Rudiger on the Streets

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In Rudiger, John Rudiger is now a long-term fugitive financier who's been living under his alias in Antigua for 10 years.  He's down to his last $2 million. Katie Dolan, a lawyer with the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, is sent to Antigua to try to get enough evidence to extradite Rudiger back to the U.S. to stand trial. Rudiger recruits her to help him retrieve $50 million of bearer bonds from a safe deposit box in New York.  Katie is no dope, and neither is Rudiger, and each one has to figure out who's scamming who as they work their plan to sneak the bonds out from under the nose of Charlie Holden, Katie's boss, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York, who's wise to both of them.

Rudiger is a 10,000 word short story, chronologically the fifth of the Rudiger stories.

Read a sample of Rudiger

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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, in part because Katie conned him out of millions. 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 crooked Swiss banker and he’s conned her out of Rudiger’s money. Can they get it back and escape before it’s too late?

Read a sample of Spin Move

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Mark Knopfler, Rüdiger and Me

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I recently wrote a short story called Rudiger.  I titled it and created the main character, John Rudiger, based on emotions evoked by a song called "Rüdiger" by Mark Knopfler.   For those of you who don’t know him by name, Mark Knopfler is better recognized as the front man, guitarist and creative force behind the now disbanded rock group, Dire Straits.  "Rüdiger" is from Knopfler’s first solo album, Golden Heart.  "Rüdiger" has a haunting melody and soft backing instruments and vocals behind Knopfler’s trademark lead guitar and gravelly voice with lyrics that linger.

A link to Knopfler performing the song on YouTube in 1996, when it was released, is here: http://tinyurl.com/423d85w

The melody and pace of the song always called to mind the image of someone skulking around with something to hide.  For years I’ve thought of writing a story about a crook hiding out in the Caribbean from the authorities, and every time I thought about it the song, "Rüdiger," played in my head.  So, I wrote the story.

In it, John Rudiger is a fugitive financier living under an alias in the Caribbean, because he ran off with close to $100 million from his hedge fund ten years ago.  He's now down to his last $2 million.  Katie Dolan, a lawyer with the US Attorney's Office in New York, is sent to Antigua to try to get enough evidence to extradite Rudiger back to the US to stand trial.  Rudiger recruits her to help him retrieve $50 million of stolen bearer bonds he can’t get otherwise get out of a safe deposit box in New York.

Katie is no dope, and neither is Rudiger, and each one has to figure out who's scamming who as they work their plan to sneak the bonds out from under the nose of Charlie Holden, Katie's boss, the Assistant US Attorney in New York (a character reprised from my Wall Street novel, Bull Street), who's wise to both of them.

I enjoyed the characters and writing the story so much that I’m creating a series out of it, called the White Collar Crime Series.  Rudiger and Katie will be back, and other shady types will be introduced as well.  I hope you’ll give Rudiger a try.

Update: since I wrote this post I introduced a new short story about Rudiger, Rudiger Comes Alive. It's the prequel to Rudiger, about how Walter Conklin, wunderkind hedge fund manager who runs a $1 billion technology fund, gets stuck between his CFO cooking the books to draw in more investors, Charlie Holden on his trail to arrest him, and his wife Angela, who's never at a loss for (sharp) words. Leaving the country begins to seem like a viable option to him.

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Rudiger is a 10,000 word short story.

Read an excerpt from Rudiger

Buy Rudiger

Rudiger Comes Alive is a 13,000 word short story.

Read an excerpt from Rudiger Comes Alive

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Now Rudiger's subsequent adventures are available in the collection, Rudiger Stories.  And a Rudiger novel, Spin Move, takes Rudiger and Katie on a new jaunt from the Caribbean to Africa, Continental Europe and the UK.  I hope you'll give them a try as well.

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Read an excerpt of Spin Move



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To John Glenn and Mrs. Slocum

Today was the 50^th anniversary of John Glenn’s orbit of the earth, the first by an American. It was also the 50^th anniversary of the first story I recall ever writing. Mrs. Slocum, my fifth grade teacher at Mt. Tabor School, gave us the assignment to write an essay about Glenn’s historic spaceflight on that day. She wasn’t more specific than that—it just had to be about Glenn’s spaceflight. I remember pondering over what to write for a while without coming up with an idea, then started writing when Mrs. Slocum said we had 15 minutes left, putting down the only thing that came to mind.

It was a story about seeing Glenn sitting on the steps of the Mercury capsule, looking dejected (I’m sure I didn’t use that word). I asked him what was wrong and he told me he’d locked himself out of the space capsule and had no way to get back in, and no way to get home again. I told him not to worry and tossed him a skeleton key. He thanked me, unlocked the door to the capsule and went in. He waved to me through the window as he continued on his way, orbiting the earth and finally splashing down safely.

I remember walking home that afternoon with second thoughts about my “essay,” afraid I’d get in trouble. The Glenn flight seemed to be the only thing anybody talked about on the way home from school, all we talked about at dinner and the only thing on television that evening. I couldn’t get away from it, and kept thinking about Mrs. Slocum sitting in front of the TV watching Glenn on the news, reading our essays, getting to mine and saying to herself, “What’s this? This isn’t an essay.” I had visions of getting my story back the next day with a “C” (that was the worst I could imagine, never having gotten one that I can recall up to that point). I went to sleep thinking, “Oh, man. A ‘C,’ Mom and Dad are going to be mad.”

When I got to school the next day I was still anxious.  Mrs. Slocum went about our lessons the usual way, never referring to the essay on Glenn.  It wasn’t until after lunch that she handed them out.  I sat about halfway back in my row, and the wait was excruciating as the kids in front of me passed them back. When it arrived I was thrilled: an ‘A.’ Mrs. Slocum even mentioned my story to the class, saying she thought it was a clever approach or something like that. I took it home and proudly showed it to my Mom, who also thought it was great.

Mom saved it for years, every once in a while showing it to a neighbor.  Mrs. Hutchinson, as I recall, pretended not to have read the story when Mom showed it to her the second time. It got to the point that I started to cringe whenever Mom brought it up with one of the neighbors around. Even so, as I write this I remember thinking back to that story many times over the years as the first evidence that I might have the inclination to be a writer one day.