On "Writing Advice": Make Reasoned Choices With Intention
Welcome to OUT OF CHARACTER, Buttondown edition! ICYMI, I have ported my newsletter off of Substack in light of their questionable platforming & monetization decisions. If you’re seeing aesthetic changes, that’s why! The content should stay the same, but drop me a line if you have any trouble.
March Totals:
- 43,947 words
- 36,637 fiction
- 9 projects (SO unfocused this month); one interactive story (19k), two short stories (8k, 4k) and three drabbles finished
- 7,310 content
Books read this month (links to booksta reviews where applicable):
- Good Neighbors, Sarah Langan
- The Searcher, Tana French
- Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
- The Wych Elm, Tana French
Very excited to announce COPPER SPINES, an interactive fiction partnership between myself and my friend Kathy! I am the main writer, and Kathy is behind the incredible illustrations. We are launching our first title later this month—A LIMBER LOVE is a 19k illustrated interactive horror-romance novella, and it’ll be free to play on itch.io. I’ll be sending out a bonus issue of OUT OF CHARACTER talking about when the meta supports the narrative when the game is out, so keep an eye out then! In the meantime, you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
Writing advice is good for one thing only: making you think about craft. You don’t need to take writing rules as gospel, but you do need to think about them. It’s a good part of figuring out your own process. This is also true of bad writing advice: sometimes your best rules for writing are formed by reflex when you run into a bit of advice that strikes you as patently wrong. You can also intentionally cultivate your own best writing advice from writing rules that aren’t very good.
Elmore Leonard’s so-called ten rules of writing are an excellent example of when the rules themselves are bad, but if you can extrapolate the themes of his advice from the bad individual pieces, there’s some wisdom to be found.
Elmore Leonard was, of course, primarily a thriller writer. Genre always matters to the applicability of advice. There are things you can get away with in literary that would be cut in a tropey sci fi, and rightfully; I also think a lot of his advice goes against what I most enjoy about books. But a thriller writer I am not, so I’m coming at this with the biases of my own genres: pretentious romance and pretentious spec.
I’m going to take Elmore Leonard’s ten rules a few at a time to excavate some usefulness from what is pretty negative, unhelpful advice. You can find annotated versions of these rules with a quick google, but for our purposes it’ll mostly take away from the argument. Most of the time, he’s broadly saying something I agree with, which is: when writing, make reasoned choices with intention, or: Do Things On Purpose For Reasons. It’s just a matter of excavating that advice from negatives and admonishments.
Let’s dig in.
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
On the face of it, this advice is telling you not to do perfectly valid things, but in fact, it’s telling you not to write a boring or irrelevant opener. This is good advice! You shouldn’t do that. Your first line should probably be a hook directly related to the ideas and/or events of your book. Ideally, it is an action hook. The weather and prologues are two great ways to delay an action hook.
Personally, I think it’s both fun and possibly good to open with the weather, as long as you have your action hook within the first paragraph, AND if your action hook is relevant to the weather—e.g., “Malibu Stacy only got away with it because of the mist.” As long as your opening lines serve your central story and aren’t just there for atmosphere, do it, whether it’s weather or prologue or something else. Make reasoned choices with intention.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
What Leonard is admonishing here is laziness. These phrases, functions and symbols are often relied on by writers to convey shorthand. Leonard’s advice here is a longwinded way of saying “show, don’t tell“—but it’s all telling you what not to do, when instead I think you should—ready?—make reasoned choices with intention.
It’s probably a good idea to be selective about using verbs other than said, adverbs, and exclamation points. They can serve as lazy shorthand. Adverbs can make it easy to avoid doing the work of setting a physical scene, for example: did she say it tersely—or were her arms crossed over her chest, was she standing away, was her gaze somewhere else, was she unhappy with you for something that happened hours ago? In other words, why did she say it ’tersely’? Have you set the scene sufficiently to rely on that shorthand?
If none of those questions matter—if, for example, she’s speaking over the phone—then ‘said tersely’ might be the only choice. And that’s the thing: sometimes adverbs are appropriate.
Sometimes exclamation points are appropriate! Some genres just need more exclamation points. Punctuation modifies tone, and when used intentionally, exclamation points may well be the right choice even if frequent or repetitious. On the other hand, if you’re trying to convey a sense of urgency or stakes, there may be better ways to do it than with punctuation. It may also be right for characterization; I myself do not speak in exclamation points, but I have friends who do. Be intentional and don’t be lazy, and your punctuation choices are probably fine.
Sometimes ‘said’ is not descriptive enough and you should replace or modify it. Sometimes you should use shorthand. The “suddenly”/“all hell broke loose” rule is pretty good, though: it’s also scolding lazy shorthand, as well as getting at redundancy. “All hell broke loose” is roughly meaningless unless you then explain what that broken hell looks like, and in that case, you no longer need the literal phrase “all hell broke loose.” “Suddenly” is trickier, because sometimes things do happen suddenly; but generally speaking, you use “suddenly” when describing a change, a difference between one moment and the next. Much of the time, describing this change is going to work better for a scene than just saying “suddenly”. If the word “suddenly” is not describing a change, meanwhile, you are much better off using a different word.
Leonard’s advice is trying to get at “be intentional in your writing,” but ironically, as long as you’re being intentional, you can break any of these rules with impunity. The truly versatile writer needs to know how to employ different skills in different context: showing and telling, shorthand and setting the scene, verbs and adverbs, and know when to apply each. Sometimes “shouted,” “said tersely,” or “suddenly” is exactly what the scene needs to flow well, and sometimes it’s not. The skill isn’t in not using these elements of style—it’s outright bad advice to say “never do X,” because it discourages skill-building that can only improve your writing! The skill is knowing when to use certain elements and when to use others. Approach your writing with intention.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
These may well be good advice for writing thrillers, but I’m going to go ahead and shove them in the trash. For one thing, not describing characters is a luxury held by predominantly white writers in a predominantly white industry assuming predominantly white readers. If you need a practical reason to put difference and diversity into your writing, it makes for a deeper world and deeper characters. Describe your characters! Why not?
What Leonard is warning against is descriptions like “I have long ebony black hair with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears,” which comes back to “don’t be irrelevant”. Sometimes character descriptions are irrelevant. It may be a stylistic choice to make someone illegible, or it may be a science fiction premise or secondary world where using Earth-standard descriptions feels antiquated. But that doesn’t mean you should never describe characters; it means that you should describe them or not describe them with intention. Develop your skills: learn to describe your characters in ways that feel neither irrelevant nor intrusive to the story, and you’ll be following the spirit of Leonard’s advice here if not the letter.
Leonard’s position as a thriller writer is especially relevant here, because thriller is a genre that is more concerned with Inquiry or Events than Character or Milieu. (If this description bewilders you, you can read my last post on balancing MICE elements in your story here.) Perhaps he is encouraging you instead to characterize behaviors and mannerisms—but if you’re writing a character-driven story, the physical characteristics of your characters are likely directly relevant to the plot. In romance novels, I think you should always describe your characters in detail; it helps with immersion. If your characters are about to make out, height is relevant. Eye colour is relevant if you’re staring into them in search of their soul.
In speculative fiction, meanwhile, surroundings are incredibly relevant and a crucial part of worldbuilding. An alien planet might have purple trees, which you need to describe because the image in the reader’s mind is going to be green otherwise. If your protagonist later faces a situation where they’re facing shoving someone off a cliff, mentioning cliffs in the topography early is a really good way of establishing theme and foreshadowing.
Explicit physical description, then, is only to be avoided if you’re foregrounding neither Milieu nor Character in your story. If these things are important to your story—for pity’s sake, describe them.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
11. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Once again, Leonard is imploring the writer not to bore the reader in THE most unhelpful way. A better way to say “don’t write skippable material” is: be intentional, include things for reasons, and cut what’s not relevant to keep things tight.
This bonus tip is similarly ridiculous in its vagueness. Whatever could this mean? If it sounds like writing…? It is writing; why shouldn’t it sound like what it is?
Presumably what Leonard wants here is for narration to flow like water, as though a person was standing in a room and absorbing its events and circumstances. You don’t stand in a room and process it like “The room was rectangular, with off-white walls and an eight-foot ceiling—eggshell, maybe. There were six people there, some standing together and others apart, each of differing heights, many with different hair colours. She didn’t know who they were, except for John, whom she recognized by his white-blond hair.” This is the kind of setting/character description he presumably hates. Have everyone intone, say shrilly, and exclaim, and it becomes his worst nightmare.
But you might describe the same room thus: “It was unexpectedly bright for such a plain room. Its occupants, most unfamiliar, arranged themselves in its corners, trying to look casual as they waited. She recognized John when she saw him across the room, his silvery hair catching the light.”
Nothing wrong with that. It describes a character and the room, and probably doesn’t “sound like writing” by Leonard’s standards because the narration comes off like natural cognitive processing. You process the room and its contents, register that you don’t know the people there, and then register what is familiar, including why it’s familiar. Make description feel natural in the POV character’s natural process and you’re probably naturally going to avoid what Leonard is warning against.
But maybe it does “sound like writing.” So what? You are writing; it is writing. It is okay, like the duck before it, for writing to sound like what it is.
Of course, no “rule” of writing exists without its exception, even “do things on purpose for reasons.” The most correct of Leonard’s rules is:
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
The reasons he gives are technical: once you start spelling phonetically and adding apostrophes, he says, “you won’t stop.” Look—don’t do it because it’s a fast and easy way to offend someone, and an especially fast and easy way to be racist. Especially if you, like me, are white, take it as a rule: don’t put dialect into the text unless you share the background you’re writing about.
That said, there’s a differentiation to be made between dialect and jargon/slang. Variant vocabulary can be good to include for characterization. A benign, illustrative example: if you’re writing a Scottish character and they use an American analog to describe something because you’re avoiding “regional dialect,” that’s silly. But don’t, for example, render a Scotsman’s accent phonetically unless you are yourself a Scotsman, or you are otherwise fluent in Scots. Also don’t render Hagrid’s accent the way Hagrid’s accent is rendered. This rule breaks the “with intention” rule: even if you have a reason for doing this, even if you are doing it on purpose—broadly, don’t. Standard English grammar and spelling (not to be mistaken for prescriptivist English grammar and spelling) is the general rule in writing, and it’s a good one.
You can show linguistic difference in other ways—like with selective vocabulary changes, or it may be okay to give a brief, inoffensive description of a character’s accent before defaulting their dialogue text to standard English. But, broadly, if you’re considering writing a character in a dialect you’re not intimately, personally familiar with, your options are:
- Just don’t write in dialect, or
- Write a different character so you don’t break this rule.
You’re probably not the magic exception. It probably doesn’t add flair. Describe a character’s accent in one line and let it go. Do this on purpose and with intention.
So what are good rules of writing, if I’m so critical of these? My “rules of writing” are few and pretty broad:
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Develop skills, lots of them, even contradictory ones. Then develop new ones, or develop those ones some more.
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Try different things in your writing; use what works and discard what doesn’t. In other words: make reasoned decisions in your writing, with intention.
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Consume tons—more than you think. Books are ideal, but video games, movies, comic books, and television can also fill the tanks. Ideally, do so reflexively.
In the spirit of Elmore Leonard, all these rules really say are: Learn on purpose, and practice. If you’re weak in something, instead of avoiding it, why not learn how to do it? Even if it takes you a while, even if you never use the skill—you’ve learned something applicable! That’s a much better directive for developing your writing than “don’t” and “never”.
That concludes my first issue here on Buttondown! Thanks for following me this far. If you were hoping I’d forget you in the port, no hard feelings; you should see an unsub button in your email below.
If you’re still here with me, thank you. Let me put in one more plug for Copper Spines’ twitter. You’ll hear from me again in a week when we launch our first title.
In the meantime, you’ve been reading OUT OF CHARACTER. Let’s put something on the page.