Writing Advice from Leonard and Busiek

In 2001, Elmore Leonard published an essay in the New York Times’s “Writers on Writing” series headlined “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle”.

Leonard offered advice like:

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

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

Eventually that article was the seed of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing.

Last August, when Leonard died, the comics scripter Brian Michael Bendis featured that on his Tumblr site. In the way that Tumblr works, the scripter Kurt Busiek quoted it on his but added these comments:

I disagree with almost all of Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing, largely because any time someone says “never do X,” I immediately try to think of times it works.

But all of his rules are worth thinking about, and can be extremely useful in thinking about whether to use them. If you decide not to use a rule because you’re aware of the hurdle Leonard’s warning of but have overcome that hurdle another way, then the rule was still useful, because it got you to think about how to avoid the problem.

What Fell Out of 52 Pickup

It was a warm, clear day when I heard that crime novelist Elmore Leonard had died after well over eighty years and forty books. That news reminded me that I’d been meaning to write about the experience of recently reading one of his novels—52 Pickup, to be exact—in digital form.

Like many caper novelists, Leonard wrote lots of short scenes and jumped from one point of view to another as needed. When one of those shifts occurred within a chapter, his print publisher followed the usual format of leaving extra space between the end of one section and the start of another. If those blank areas wound up at the bottom or top of a typeset page, the publisher hauled out the simple • dingbat to alert readers to the otherwise hard-to-spot section break. 

Typesetting conventions for ebooks are different, however. Most notably, the standard ebook format follows most web pages (including this one) by putting an extra line space between paragraphs and not indenting the first line of each new paragraph. 

In converting 52 Pickup to its digital format, HarperCollins ebooks reformatted the paragraphs: no indent, extra space in between. But it also wiped out the extra spaces between one section and the next. If there was a dingbat on the printed page, the • also appeared in the digital form, but most shifts from one point of view and scene to another come with no such signal for readers. That meant Leonard’s transitions, originally smooth, were bumpy, requiring me to notice the shift, stop, and look back to confirm when it happened.

The copyright page of the 52 Pickup ebook says it was converted in 2002. I hope the process has grown more sophisticated since, but then I’d hope it would have been applied to older books. It’s an easy fix, and Leonard and his readers deserve better.