I heard today that crime fiction writer Elmore Leonard has died at age 87.

Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing:

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”…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.”
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.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
― Elmore Leonard

Mr. Leonard wrote a heap of books. Chances are you’ve read some of them, or at least seen the movie. There are a lot of writers who wish they could write like him. If you haven’t read his stuff, get yourself a stack of his books and get going. You’ll need a good sized stack because once you get going, you’ll gobble them up. They one day, you’ll belch and say, why am I so full? Then you can go read something else for a while.

RIP