RIP Elmore Leonard

Aug 21, 2013 | Better Writing

Elmore Leonard died this week at age 87. In his lifetime he wrote fifty novels, mostly westerns and crime fiction. About a third of them were turned into movies. John Williams did a wonderful job of chronicling Leonard’s career using references and reviews from New York Times, starting in 1956.

If you want to write well, you should read his ten rules for writing. When it appeared in the NY Times, the title was “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.” I loved Leonard’s crime fiction, but this piece is my favorite of all the things he wrote.