Illustration: Andrzej Krauze 

Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin 

1 Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.  

2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.” 

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. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary. 

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”. 

5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful. 

6 Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose”. This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points. 

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range. 

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”, what do the “Ameri­can and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story. 

9 Don’t go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill. 

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.  

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. 

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is published next month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 

Checkout the some more useful rules at;

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one

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Check out this blog from the Guardian. It seems that the news is out, Manchester is a great place to be a writer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/nov/03/manchester-literary-renaissance

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So this is my first blog. You’ll have to go gently on me, forgive me if I put the wrong word in the wrong place, or if after a couple of lines I finish in a premature dizzying of words. I feel I must also confess that I use to dislike blogging, in fact possibly still dislike blogging.

This dislike probably centres on what I think blogging is. I thought that blogging was just an outlet for people to vent their pent up rage. A forum where one could complain about litter on the street, or about their ‘shitty’ day. A magical place where people without friends or no one to talk to could find a sympathetic ear. And of course a haven for those damn right arrogant people who imagine that their lives are so interesting that everyone should hear about it.

But I find now that everyone is doing it, even friends of mine who I supposed were normal. Almost everyone one I meet appears to keep a blog (which probably means they set one up once feeling they were missing out on something and never posted another). Yet I do wonder how long it will be until ‘blog’ and ‘blogging’ are in the dictionary, how long it will be before the computer spell checker will refrain from drawing a squiggly red line under the word.

This is why I decided to go along to the Manchester Blog Awards last week. I was keen to find out what the best bloggers had to offer. We heard from several of the nominees which included some funny short stories and only a little ranting. Jenn Ashworth (she is setting the theme for our next issue) who has been shortlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker also read from her new novel and talked about blog writing. Jenn won the award two years ago for her great blog Every Day I Lie a Little. She explained that blogs didn’t have to be truthful and that it should be a creative outlet.

The Blog of the Year Award went to Lost in Manchester an anonymous blogger who reveals the hidden gems of Manchester. He photographs the sights we all see about us but fail to notice. Looking back through his blogs you see him marvelling at the lovely tiling on a shop in Chorlton, at a beautiful ghost sign in the Northern Quarter and a Lemn Sissay poem on the side of a building on the Oxford road. I must admit I go passed it on the bus everyday and never realised what it was.

The night distilled in me the notion that yes blog writing could be about ranting but it could also be about much more. Because it is an uncensored world there is of course a large amount of rubbish out there but there is also a huge amount of talented interesting writers. Most of all I have found that in writing this blog and reading others that it is a pleasant distraction from the pressing things I should be doing. It is great way of putting off the work you should be doing, the washing up on the side board. It’s another Facebook but far more interesting and varied.

How was it for you?  

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Hello, Bewilderbliss readers!  My name’s Valerie; I’m one of the new crop of MA students that have co-opted this fine publication for this academic year.  We hope you’ll like what we have to offer – and we hope you continue to submit your fiction and poetry to the magazine.  In the meantime, keep checking in with the blog, and we’ll keep you up to date with what we’ve been up to, and what’s going on in the wider world.  And on that note…
   
The Manchester Literature Festival continues apace, and on Saturday October 17th, I went to an event called Is There A Novelist In The House?  I’d read about it on the MLF website, and one of our MA tutors emailed encouraging us to attend.  Two alumni of the course were presenting their work, so I thought I’d better check it out.  Here’s the website blurb (I’m feeling lazy and now you don’t have to click – I’m practically a labour-saving device):

Commonword and Manchester Literature Festival have been seeking out the most exciting new fiction voices in the North West and now six unpublished hopefuls (Rachel Connor, John Davenport, Gift Nyoni, Marli Roode, Pauline Rowe and Colette Snowden) will be pitching their novel to a panel of movers and shakers in the publishing world, including Dan Franklin (Canongate), Rebecca Swift (The Literary Consultancy) and novelist Sherry Ashworth. The panel’s favourite will win £250 and the opportunity for more extensive feedback on their work.

I hadn’t gotten a ticket in advance – wild and reckless chancer that I am – so I joined another seven hopefuls out in the hall and we watched with utter dismay as the room filled up before us.  This was a Saturday morning - a Saturday morning! – don’t these people sleep?  I’d certainly weighed up the sleeping option, and besides, I have a suspicion that my attendance was really a sneaky way of deferring working on my own novel.  (Let’s see how other people’s careers are progressing, hahahaha, gulp.) A few ticket returns came in, and soon it was just me in the hall, trying to look nonchalant, like I’d placed myself there on purpuse, clutching my bicycle helmet and looking nervous, because that’s just the way I roll, suckas.  They let me in eventually, the kind souls, and I got the last seat in the house, which was right near the lectern, so I had a very good view of the whole event.  It was held in some sort of committee room upstairs in the Manchester Central Library (beautiful building, great leather desks, makes you feel like you’re learning when you’re really just opening and closing documents in a panic) and I think the capacity was about eighty, with a few more packed in standing at the back, so there was a pretty large audience.  

Imagine pitching your unpublished novel to a panel of three and a room of ninety eager punters.  Gives me the shivers.

Each of the six entrants had already submitted their synopses and extracts to the panel of judges.  They then had five minutes each to give a public presentation, followed by a quick Q&A from the judges.  After a fifteen minute break when all ninety of us competed to get to the little refreshments table in the corner (I emerged triumphant with a polystyrene cup of tea and a Bourbon Cream – score!), they all trooped back in and the judges spent a while discussing the merits and flaws of each submission – the writing, the synopses, the pitches – before announcing the winner.

Now, my memory requires aides, like copious note-taking or a handout, if you want much precision in my reporting, and I went into this with nothing but the bike helmet and a cramp in my side from sprinting through the library at the last minute.  So apologies for the brevity of this section – the details of the actual entries are a little hazy in my mind.  On the other hand, I can unequivocally state that all six of them were brave and clear and passionate about their work, and that the range of works presented was fascinating.  

John Davenport’s novel is about a young Manchester boy on the hunt for his missing mother, who has run away from a haunted house and may or may not have been murdered; Gift Nyoni, a performance poet from Zimbabwe, has written about the conflicts there and the fallout for a pair of childhood sweethearts, caught up in it as adults; Marli Roode, from South Africa, and a very recent graduate of my own MA, pitched a literary thriller about a journalist returning after a period of exile to South Africa, and embarking on a perilous road-trip with her estranged father.  Pauline Rowe, who’s also a published poet, has written about a woman whose story begins in a psychiatric ward; Colette Snowden’s novel deals with the interior life of a woman called Marion while asking the audience to question the reliability of Marion’s narrative; and,finally, Rachel Connor, the other MA graduate on the line, presented her distopian-esque novel about polygamy, desire, and duty.

Got it?  There was a lot to take in, I have to say, and without access to the extracts, it was hard for the audience to second-guess the judges, X-Factor style.  Some of the six read from their work; others didn’t, the judges read short extracts from one or two of the entries.  The panel explained their decision in some detail, telling the various entrants what they might want to work on in the future – structure, voice, the pitch itself, and issues such as the intended audience or market for the work.  All six had presented their work differently; having never attended a literary pitching session before, and being aware that this public session might not reflect the reality of an actual pitch to a publisher, I wonder which conformed most closely to the industry standard?  There’s always an industry standard, whatever your industry, and a pitch must surely be one of the more business-like aspects to writing in this day and age.  I imagine it’s possible to approach it very much like a job interview – each situation will be different, but there’ll be acknowledged ways to approach it (I suspect Nicola Morgan probably has a post on it somewhere in her archives) and presentation is probably key.  It is a product, after all, your novel, and there’s always professional hoops to jump through, and ways to get through unscathed.

Anyway; enough of my babbling; the winner was – ready? – the lovely Marli Roode!  The name of her novel, annoyingly, is one of the many details that totally escapes me. Oops.  But well done, Marli!  I can’t wait to read her work – and I’m so impressed that both Marli and Rachel, having handed in their MA dissertations just last month, are at the point where they have good solid drafts of their novels, ready to pitch to real industry people.  I’m not sure I’ll be in that position in a year’s time, but I’ve now been set two very worthy precedents.  And congratulations to all six entrants – I’m sure we’ll see every one of them on our shelves in time.      

Finally, I’m cross-posting this over on my own blog (go on, send my stats sky-rocketing), and also, if you want a different perspective on the event, do check out the MLF’s own blog, where Benjamin Judge has written all about it.