<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Elmore Leonard, the great novelist, story writer, and scriptwriter, died this morning at 7:15 from complications of a stroke. In an era when great writers like Alice Munro and Philip Roth have the audacity to retire \u2014 pulling power trips on their own talent \u2014 Leonard died honorably with his boots on. He was working on his forty-seventh book when he died and a new film adapted from his work, Life of Crime, is slated to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this September. On television, his latest massive hit is Justified. Perhaps the most incredible fact about Elmore Leonard is that he also wrote &amp;quot;Three-Ten to Yuma&amp;quot; in 1953, which became one of the last truly great black-and-white Westerns. His career is utterly extraordinary: For nearly sixty years, he had a nearly unbroken string of hits. Though each of his hits were firmly rooted in genre fiction, whose rules are more or less timeless, they each managed to encapsulate their own period: Out of Sight is the perfect nineties film. Justified is a reimagination of the Western that is absolutely of the current moment. Nonetheless, he ran against the current: What I loved about Elmore Leonard&amp;#039;s comic characters was they were all idiots, bumbling buffoons. During the era of The Godfather and Scarface, his criminals flew in the face of most crime fiction, which nearly required masterminds, Walter Whites, Tony Sopranos, Avon Barksdales. The stupidity of the criminals in Leonard&amp;#039;s books was so refreshing, because they were so much more realistic. Actual criminals mostly are quite dumb. If they were brilliant, they&amp;#039;d find a way to make money without the risk of going to jail. Elmore Leonard captured that reality over and over again, but it&amp;#039;s always hilarious. The endurance of his success was so extraordinary. He made the same narrative tricks work over and over again. Which is why maybe my favorite thing he ever wrote was his rules for writing fiction. There are tons of writers who will give you advice on how to write, but they&amp;#039;re almost always either wrong or too vague. Kafka said that writing is an axe to smash the frozen lake of the human soul, which is great and all, but it&amp;#039;s hard to know what to do with that information. Leonard&amp;#039;s guidance was just much more practical:   1. Never open a book with weather. 2. Avoid prologues. 3. Never use a verb other than &amp;quot;said&amp;quot; to carry dialogue. 4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb &amp;quot;said&amp;quot; ... 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 &amp;quot;suddenly&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;all hell broke loose.&amp;quot; 7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 9. Don&amp;#039;t go into great detail describing places and things. 10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.   If every book you ever read followed those simple rules, then every book would be better. Obviously rule number 5 is golden \u2014 true in every case. Rules 1, 3, and 6 are also true in all but the most extreme cases. Rule 10 is more like a general philosophy of writing and life, but it&amp;#039;s one of the hardest and therefore most necessary rules to follow.  As great as his rules are, rules are only as good as their makers. These show just how great a writer Leonard was (it still feels strange to put that sentence in the past tense). Funny and brusque and useful, they have the same punch as everything else he wrote. PLUS: Elmore Leonard: What I&amp;#039;ve Learned "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a24312/elmore-leonard-dies-082013/?src=rss>