Almost two years ago, The Guardian published 10 Rules of Writing from Elmore Leonard. Leonard is famous for his allergy to adverbs and his advice in The Guardian includes the usual harangue. But Leonard goes further and issues a fatwa against the word “suddenly” and against adverbs that specifically modify dialogue words like “said”.
Being an empiricist, I’m interested to know if Leonard follows his own rules. Digital text now makes it easy to answer such questions. Using his novel, Get Shorty, as my sample, I found there that he uses 342 adverbs including 4 instances of the adverb “suddenly”. Maybe The Guardian should publish a new piece called “The Exceptions to the Rules”.
If writing were easy enough that it could be reduced to a series of 10 or even 100 rules, then we could all follow Bo Catlett, one of the thugs in Get Shorty:
Chili opened the script again, flipped through a few pages looking at the format. “You know how to write one of these?”
“You asking me,” Catlett said, “do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn’t like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how to write, didn’t you? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I’ve even seen scripts where I know words weren’t spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don’t think it’s too important. You come to the last page you write in ‘Fade out’ and that’s the end, you’re done.”
Chili said, “That’s all there is to it?”
“That’s all.”
Chili said, “Then what do I need you for?”