Morning Reading: Elmore Leonard on rhythm and POV

Adam on Elmore Leonard’s structure and his method of writing dialogue.

By day three, each day of National Novel Writing Month brings high highs and low lows. At least that’s my experience. A dozen inspirations come and go. On day four I began studying an Elmore Leonard novel. Studying other structures is helpful and it’s on a list of strategies written by someone who doesn't know what he’s doing.

This 9-minute interview Terry Gross conducted with Elmore Leonard in 1987 is full of useful writing advice. Two quotes I particular like are included below.

I listen to the rhythms more than I do words. I don’t think there will be in any give book more than a half a dozen lines, or say a dozen lines in the whole book that I actually heard someone say. It’s all made up. But it’s put within the rhythm of the way I hear people speak.

I decide before I write a scene from whose point of view the scene should be written, what the purpose of the scene is, and then let’s see what happens. Point of view is everything. It’s what keeps me down in the story within a character. I don’t know any more than that character does. The omniscient author, who’s sitting up above looking at it all, he knows what everyone is thinking. And sometimes he’ll change points of view, too often he’ll change points of view in the middle of the scene and it just thins it out. He’s telling to much at once and for me it starts to fall apart. It doesn’t retain the intensity that you can have by maintaining a single point of view.