Elmore Leonard Interview
By Jean Henry Mead
“I don’t believe in writer’s block or waiting for inspiration. If you’re a
writer, you sit down and write. Fortunately, I enjoy it. In fact, I love book
writing. Writing a film is something else. The first draft might be pleasant
enough, but after that, the rewriting becomes a chore. Chandler called it ‘Turning
over old bones.’”
“Dutch” Leonard’s overnight success began in 1951, when he flipped a mental coin
to decide between writing crime novels and westerns. “Westerns won because I
like western movies a lot,” he said, “and because there was a wonderful market
for western short stories. You could aim at the
Saturday Evening Post or
Colliers, and if you missed there, try
Argosy, Blue Book, and on down to the
lesser paying pulp magazines, the most prestigious being
Dime Western and
Zane Grey. Right behind them were
Ten-Story Western and Fifteen
Western Tales.”
Eighty-two-year old Leonard has always been an avowed reader. “A bookworm, yes,”
he said, “beginning with the Bobbsey Twins
and The Book House volumes of abridged
classics that included everything from
Beowulf to Treasure Island. In the
fifth grade I read most of All Quiet on
the Western Front, serialized in the
Detroit Times, and I wrote a World War I play that was staged in the
classroom, my first piece of writing.”
His
first nine years were spent south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the youngest of two
children. He lived in Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Memphis before moving to
Detroit in 1934, during the World Series. Raised a Catholic, he graduated from
Detroit High School and the University of Detroit, both Jesuit institutions
where he majored in English and philosophy.
A baseball player during high school, he
acquired his nickname “Dutch” from teammates, who borrowed it from the
Washington Senators knuckleball pitcher. The second Dutch Leonard served in the
Navy during World War II with a Seabee unit in the South Pacific. Four years
later, he acquired a bride and a new job with an advertising agency.
Leonard said he lusted for full-time writing, and remembers a letter from his
agent in 1951, which attempted to discourage him from quitting his advertising
copywriting job to freelance. He had concentrated on truck advertising for
Chevrolet and, by that time, had a tank full of writing catchy ads. Getting out
of bed at five o’clock, he wrote two pages of fiction before going to work “with
the rule that I couldn’t put the water on for coffee until I’d started writing.
I’ve been a disciplined writer ever since.”
While working for the ad agency, he supplemented his early morning writing by
placing a pad of paper in his desk drawer. With the drawer partially open, he
wrote fiction on the job.
Leonard’s first two short stories were rejected, so he decided to spend more
time and effort on research. Although he had never set foot west of the
Mississippi, he concentrated on the Southwest, Apaches, the cavalry and cowboys,
while subscribing to Arizona Highways
Magazine to learn all he could about the arid terrain. His first sale the
previous year was a novelette titled, “Trial of the Apache,” which sold to
Argosy for their December issue. His next story, “Tizwin,” earned
him a rejection letter from Argosy and
a sale to Ten Story Western, which
eventually appeared in print in 1952 under the title, “Red Hell Hits Canyon
Diablo.”
Thirty of his short stories sold during the 1950s, four of them to
Argosy and the Saturday
Evening Post, while the majority appeared in
Dime Western and Zane Grey.
Leonard sold everything he wrote with the exception of his first two short
stories and several with contemporary settings.
By
the end of the fifties, television had taken over. “The pulps faded away and the
book advances didn’t compare to what was once offered. It took nearly two years
to sell Hombre, for an advance of
$1,250.” Multiple printings followed, with the book listed among the twenty-five
all-time best westerns. Hombre more
than made up for its meager beginning, along with a film version starring Paul
Newman, which earned the writer a modest $10,000.
Gunsight
was his last western novel, written at the request of Marc Jaffe in 1979 for
Bantam Books. Leonard then flipped his genre coin and found that crime can pay
quite well. Stick and
LaBrava made him an overnight success,
nicely padding his wallet along with the 1985 film version of
Stick, starring Burt Reynolds, a production he prefers to ignore.
The writer’s innate humor is deadpan, he said, not slapstick.
Glitz
sparkled for eighteen weeks on The New
York Times bestseller list, ensuring him top billing on the literary
marquee, but although the film rights were optioned by Lorimar, production
stalled for more than two years.
His
sudden popularity cut deeply into his writing time. “It’s nice to get fan mail,”
he said, “a few letters a week, and being recognized on the street, but the
interviews are wearing me out. I’m asked questions about writing, and about my
purpose in the way I write that I’ve never thought of before. And I have to take
time to think on the spot and come up with an answer. I’m learning quite a bit
about what I do from recent interviews, and getting a few answers.
“What astonished me most is to be interviewed by George Will one day and Pete
Hamill the next. I learned that both, despite their widely divergent points of
view, enjoy my work.”
Interviewers ask Leonard for advice for budding writers. He usually responds
with: “The worst thing a novice can do is to try to sound like a writer. I guess
the first thing you have to learn is how not to overwrite.” His advice is simply
to write. “Don’t talk about it, do it.
Read constantly, study the authors you like, pick one and imitate him, the way a
painter learns fine art by copying the masters. I studied Hemingway, as several
thousand other writers have done. I feel that I learned to write westerns by
reading and rereading For Whom the Bells
Toll.”
A
portrait of Hemingway hangs on the wall of his office, reminding him that he
studied the revered novelist’s work for “construction, for what you leave out as
well as what you put in. But I was not influenced by his attitude, thank God. My
attitude is much less serious. I see absurdities in serious situations,
influenced in this regard by Vonnegut, Richard Bissel, and Mark Harris, and this
shows in my writing. It’s your attitude that determines your sound, not style.”
Leonard wrote for many years in longhand on specially-ordered yellow sheets,
rewriting and revising until he was ready to type his final draft. “I’ll do a
few pages this way and then put it in my Olympia manual office-model
typewriter,” he said. “I hate to change ribbons, but have no interest in
electronic advances. How the words are eventually reproduced is not my concern.
I revise as I type, aiming for five or six clean pages a day. Then I continue to
go back and revise and the pages begin to pile up. Sometimes I’ll go back and
add a scene or shift scenes around, but most of the revising has to do with
simplifying, cutting out excess words, trimming to make it lean or to adjust the
rhythm of the prose.” His manuscripts usually run 350-400 pages, and take three
to five months to complete. Working 9:30-6:00 on weekdays, he has worked most
Saturdays and at least half-a-day on Sundays, if in the middle of a book or
script.
“I
don’t believe in writer’s block or waiting for inspiration. If you’re a writer,
you sit down and write. Fortunately, I enjoy it. In fact, I love book writing.
Writing a film is something else. The first draft might be pleasant enough, but
after that, the rewriting becomes a chore, Chandler called it “Turning over old
bones.”
Averaging a book and a half a year and several drafts of screenplays, he said,
“I’ve been wanting to begin my next book since last fall, but can’t get to it.”
The
slightly built, quiet-spoken novelist has never rushed through a first draft,
only to revise. “That’s done as I go along, so that by the time the end is in
sight, I can turn the manuscript over to my daughter Jane, who does all the
final typing.” His five grown children and nine grandchildren have read his work
in manuscript form and are supportive.
Leonard said that his wife has been the only person he discusses his work with
in depth, “or just below the surface. She has the good story sense, but better
than that, she can sense false notes and characters who are acting slightly out
of character. She’s helped me enormously in bringing my women to life. She also
helps with research and keeps an ear open—it might be in the ladies room—for
interesting dialogue. She’s the only one I’ll discuss a scene with before I
write it. There’s a danger in telling too much before you write—the loss of
spontaneity—which is the main reason I don’t choose to outline or think too far
ahead. I’d rather sit down at my desk each day and be surprised.”
“The
Dickens of Detroit,” as he’s known by faithful fans, worked for many years in
his small den off the foyer of his unpretentious Birmingham, Michigan home.
“Getting it right,” he said, “is all that’s important.” He never worried about
speed. When his muse ran out, he usually typed what he had handwritten, hoping
for some additional lines to come through while seated at the typewriter. He
said, “I feel a lot closer to the story when I’m touching it.
“To
me, the characters are everything. I begin with them, and if a story doesn’t
come out of their interactions, I don’t have a book. I imagine a type of
character in a particular setting—South Miami Beach, Atlantic City—adding other
characters in a very vague idea of a plot situation and make it up as I go
along. Characters audition in their opening scenes. Some, who I think at first
are going to be main characters end up playing minor roles while a walk-on
character will now and again talk his way into a part that becomes the third or
fourth lead.”
Leonard develops his stories in scenes with dialogue moving the plot, seldom
knowing what’s going to happen beyond the next chapter, and “never, ever knowing
how it’s going to end.” The only exception was
Hombre. The novelist broke
conventional rules by changing viewpoints in different scenes to get inside his
character’s heads.
“I
experiment,” he said, “rewriting scenes from different points of view, to
determine which is the most interesting or dramatic. And I try very hard to keep
any evidence of a writer out of it. I’ve said to interviewers, ‘If it sounds
like writing, I rewrite it.’ I don’t want any of the words to get in the way, to
distract—which is the reason I don’t use figures of speech—to get between the
reader and the story. I give it to my characters and they run with it.”
Claiming that he cannot write metaphors, he also avoids adjectives and adverbs.
“Whenever I use one, I cross it out. You should never hear the author.”
A
finely-tuned ear for conversation and a subtle sense of humor carry his plots
forward with less narrative than is
usually written. Leonard has hung out at police stations for as long as three
months, soaking up local jargon and procedures. He also visited Angola Prison on
the Mississippi-Louisiana border, talking to maximum security inmates to learn
prison vernacular. Many of his crime stories have been set in South Miami, where
the crime rate, coupled with the influx of Latin and Caribbean immigrants,
provided him with more plots and characters than he may ever use.
Greg
Sutter helped with research. A part-time employee for a Detroit film production
company, Sutter conducted Leonard’s preliminary legwork as well as library and
newspaper information gathering.
“For
my novel, Glitz, he went to Atlantic
City, researched local newspaper stories, made contact with the police, and took
180 photographs of the area. I spent a week there getting the feel of the place,
talking to the police about their particular procedures and snooping behind the
scenes of a casino operation.”
The
author feels that Valdez is Coming was
his best western novel, and has a special fondness for
Swag and
The Switch. “I think I’ve been
improving with each book, trying ways to simplify the writing that, to me, work
but is not that apparent to the reader. I’ve introduced characters who are a
little more complex, varying the point of view more often to get minor
characters to perform. The reason I like [those two novels] is because the
stories are off-beat, the bad guys are the good guys—sort of—and the plots are
less conventional than my latest efforts. Less commercial, too.”
One
of the biggest mistakes to appear in one of his novels was not the result of
sloppy research, but the renaming of his protagonist in
Split Images. Raymond Cruz, the cop
from City Primeval, was supposed to
move on to the next novel as a continuing character, but when Leonard’s agent
read the manuscript, the writer was told to change Cruz’s name if he hoped to
sell the screen rights. United Artists previously bought
City Primeval and owns the character
Raymond Cruz. (The screen version earned UA the Grand Prix de Literature
Policiere in France in 1986.)
“My
publisher, Arbor House, would rather have a movie sale than a continuing
character,” he said, “so I changed Raymond Cruz to Bryan Hurd and lightened his
mustache a little. I changed the name throughout the manuscript, but missed one
and as did the publisher’s proofreader. So, on one page of Split Images the name
of Raymond Cruz appears out of nowhere. It’s not much of a mistake, though. I
don’t even remember which page it’s on.”
Leonard’s crime novel, 52 Pickup, was
released during the fall of 1986 as a film starring Roy Schneider and
Ann-Margaret, with the author sharing screenwriting credits.
Bandits followed, which appeared for
more than ten weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, with screen rights optioned by actor Bruce Willis.
Touch originally sold to Bantam and later to Arbor House after Leonard
acquired the publishing rights, and was also optioned for filming.
Freaky Deaky then made its debut in
April, 1988. Forty-one Elmore Leonard books have seen print to date, with
Up in Honey’s Room due for release.
(The
interview was excerpted from Jean Henry Mead’s book,
Maverick Writers.
Signed
copies are available from the author: JeanHenryMead@aol.com.)