CNN.com - Books - Writer Elmore Leonard says it's a mystery to him


Elmore Leonard follows several rules when writing his novels -- but he still has no idea where they're going until they get there

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- When you are reading an Elmore Leonard novel and two bad guys get together, you know one is going to shoot the other. But you don't know which.

Well, you are not alone. The author doesn't know either.

In fact, there is a lot the 75-year-old Leonard, who has just published his 36th novel, "Pagan Babies," says he does not know: He has no idea what his characters are going to do next, what they are really thinking, how his books are going to end -- or even how they are going to get to page 100.

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He lets his characters do the work for him and take the book where it should go. He likes his books to end abruptly, but now he adds thoughtful last lines because an editor complained that he needed to put more in. "Pagan Babies" has a thoughtful last line that "ties" everything together -- maybe.

He says he finds things out as he goes along, carefully obeying a list of writing rules and regulations that have made him one of the best-loved U.S. writers -- a sort of Norman Rockwell of the American underclass who creates a unique landscape of gangsters, con men, deluded dreamers and sainted fools stretching from the Detroit suburbs to Hollywood and Vine and, in "Pagan Babies," to the African nation of Rwanda.

Lots of plot

"Pagan Babies" is about Father Terry Dunn, who may or may not be a priest, may or may not know how to say Mass, but who definitely witnessed a slaughter of innocents in Rwanda.

He has now gone home to Detroit to hook up with a stand-up comedian named Debbie Dewey just released from jail and pull off a $250,000 scam involving the Mafia and Dewey's ex-lover, whom she has already tried to kill once, which is fine by Dunn as he has already killed four people essentially for being insincere during confession. Sometimes, Dunn says, reciting Hail Marys is not enough penance.

If you are an Elmore Leonard fan, then this complicated, convoluted plot is what you would expect from the author of "Get Shorty," "Out of Sight," "Maximum Bob" and "Pronto." It is a tale filled with hard-luck characters, unlikely events, wickedly funny hard-bitten dialogue, short sentences that pack a punch and a plot that grows odder and odder as pages fly by.

Maybe, he says, this is because "plotting doesn't interest me. I much rather would just fool with the characters."

Writer Elmore Leonard says it's a mystery to him

Plot may not interest him, but he cannot do without it. The plot of "Pagan Babies" suggests Leonard is a master of what is called convergence these days -- everybody showing up at the same street corner at the same time for no good reason.

"My next book will be about Civil War reenactments -- they are really popular now -- and a high diver who dives 80 feet (24 meters) into a 20-foot (6-meter) pool because he is a showoff. So I guess it will be a little complicated and it will be set in Mississippi," he said in an interview.

Leonard also has rules that are so ingrained they even pop up as clues in crossword puzzles. "I was doing the USA Today puzzle the other day and the clue was 'Elmore Leonard saying,' so I thought, What did I say? According to the puzzle I said, 'I try to leave out those passages that the reader skips.' I don't remember saying that but I believe it," he said.

The Leonard rules

"I got other rules as well: Never start a novel with the weather or a prologue, never use a verb other than said, never use an adverb to modify the word 'said,' never use a semicolon in a line of dialogue, and be very frugal with the use of exclamation points -- like don't use them!"

Not only that: Avoid metaphors like the plague; they interfere with the telling of the story.

Those are admittedly old-fashioned rules but he describes himself as an old-fashioned writer -- one who still writes in longhand and rewrites when he transfers his work to a typewritten page. When he gets to page 300 in manuscript form, he says, he decides it is time to bring his book to a close and looks for ways it should end.

He also is a careful researcher who read extensively about the genocide in Rwanda, for example, and studied pictures of churches where people were killed before he began writing.

He likes to know things like the physical look of the places he is describing before he starts, he says, because "I don't like to be vague." He has a full-time researcher who went to Cuba for him for "Cuba Libre" even though he did not have to since "I already had the world's best collection of 1899 guide books to Havana."

One thing Leonard will not do is have a regular "private eye"-style series character who shows up in book after book and tells it from his point of view.

"I always shift point of view and that's why I don't have a continuing character. I want to get into the attitudes of all the characters," he said.

"I did have a continuing character for a couple of books; he was a guy my age and he was a little hard to get along with and as the book went along he got even more irascible. Listen, I know when I have two bad guys in a scene together one is going to shoot the other. I just don't know which one."