Elmore Leonard... your ten rules live on

Given his recent passing, it seems as good a time as any to reiterate dialogue-master Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writing, after which I will stop blogging other people's writing advice for a while, I promise. Anyway, the late Mr Leonard - here goes.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ... he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5. Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri­can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

RIP.

You mean there are rules for writing?

Well no, not really. I mean yes, of course there are tips, things that help, things that are good practice. But rules? They're all made to be broken, at some point.

Anyway, I'm not going to give you my rules - who am I, after all? But I will offer some from other authors, famous authors, successful authors. You might like them. If nothing else, this might make a nice jumping-off point for you.

Here we go.

Thirteen writing tips from Chuck Palahniuk

George Orwell’s five rules for effective writing

Jack Kerouac’s rules for spontaneous prose

Stephen King's six key rules for writing a bestseller

Stephen King's "Everything you need to know about writing successfully - in ten minutes"

And everyone else... including Elmore Leonard's famous ten rules, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Jonathan Franzen, Neil Gaiman, PD James, and more.

Edit:

Ray Bradbury's 12 pieces of writing advice to young authors (thanks Mark)

Colson Whitehead's rules for writing

David Morrell's five tips for writing thrillers and more