| talking about fiction |
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Recently, we caught the tail end of a Charlie Rose interview with Elmore Leonard, whom many people think of as a hard-boiled crime writer. Which he is, of course. But actually he’s more than that: a thinking writer whose work is admired by ‘serious’ novelists like the British writer Martin Amis and others. An example of Leonard’s thinking: “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.” Now that’s a piece of advice to chew on since it goes to all the elements of fiction. But what can it mean? Doesn’t writing inevitably sound like writing? Well, no. Weak writing sounds like writing. And sometimes strong writing of, say, the Jamesian cast, which lives on deliberation and circumlocution in its generally successful quest to evoke the finest filaments of human experience. As a practical matter, though, we take Leonard’s dictum to mean that we must not merely make announcements ABOUT the actions and speeches and thoughts and feelings of our characters, that we must capture the feelings, etc. themselves. In short, we take Leonard to mean the sort of thing we’ve been advising on this site all along, evocation, not explanation. No easy trick, to be sure. But that’s the capacity fiction writers must cultivate.
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