Elmore Leonard’s rules for good writing. More rules by Henry Miller, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell. And timeless advice from Stephen King, Anne Lamott, Ray Bradbury, and more.
Hey there’s my 2005 drawing of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules w/o attribution again. ;-)
Everyone has an agenda - even oursleves to oursleves.
—Unknown
Sponsorship
Today she was in casual riding gear; helmet, shorts and knee-pads, every surface covered in sponsors’ logos. She was an anthropomorphic Formula 1 car, wind tunnel testing included. Even her Progue shoes were festooned with bumper stickers. Her new helmet was her latest piece of kit: one-of-a-kind and built especially for her. Based on a lightweight, tough carbon shell, the entire outer surface was a screen made from flexible organic LEDs, or FOLEDS, connected to sensor arrays built into her clothing or fed wirelessly from advertising hotspots or marketing executives sat in the crowd at races. It was aimed squarely at capitalising on Olympic-sized television exposure. It could show anything, from qualifying times and national flags to positional information during the race itself. Telemetric data was displayed inside her goggles like a fighter pilot’s head-up display, channelling split times and leader boards into her peripheral vision. It was good for training and qualifying runs, but filtered out by hyper-focussed brain activity come finals time, like Stirling Moss blitzing the Mille Miglia.
Margarine
The spare room held the tokens of their infatuations. Every book, fable and myth about Dreamland, Area 51 and Skunkworks, with accompanying artwork and miniature models, from Have Blue to the Wobbling Goblin. Marvin had purged the books of all their facts; like how Lockheed had radar-tested a model of the F-117A stealth fighter in the Nevada desert and discovered that the pole it was stuck on had a greater radar signature than the aircraft itself. And that they had to manufacture the aircraft vertically because of its awkward geometry. And that during the Gulf War, groundcrews found dead bats around the tail, their sonar bamboozled by the absorbent paint (which was a lie). And that the SR-71 Blackbird leaked fuel on the tarmac because the gaps in its panels were filled by heat expansion at the extreme speeds and altitudes it operated at. And that aliens didn’t exist and that UFOs could be explained, somewhere along the line, by some secret military hardware that would one day divulge its technology into a kitchen appliance that you would come to take for granted. Like margarine. Or Teflon spatulas.
Flatland
Every day is written out in long hand before I start it. I always know where it will end. I planned it that way and there is nothing I can do to change it. Today I know exactly what I should be doing. I should be doing the work sat in front of me. I should be reading the brief and responding with terse, accurate emails. I should be requesting the corporate standards document and testing the limits of their typographic grids. I should be laying it all out on the screen, coldly and methodically, iterating consciously whilst my subconscious clicks the bricks together and flicks the switches. I know how it works, I’ve spent my whole life getting to this point. It is not a revelation. There are things to do and things not to do. There are things I want to do and things I don’t want to do. Sometimes those things are the same.
I was taught to diverge and converge, to dive in and pan out. Right now, I’m zoomed all the way out. No more clicks will change my viewpoint. I am the average of my five closest friends. Except I don’t have five friends. I have two friends and one of them is myself. I am half myself and half my friend. I am half black pixels and half white. Everything I think simultaneously makes perfect sense and is utter nonsense. I am both on and off at the same time, a wave and a particle. In the present tense, I stare an empty pixels. In the past, I have stared. In the future, I will stare. And no-one will know, and no-one will care, and half of me will be upset and half of me won’t.
It has taken a long time to fail this badly. All the millions of pages I’ve looked at, all the things that failed to inspire me like they said they would. They all lied to me. I left a part of myself on each one. They have flattened my mind to single plane, scrolling infinitely, constantly refreshed and extended but never bending over the horizon. I am stuck in flatland. There is no z to my x and y.
Once I could think in all directions at the same time, pluck answers from a separate dimensions, reach out in two directions simultaneously and pinch the two points together into the same space and time, bending light, emitting heat, making no noise. Now I am a monolith, stationary, humming to myself, keeping the same shape, bounded by parallel sides and perpendicularity. I cannot shift into a rhombus, a parallelogram or any other sheared quadrilateral. I cannot be transformed. You cannot type in new dimensions for me. There are no filters you can apply. No external script can affect me at runtime. I am prime, divisible by myself and one. My volume is constant, my density unchanged. I am the materials that made me, coded to a single plane with no memory to expand.
Gyroscopic overload
His eyes were drawn to at an old woman pottering on her Segway near the edge of the pavement, skirting the kerbstones and heading directly towards him, yellow velour tracksuit providing a natural warning to those around her. She was exploring the limits of the gyro-stabilised device, teetering backwards and forwards, her resultant vector taking her very slowly towards him. She had invested in the carbon fibre back support (£299), which was just as well in the circumstances.
Her feet angled outwards on the baseplate like a serifed ‘I’, supporting her forward tilt, marbled hands grasping the fat grips. Every wobble was electronically translated into a pitch forward or backwards, a tweak on the handlebars spinning the device in her involuntarily chosen direction.
Good, thought Marvin, and continued to observe her at the peripheral of his vision. She still had a poppy pinned her jacket, with a thick woollen scarf on top despite the summer temperature. She was no stranger to pensioner cliché; blue rinsed hair, glasses hanging from a chain around her neck, and a very small scared dog in the basket in front of her. As she got closer, he could see the remnants of breakfast on the smeared lenses. Her ankles bulged out over her comfort shoes and the diameter of her legs remained consistent all the way to her knees, only connecting at her grazed thighs.
The woman in the street had awkward arms, thrown wide by arthritis and counterbalanced by worn gyroscopes. She was ten feet from the van when it happened.
A super-lorry took the corner too quickly, bumping over the sleeping policeman at the top of the high street, its Estonian number plates betraying the driver’s lack of local knowledge, satnav unsuckering from the windscreen. Both trailers, packed full of bee hives, buzzed like vuvuzelas as the under-pressurised nitrogen shock absorbers reached the limits of compression and rebounded violently. The second trailer, twenty hives short of a full load, rattled loudly and shed its loose bindings, splitting the side canvas and scattering its apiarian contents all over the high street, crash blossoming, bees pouring like their own watery honey, thinly and rapidly, lifting off in search of food other than the apple orchard they had lived in for the last three months. Marvin had no fear. The bees avoided him anyway.
The old woman’s senses failed her one after the other as Marvin watched. Her left wheel caught a cracked kerbstone and she instantaneously passed the sensory limits of her device, plunging blindly, not even putting her hands out to protect herself. The full left side of her body connected with the tarmac, knee then hip, elbow, shoulder and jolted head, parting the stranded bees like a fat butter knife.
Marvin left the van and rushed to her aid, close enough to be the first responder, stamping a safe path. The woman lay still, spitting bees and grimacing but fully conscious. A large bump rose from her forehead. Her left ankle, mottled under thick tights, was already blackening, velluvial matrix ruptured, leg turning to smoked sausage. Marvin blinked the image away and removed his coat to place under her head. Half a satsuma segment had been shaken from the woman’s glasses and was instantly colonised by the nearest bees. The chain holding the glasses had snapped, throwing them a few feet away and scratching the plastic lenses. He picked them up, cleaned them and put them in his own pocket. He knew he would look after her. No-one was stopping to help. Melissophobia was ripe in the local populace.
Everyone else subconsciously noted the accident, the bees, the evident capability of the man in attendance, and flocked smoothly around the distraction, maintaining a constant radius. They exhibited textbook behaviour, guilt unimpinged. Some stopped briefly at a good rubbernecking distance, more to look at the bees than anything. Mothers pointing them out to headphoned children who gawped for a second and then looked for the next interesting thing.
The onlookers had shopping to do, and moved on. The driver of the lorry was righting split hives in the hope of mitigating the damage and avoiding an insurance claim. His bosses were receiving many complaints on the 0800 phoneline advertised on the back of the lorry. ‘How’s my driving?” it invited. “Shit”, would say the answerphone many times over.
“Shall we call an ambulance?” said one patently unfit man, face grey from exertion, struggling to break into a sweat but kind enough to broach the conscience barrier that held every one else back.
“Let’s just see if anything is broken,” replied Marvin, “If she’s OK, I’ll take her round to A&E, it’s quicker, especially with the strike on. My van is over there.”
The man nodded agreement, deferring authority to Marvin’s apparent calmness. In truth, he wasn’t calm at all. He was fighting his raw urges.
The woman was coherent and calm, like this happened every day of the week. After a couple more minutes, she was happy to be helped to her feet. Marvin checked her limbs carefully for breakage, but saw none, and her reactions indicated as much, but the bump on her head was angry and the bruising blackened like only old skin could. To Marvin, he looked like his grandfather’s head after he had accidentally dropped a dumbbell on it, rupturing blood vessels and slicing into intoxicated skin. He swore he saw his grandmother smiling.
Marvin half-lifted half-carried the woman into the passenger seat of the van as the other man struggled with the skewed Segway.
“Thanks” said Marvin, “You’ve been a great help”.
Go away, he meant.
The man returned to the accident site, picked up his briefcase and flocked off. Marvin smiled to himself. It was going well. The woman was relieved to be there, and Marvin smiled again, this time to her. He looked at the scene.
Junkies bled out of the alleyways and scooped up bees into every available pocket. One man put them under his tattered trilby hat, containing the bees for a second before scooping them up again and again. Another man angered bees into stinging him repeatedly on the neck, desperate for another high. He was enraged by their apparent lack of potency, but persevered with his own private madness. Bees were rare and valuable and these people were skilled in converting solids in something intravenous. The police arrived two minutes later and set to work scraping up the scavengers. The questions would have to wait, and the precipitate events would be left undocumented for some time to come.
Marvin’s smile had not left him.
“Don’t worry,” he said to the woman he now knew as Dorothy Olive, “I’ve got some strong painkillers here, and some good vitamin tablets too. Have some, they’ll perk you up no end and stop the shook from setting in. I seriously doubt the doctors will even want to see you. You’ll be better off than the bees, believe me. Most of them will be carrying parasites the equivalent of you or me walking around with a monkey on our backs. Things could be a lot worse - a third of them will be dead within the week. I think your odds are a little longer than that.”
Dorothy Olive stroked her dog as Marvin executed a perfect three-point turn in his unremarkable van.
“Do you like animals?” She asked.
“Oh yes. I love them.”
He exited onto a road leading to precisely zero medical facilities. The dog yapped loudly before Marvin silenced it with a fierce look. He glanced in his side mirror, watching a new swarm flock in from the rooftops and roosts to make the most of the unexpected feast.
Pavemental
Average white men exerted their patriotic right to space, bowling along with wide elbows. Teenagers collapsed into each other, every part of their body in constant contact with at least one of their friends, steering each other to the next shop and sharing headphones so they could sing along to the same music. Young mums with buggies costing a week’s benefits ploughed the crowds, furrowing the heels of upstream walkers and scowling at the less conspicuously reproductive who force them onto the road.
Reverse graffiti on the walls stood out clearly, clean tags sculpted from dirty surfaces by high pressure air cans. Marvin wanted to see someone arrested for that activity: community service for partially cleaning a wall. This district popped up red on the online criminal maps, and remained a hotspot for drugs despite copious local authority investment in drop-in (and -out) centres, free clinics, methadone distribution programmes and self-initiated self-help groups. Unfortunately, these often turned into help-yourself groups.
Marvin had spent time in nearby coffee shops, navigating the maps in real time, giving himself a guided tour of the latest knifing or fight spots. He knew where to look for the latest gore: a splatter of blood, haemoglobin decayed into dull brown, had been neatly cleaned into a the shape of a hemp leaf by a budding artist. A shell casing, missed by overworked forensic teams, was embedded in the window putty of a baby clothes shop.
He allowed his eyes to focus back onto the people again, tuning out spurious stimuli, filtering and attenuating the choice bits. Just like only seeing Mini Coopers on the road when you’ve just bought one. Most of all he noticed the stragglers, the injured, the old, stooped or straight, who lagged behind the general flow, existing outside of the same deadlines as everyone else. They could not guarantee alignment with their co-pedestrians and gathered many spiteful looks and muttered insults. Walking or motorised, they followed their own wobbly path, rippling constant adjustments through everyone around them. Had they earned the right, merely from their age or condition, or were they just as awkward as everyone else? For every war hero there must be ten war cowards, fifty peaceniks and five deserters. A murderer at eighty should still have the same sentence as someone at twenty. Surely.
We all die in the middle of a story.
—Mona Simpson
Helvetica
Marvin stood in front of the mirror with a bare chest and a Cotic Multiliner 0.3 mm in his left hand. His sinistrality made writing backwards an easy task, and years of pen work enabled him to replicate Helvetica characters precisely and repetitively. They were evenly spaced and consistently sized. The ascenders and descenders were beautifully balanced, the counters delicately controlled. Max Miedieger would have been proud. The concentration he employed barely registered in his brain activity.
As a year ten schoolboy on work experience he had watched engineers use their metal rules to control their handwriting on Post-it notes. Even mundane messages were brought to life by the curiously flat bottomed letters and unshakeable adherence to British Standard 8888 (Technical Product Documentation), in spite of their six pints of mild every lunchtime. It was impossible to discern an individual’s handwriting and he was fascinated by their dedication to their craft, and took it wholesale into his own repertoire.
When he had finished, he put down the pen and admired his own work:
Marvin Gestetner
Graphic Designer
120976231196
Blood Type ‘O’ Negative
