The Part That Readers Skip

Elmore Leonard wrote more than forty novels across nearly five decades, most of them gritty, character-driven crime fiction. Across all of it he built a method around a single aim: to disappear from his own pages.

In a 2001 essay for the New York Times, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Leonard set out ten rules of writing, later collected as a book. Their purpose, he explained in the preface, was to keep him invisible while working. The odd word in that title, hooptedoodle, is John Steinbeck’s coinage, his name for the pretty writing that tends to get between a reader and the story. Leonard lists the usual intrusions: opening with weather, leaning on prologues, reaching for adverbs and exclamation points, describing characters at length.

His tenth rule is the most expansive: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” He goes on to say: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

We all have those intrusive words, show-off sentences, and wordy paragraphs. Leonard’s philosophy suggests we should remove them, even when they’re the lines we’re proudest of.

Leonard’s rules are less about style than self-effacement. They describe the discipline of removing yourself so the story can arrive uninterrupted. That awareness improves when other writers are reading your work, which is what our critique groups and Work in Progress Readings are built for.