Brevity

Elmore Leonard sat across the table from me, looking exactly like his dust jacket photo. Owlish glasses.  Scraggly goatee.  Tweedy sports jacket over a plaid shirt.  He was in Vancouver promoting When The Women Come Out To Dance, a collection of short stories and two novellas, and agreed to come on my CBC Radio show Saturday.   

Leonard is a master of the short story.  The TV series Justified is based on his short story Fire In The Hole.  He’s written several dozen crime novels (Get Shorty was made into a movie starring John Travolta and Gene Hackman), a dozen or more westerns (3:10 To Yuma was made into a movie in 1957 and again in 2007) and even an international thriller or two. He writes crackling dialogue like no one else and uses it to move the scene along and keep the reader turning the pages, which is why his work is so adaptable for movies and TV.  So I asked him if he had any advice to writers about how to perk up their prose.  He didn’t, but his own mantra was simplicity itself.

“I just leave out the stuff people don’t read,” he told me.   

I spent more than thirty years editing stories for radio, taking out the aural equivalent of the stuff that people don’t read.  My inner editor is always present when I write, decluttering and removing the unnecessary.  I’ve tried to take Elmore Leonard’s mantra to heart in my novel Astraphobia, part of BWL’s Paranormal Canadiana Collection.  The story follows three generations of the McKenzie family as death by lightning stalks them from Scotland to Ottawa to Moose Jaw.  Astraphobia will be published in June 2025 by BWL.       

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