How to write like Elmore Leonard:Gunsights (1979)

2002 edition

Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing have been circulated widely on the Internet, but they are more obfuscation than revelation about the art and craft of writing fiction. Reading one of his westerns, Gunsights (1979), you can begin to glean what makes his novels so good.

In this novel, two men are on opposite sides of a conflict between a mining company and a scattering of settlers on an Arizona mountainside: Apaches, Mexicans, and former 10th Cavalry regulars. The two central characters were at one time friends and partners, and the novel begins in Sonora with their retrieval of an Apache chief and a white girl.

While there, they are involved in the shooting of a gang who have been after the same chief to collect a large bounty. Now one of the two former partners is employed by the mining company attempting to drive the settlers out of their homes. The other is an Indian agent, defending them.

This could be a set-up for a conventional western novel, the two men now enemies—one of them turned villain as he works for the mining company, the other heroically serving the cause of justice until there’s a final shootout. Well, that’s not what happens. It’s much better, and here are some reasons:

Strong characters. Leonard’s characters are not the usual stock characters found in traditional westerns. You cannot anticipate what they are going to do or say. That’s because they are smarter than you and me, and their intelligence is mostly intuitive.

1979 edition

Characters in this novel get into trouble when they think too much. It may only be a split-second thought before firing a gun, and the delay makes the difference between life and death. The ones who survive act when the feeling is right and wade in without knowing what’s coming next, just trusting their instincts. Thus, when they act, we are likely to be surprised by what they do.

Part of their strength as characters is their age. They are not youths as is often the case in conventional westerns. Bren Early and Dana Moon, the two central characters, are in their 30s. They have already grown up.

Plot. Characters like this drive a plot. Leonard plays with this idea by casting a group of newspaper reporters who have come to Arizona for a particular story. For them, the “plot” they are after is the conventional one—an armed confrontation between two men who used to be friends and partners.

But the two men refuse to cooperate because they are not enemies and have other priorities. For one thing, they don’t want to be bothered. For another, they have a mutual enemy in a third man from that incident south of the border a dozen years ago—a man they thought was dead. Looking for the plot they expect to develop, the news reporters continually miss what’s going on under their noses.

Villains. Leonard’s villains eventually die because they are ignorant. They can be brutally cold-blooded and therefore scary, but confronting a foe who isn’t afraid of them, they are at a disadvantage. If that foe is smart enough to outwit them, they are stymied. And if they are dumb enough to make a stupid mistake, like pay too little regard to a woman with a shotgun, they are dead men.

The conventional western often uses vengeance as the motivation for the main character’s actions. And the villain is finally avenged for some horrible misdeed. In Leonard’s novel, revenge is what’s driving the villain. He wants payback for a nasty gunshot wound that narrowly killed him and left him with a disfigured face.

Loren D. Estleman, The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion

“This is an entertainment,” we’re told midway through this novel, “not a historical tale.” And entertaining it is, not only the story it tells but the way it is told. Estleman indulges a penchant for droll humor and clever wit as he follows a troupe of actors roaming the West and robbing banks. Played against a backdrop of actual historical events and figures, their story also has a persuasive ring of verisimilitude.

Johnny Vermillion is the stage name of the lead actor and brains behind The Prairie Rose Repertory Company. On their tracks is a Pinkerton detective, who has persuaded his boss—Allan Pinkerton himself—to let him leave his desk job and try his hand in the field. Also in hot pursuit is a gang of cold-blooded outlaws, upset that the Prairie Rose is giving them stiff competition.

Plot. It is 1875, a year in that sliver of time between the Panic of 1873 and the Little Big Horn. Johnny Vermillion, son of a Democratic party boss in Chicago, comes by thievery as easily as any young man following in his father’s footsteps.

Gem Theatre, Deadwood, 1878

A small troupe playing multiple roles, the Prairie Rose players are able to carry out a robbery during the performance of a play. One of them slips out of the theatre for the few minutes it takes to hold up a bank employee at gunpoint. You can say they take suspension of disbelief to the next level. The theatre audience, believing their own eyes and what’s erroneously printed in the program, never notices the absence of a cast member.

Philip Ritterhouse, the Pinkerton detective, is not so easily fooled. He has an obsessive attention to details that reminds one of Sherlock Holmes. By reading coverage of the string of robberies in local newspapers, he discovers the odd coincidence of the Prairie Rose’s appearance in ads and reviews on the same pages. Putting two and two together, he sets out to capture them.

Black Jack Brixton’s gang crosses paths with the company in Salt Lake City, when he and his men show up a day late to rob an express office. The money is already gone. During a summer hiatus, while the gang retires to Mexico, the actors disperse to parts unknown, and Ritterhouse sets a trap for two of them by posing as a booking agent. At the start of the next theatrical season, all are fated to be reunited in the dressing room of a theatre in Wichita.

Opera House, Iowa City, Iowa c1875

Style.  In this and other westerns by Estleman, humor and irony dominate a playful narrative style. The opening pages evoke the legendary West with a catalogue of the genre’s clichés and conventions. It’s a West that should have been, we are told, but never quite was. And what follows is a clever mix of historical fact and fancy.

Much of the fun is in the narrative voice used to tell the story. Tense switches from past to present and back to the past again. There is occasional use of the second person: a pot of coffee is so strong “when it’s poured you could tie a knot in the stream.” And there’s liberal use of first person plural: “We shall meet him in the flesh presently.”

Generic conventions are acknowledged: “Marshal Fletcher was forty and unpleasantly fat, a fixture in outlaw tales of this type.” In a Denver pleasure palace, “the usual chubby quartet gallops in sparkling leotards onstage.” Meanwhile, common knowledge is noted: “Lazy fat men are commonly dismissed as cowardly and stupid.”

Revise, revise, revise: nitpicking

Working with my own personal copyeditor, I’ve just finished the third draft of the book I’m putting together on early frontier fiction. I would have said “the book I’m writing,” but it’s at the stage now where “putting together” is more like the task that revising feels like. Some assembly required.

I’m now looking at a list of terms I need to make sure are used consistently:

couple of – My copyeditor points out that it’s not just couple, as in a couple people.

barb wire – Other forms of this term are OK (barbed wire, barbwire); I just need to stick with one.

Cavalry / cavalry – Use one when I mean the U.S. Cavalry and the other when I’m just referring to a company of mounted soldiers.

nonwhite – It’s not non-white.

backstory – It’s not back story or back-story.

kind of – Delete when it’s a hedge phrase (e.g., kind of angry).

Populist / populist – Capitalize when it refers to the actual political party.

en dashes – Use these instead of hyphens in date ranges (e.g.,  1910 – 1915)

s’ / s’s – Either is right for possessive case of plurals; I prefer s’ and just need to check for consistency. What I’m still not sure about is whether the same rule applies to a singular word ending in s (e.g. the name Adams).

dance hall – Always two words, not dancehall.

half-dozen – Takes a hyphen.

East / West. A big headache so far has been deciding when to capitalize these two words. The manuals say to use capitals when you are referring to a region with its specific culture and customs. So the East and the West are easy, and a little less so is back East and back West. But things get murky when combined with other words. Is it came West or came west? And when is it Western or western? Westerner or westerner? I still don’t have a rule for these nailed down.

Bob Stockton, Counting Coup

Coup were the bragging rights earned by Plains Indians on the field of battle between tribes. Counting coup was the ceremonial recital of a warrior’s achievements, be they merely touching an enemy, striking, wounding or killing him and taking a scalp. This historical novel is a recital of episodes in the frontier life of trapper, scout, and Indian fighter, Kit Carson. 

Plot.  The central character is Tom Adams, formerly a captain in the Union Army during the War Between the States. Adventure has drawn him to California, and the novel is structured around his interviews with Jeb Ford, a man who knew Carson.

Ford is a crusty mountain man who fetches up in Carson City, Nevada, where Adams has taken a job as agent for Wells Fargo express. Much of the novel reads like a verbatim transcript of Ford’s graphic recollections of encounters with hostile Indians. The closing chapters retell the story of engagements between Americans and Californios in the war with Mexico.

Quite a number of other historical figures walk the pages of the novel, including John Fremont, Gen. Kearny, Sam Clemens, and Commodore “Fighting Bob” Stockton, a predecessor of the book’s author. They are joined by a dozen others, unknown or forgotten, ranging from a ship’s captain, a telegraph operator, and a barmaid to “Emperor” Joshua Norton I, a deranged but beloved man who roamed the streets of San Francisco. For me, the most fascinating part of the novel came at the end, where Stockton describes what happened in later life to each of his characters.

San Francisco, Portsmouth Square, 1851

Also of interest is what we learn of the Wells Fargo’s express business, running coaches and freight wagons between Sacramento and Carson City, Nevada. And readers get a short history lesson from the days of California’s Bear Flag Republic and General Kearny’s near defeat at the hands of Gen. Pico outside San Diego.

As winter descends in Stockton’s novel (and in Ann Parker’s Silver Lies, reviewed here recently), a reader is reminded of how westerners had to endure snow and bitter cold. The traditional Hollywood western, usually shot in Southern California or Arizona, made the West seem always summery. But the novelist, without needing to resort to special effects, can let the snow fly and the temperatures drop.

Glossary of frontier fiction: B(buck ague - "By the Sad Sea Waves")

Below is a list of mostly forgotten terms, people, and the occasional song, drawn from a reading of frontier fiction, 1880-1915. Each week a new list, progressing through the alphabet, “from A to Izzard.”

buck ague = nervousness while taking aim at deer or other game. “Would you get buck-ague in a pinch and quit me if it came to a show-down? Are you a stayer?” Caroline Lockhart, Me—Smith.

buck and wing = a kind of tap dance. “In the center of the room was a large man dancing a fair buck-and-wing to the time so uproariously set by his companions.” Clarence E. Mulford, Bar-20.

buck at faro = variant of buck the tiger, associated with the game of faro played in frontier saloons. “What’ll we do—take in the Niagara Falls, or buck at faro?” O. Henry, Heart of the West.

buck nun = a hermit; a cloistered male. “I might as well go be a buck nun and be done with it.” Stewart Edward White, Arizona Nights.

buckbrush = common name for several species of North American shrubs that deer feed on. “The country was very rough, and the buck-brush grew thick.” W. C. Tuttle, Thicker Than Water.

bucker = a logging worker who saws logs into lengths. “The ‘buckers’ had then wormed their way among that giant heap of trunks and limbs and matted boughs, and sawn the good timber into lengths.” Martin Allerdale Grainger, Woodsmen of the West.

bucket = saddle scabbard for a rifle. “The troopers had still their rifles in the buckets, but it was safe for Apache then to let go his hold.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

bucket man = derogatory term for a cowboy. “Sometimes they were called ‘pliers men,’ or ‘bucket men’ by ex-cowboys who would have scorned to carry a ‘bucket of sheep dip,’ or to bother too much about mending a gap in a wire fence.” Emerson Hough, The Story of the Cowboy.

bucket shop = an unauthorized office for speculating in stocks or currency using the funds of unwitting investors. “That keeps more men broke than a Wall Street bucket-shop.” Frank Lewis Nason, To the End of the Trail.

bucking strap = a device worn by a horse to prevent it from lifting its hind-quarters to either kick or buck. “‘I can’t think what got the fellow, or me either,’ he added, with a look of chagrin. ‘I never thought I needed a bucking-strap; but it seems as if I did.’” Adeline Knapp, The Well in the Desert.

bucko = an aggressive, overbearing, domineering person; a bully. “He spoke like a bucko mate, and his words stirred the bile of Dextry.” Rex Beach, The Spoilers.

bucky = general reference to a male. “You can bully and browbeat a lot of railroad buckies when you’re playing the boss act, but I know you!” Francis Lynde, The Taming of Red Butte Western.

John Reese, The Wild One (1972)

What I most enjoy about a John Reese western is how he takes the conventions of the genre and makes them completely unpredictable. The conventions this time are right there on the cover from the title to the artwork to the tag line:

He was a boy in a man’s boots, packing a man’s gun, and sitting in a man’s saddle when he went riding into strange country…

All familiar and all true as far as they go. But try to guess what actually happens between the covers of this novel, and you’ll be mistaken.

Plot. Its plot is the basic bildungsroman (and there should be a simple word for that in English), a story about the moral and psychological growth of a novel’s main character. You see it over and over in westerns, a young man in his late teens forced by circumstances to take on the responsibilities of adulthood. It usually involves a crisis in which he leaves home and has to prove his mettle, usually with the use of a gun.

That character in this novel is Henry Ely, almost 18 years old, who is already flirting with trouble when we meet him in chapter one. Despite his mother’s warnings, he’s saddling up to meet with a neighbor’s wife for what he half expects will turn into the loss of his virginity. By the end of chapter two, he’s been hunted down by her husband and three sons, who beat him to within an inch of his life.

Thus begins an odyssey that takes him from Texas to a godforsaken settlement in New Mexico, where he gives himself another name, Jack Neely, and takes a job with a horse trader. There he inadvertently crosses a gun slinging outlaw, beats him in a fistfight, and eventually has to defend himself in a gun duel. Having developed nerves of steel by this point, he develops a reputation as a man-killer.

Nebraska Sandhills

Before long he is working as a foreman for a large cattle and sheep ranch in Wyoming, where he yearns to be his own man. That means running his own business. He has a dream of breeding mules using mustang mares. A partner has his eye on a ranch for sale in the Nebraska Sandhills, if they can somehow raise the money. And there’s this nice little bank waiting to be robbed.

And so on, through several more chapters, as the plot careens onward taking one unexpected turn after another. At the end, Jack (now Henry again) emerges from it all a grown man, having shown his grit by weathering several crises, including the loss of his virginity.

Characters. What makes all this work so well has a lot to do with how strongly characters drive the plot. Henry, as just one example, is so clearly a one-of-a-kind individual. A complicated guy, he doesn’t care whether or not you like him. He’s unsentimental and bonds with other people only as far as he can trust them. Which is not a lot.

Political correctness

Recently I picked up a historical novel that came with a warning from the author. I was told that if I held to any form of political correctness I would be offended. And it made me wish again that the term “political correctness” were abolished. It has become so over-used it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s not even a bumper sticker.

People who use it should be required to say what they mean. For instance, “It’s a free country and a) I can say what I like, b) I can show my prejudices if it suits me, c) I don’t have to grant any respect to people different from me, and d) I don’t believe in being nicey-nice about it.” If that’s not what they mean, they need to say so and explain.

For help, I direct anyone with internet access to wikipedia to discover the history of “political correctness.” Currently it takes over 4,000 words there to describe where the term came from and the many different ways it has been used over the last century.

Some may be surprised to know that it began as an epithet used by Socialists to characterize Communists who rigidly adhered to “correct” interpretations of the Party line. Later in the 20th century the term got new life by critics of attempts to banish the language of prejudice from public discourse. The theory behind this effort was that language itself can be used to perpetuate unfair forms of discrimination. In a country founded on the belief that all are created equal, that seems a worthwhile goal.

As an example, substituting the word “disabled” for “crippled” helped draw awareness to unfair discrimination against men and women in wheelchairs. It reminded Americans that the 14th Amendment applies to all persons, not just those who can step onto curbs and climb stairs to get to a job or access public services. Here in the U.S. it helped lead to the Disabilities Act of 1990. Tell me that’s a bad thing.

But in any reform movement—and not at the same time for all people—enough change becomes too much. As other groups of Americans began calling attention to social and economic disadvantages, their efforts gave rise to the idea of multiculturalism. This is the belief that American culture is not a melting pot that dissolves away all differences. It’s more like a salad of different ingredients, each worth preserving and savoring.

Social programs and government policies based on this idea met a wave of resistance, and the term “politically correct” was reborn. This time, instead of coming from advocates of socialism, it came from the Right of the political spectrum. So when a writer warns me that he or she is being politically incorrect, I want to know what exactly they mean. There is a world of possibilities, not all of them easily justifiable.

In my own case, as I write about popular western fiction of a century ago, I am dealing with novels that consistently use racist talk. Rather than sidestepping it as an embarrassing feature of them, I’ve made a point of taking a good look at it. That language is a record of how Americans perceived and understood race and ethnicity back then. It reveals a lot about our cultural history and how we got where we are today.

So I’ve included it as I write about the subject: uses of “darkie,” “greaser,” “redskin,” and so on. Note the quotation marks around each. I want readers to know I’m quoting from the authors and their characters, so there’ll be no mistake about whose words they are. I do the same for “half-breed,” “breed,” “squaw,” and “squaw man.”

But for the sake of full disclosure, I need to add that I often use the word “Indian” instead of “Native American.” My reasons for that are simple. In everyday use most Indians seem to prefer the term “Indian,” and “Native American” is a term that has been bestowed on them by nonIndians. I use “Native American” sometimes when an honorific seems in order. But I don’t put either term in quote marks. For more on this, go to Troy Smith's discussion of Indian and tribal nomenclature.

For similar reasons I use both “black” and “African American.” I remain open to debate, but having lived my formative years when “Black Power” and “Black Pride” were used respectfully, I continue to assume that “black” is not insulting or discriminatory for most African Americans. For whites, I do just that, use the word with no quotes. I don’t raise a fuss about “Caucasian,” but it seems awkward and a misnomer. I’m not from the Caucasus, and I don’t think I know anybody who is.

As for other self-identified groups in our big country, I try to be respectful, not because it’s politically correct to do so but because it’s courteous. There is always room for differences of opinion, and using unbiased language leaves open the doors for discussion, argument, and debate.

Bias immediately closes them, as when someone refers to Second Amendment advocates as “gun nuts.” That kind of talk is not going to get anyone anywhere. It just ramps up the rhetoric to where everybody’s shouting and nobody’s listening. As I often want to say to some folks, “a little courtesy won’t kill you.”

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Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: John Reese, The Wild One