Thoughts on Elmore Leonard and Fantasy

Last entry I jabbed at Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, and someone seems to have misread me as down on Leonard. I’m not. I prefer Richard Stark, at the moment, for that kind of hard-boiled lean, mean crime fiction, but if five years from now you catch me saying that Leonard was the better writer, I won’t hang my head in shame.

The writer Michael Lydon wrote an anti-Leonard’s rules article in 2010. It’s worth reading, but for me it kind of points up some of the problems with how we talk  about writing.

Lydon essentially says,

(a) Leonard is down on description,

(b) here are some amazing passages of beautiful description from great writers of the past, so

(c) Leonard can’t possibly mean what he says—or if he does, he can’t be much of a writer.

The comments on that article (which given that these are Internet comments are remarkably intelligent, well-written, and knowledgeable, on the whole) raise the obvious objection: sure, Anthony Trollope may have written like that, but you can’t write like that now and get away with it.

The first question, for me, is why it’s okay in Trollope and not now. Is it simply fashion? Do we write better now than in Trollope’s day? Are readers just less tolerant of complex sentences? My feeling is that it’s mostly fashion, and the fact that now prose fiction has to compete with movies and TV and so forth. We want novels to be as slam-bang action-packed as movies, and we don’t want to spend hours going through descriptive passages to get to the meat. In addition, writers would really like their novels to get picked up by video production people, because if you get a novel optioned for the kind of money Hollywood has to throw around, it pays the bills for quite a while.

The more interesting question, though, is whether Lydon’s objection to Leonard actually hits the mark at all. I don’t think it does. If I’m trying to write gritty, mean-streets crime fiction, a style like Leonard’s or Stark’s is a terrific way to do it. I pare back absolutely everything I can, take the writer out of the equation, and grab the thing directly. In that case, Leonard’s advice is good. But who ever said that this is the only kind of novel? If I’m writing grand space opera, or high fantasy, this style is just plain wrong. It’s inappropriate to the subject.

I know this from hard experience. As you know, I’ve been struggling with some novels about Ghildor, who is in essence a Stark/Leonard character, much like Stark’s Parker, living and working in a low-magic fantasy world. I’ve put a lot of effort into paring down the style, Leonard-fashion. At some point in the paring process, though, you hit a wall: you can’t peel it back any further, because if you do, the right question is, “why is this set in a fantasy world at all when it would work exactly the same in modern Detroit?” If that’s true—if it would work the same in Detroit—the story is broken.

You can’t fix this by adding a few minor plot points that require magical weirdness. If you think hard enough, you could always come up with something analogous in technological terms, so the substitution resolves nothing. At that point your fantasy is window-dressing.

If you go in the opposite direction, you get the popular fantasy-crime subgenre, which is often fun but never scratches the Stark/Leonard itch. It’s fantasy with criminals, not crime fiction. Scott Lynch’s wonderful Lies of Locke Lamora is a great example: I enjoyed it tremendously, and I think it has nothing much to do with crime fiction.

What I wanted was to write a fantasy crime novel, a crime-fantasy novel you might say.

So the crux of the matter is, I had to pare down the style toward that lean, Stark prose, but remember always that the POV is a guy who lives in a world that simply is not the same as ours. Ideally, every moment of the prose should shout Ghildor’s interiority: throughout Parts 1, 2, and 4, we’re living in the guy’s head, and every word we read could have been spoken by him. But Ghildor doesn’t live in Detroit, and his sense of the world is very different to our own. So there should be traces, little hints all the way through to suggest that, right from the start, we’re inside the character’s world—not ours.

Did I succeed? No, not really, but I’m working on it. Here’s an example:

Ghildor was always interested to work with rangers. He’d never mastered their skills and never would, but he figured it was something he could learn from. Shooting a longbow at a moving target fifteen hundred cubits away through brush takes a hell of a lot of talent and practice. Tracking, though, that just needs brains.

From what he could see, Dat’s reputation as a second-rate ranger was accurate, maybe generous. He moved well, gliding across the darkened ground instead of stumping heavily, but he didn’t have that thing with his eyes that rangers have, the way they constantly scan in all directions, automatically taking in every little detail to build up a complete picture. When a deer crashed out of the bushes a little way ahead of them, they both jumped.

Some of the little tricks to make this not-Detroit are simple and straightforward. People in this world measure in cubits, which you and I have to think about if we’re going to resolve them into actual distances. A “ranger” is a specific thing, and Ghildor thinks about that thing as though it’s obvious. And some bits are a little subtler, like the way Ghildor’s sentences can run very long in a way that (I hope) feels a little different to how Parker or a Leonard-type POV protagonist would think: Ghildor lives in a world where longer sentences are more common. Again, I don’t claim that this is entirely successful, but it’s trying to take that spare, stripped-down style and transport it into a world very different from ours.

You could do this backwards: you could write lush, vibrant, Tolkien-style not-quite-English and use it to describe classic noir characters, but at some point again you’re going to have a mismatch. In the end, Tolkien’s characters cannot talk like hardboiled Americans, and more fundamentally his characters cannot be broken in the way that noir characters must be. They can be damaged, flawed, whatever—but at base their problems have to be tragic, with a kind of grandiosity that is simply at odds with the noir milieu. If noir becomes tragedy instead of existential-absurd, it’s not noir any more. So my choice was to go in the other direction, because I think it’s impossible to write noir as fantasy, but it’s at least possible to write fantasy as noir.

Anyway, next time I will get back to Le Guin’s exercises and do her “chastity” exercise.

Thanks for reading!