Is this the most outrageously stretched book ever? I’m referring to “Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing.” Published by William Morrow for $14.95 for 96 pages, with lots of white space. I mean LOTS. If printed normally, the ten rules would take up two pages. Maybe three, tops. Of course then you’d miss out on the caricatures of Mr. Leonard and a few others (when he mentions Hemingway, sure enough, you get a big cartoon of Hemingway).
That’s not to say that the rules are bad—far from it, they’re an excellent encapsulation of what makes his writing so good. I’m just not sure you want to spend fifteen bucks on it. If you want to read the rules before you decide, you’ll find them here, in their original form as an article in the New York Times:
