Stick – Elmore Leonard

“Stick said he wasn’t going if they had to pick up anything.”
 
First line, Elmore Leonard just dives straight in. He doesn’t try to create an atmosphere: he doesn’t “try to” do anything. He just does it.
 
When I’m not writing, I’m reading all kinds and it can create a jumble in the mind. After reading Leonard, I feel like I’ve just taken all the trash out, swept and mopped and the door’s left open to let the fresh air in.
 
For Stick, robbery was just an option he tried out and he is thinking of working next in construction, maybe. He is not proud or ashamed, having done his time and paid the price, but he has certainly learned valuable lessons in jail. Because he has no agenda or meanness in him, when he applies prison behaviour to Florida life situations outside, the direct fearlessness takes others and us by surprise and the effect is deadpan humorous.
 
Leonard’s a writer I go to to learn from. Like Stick, he does what he does quietly and singularly well. When it comes to writing, he lets others make a song and dance and just gets the job done.
 
There’s more to this than just a preferred style. Leonard’s happens to match his milieu of dodgy business, crime and other ways that his American characters make money and get by.
 
With Leonard, we hear the real voices. These people wouldn’t say, “Is she married?” “Do you cook?” They say, “She married?” “You cook?” If his characters have no use for auxiliaries, or the word “if”, neither does he.

As the voices, so the narrative description, also. Not ‘how you would describe this to create an effect?’ but: ‘what does it look like?’ Only Leonard would come out with such supreme advice for writing as this: “leave out the parts people skip.”
 
When you respect words as he does, using them sparingly as an astronaut using water, they grow in power. But there’s more to it that this. Leonard wasn’t aiming for authenticity—if ever you do that, you miss—but it is achieved in his books because he is practicing something else altogether: invisibility. This is the great lesson I take away from reading him. Let the characters and the story take over and keep your own self out of it.