A character watches, mesmerized, as a diver jumps into a five-meter-diameter tank from a height of eight stories. The girl he is with asks him why he is so fascinated. The character replies, “I like watching people make what they do look easy.”
This scene takes place in Tishomingo Blues, a novel by Elmore Leonard. And that is the feeling one gets when reading his stories: everything seems so easy, it is so fluid, that one would think that he visualized the story all at once and wrote it in one go.
Leonard (1925-2013) was always a pragmatic writer. To support his family while trying to become a novelist, he worked in an advertising agency in the early 1950s, getting up at five in the morning to write for two hours before going to design commercials to sell Ford trucks. He started writing Westerns because they were the stories that magazines bought, but by the late 1960s, with several books published but little money to show for it, he realized that a) Westerns didn’t allow him to reflect everything he saw around him, and b) crime novels were now selling better.
Leonard switched literary genres, but unlike his new colleagues, he had no interest in tormented detectives or psychopaths, much less moral lessons or detailed descriptions. “As a reader,” he said, “I prefer to judge for myself what a character is like by the way he talks.” And rather than having a fixed narrator, he wrote each scene from the point of view of the character whose perspective gave the most life to the situation, which also served to show that character’s mental world.
The dream of aspiring writers is to write a book that will make them famous. God protect you from your wishes: will they be able to write another novel just as good? Can they withstand the pressure of expectations?
Some do. But there is a second dream that is much better, and it was the one Leonard lived: when he was finally “discovered” in the early 1980s, he had already published more than twenty novels, and readers rushed to buy them, turning them into bestsellers years after their publication.
Leonard lived not in Los Angeles or New York or Paris but in a suburb of Detroit, and by then his lifestyle revolved around writing every day from nine a.m. to five p.m., and he had no intention of changing that. He had overcome his alcoholism, raised his children, was married for the second time, and having written the million words it said it took him to discover his voice, he knew he would write even better novels than those he had already published.
Fifteen novels later, in 2001, the New York Times asked him what his secret was for writing such good novels, one after another. Leonard responded with ten rules that helped him show, rather than tell. They all have to do with technique, and at the end he offered one more rule, which he judged the most important because it summed up all the others: “If what I wrote sounds like literature, I write it again.”
Nine years later, inspired by that article, the Guardian asked fifteen other writers to give their own rules. None of them talked about technique. The advice they gave was along the lines of “Live life and write about life,” “Keep a light and hopeful heart, but expect the worst,” and “Honor the miraculous in the ordinary.” Thank you very much.
Let’s go back to Tishomingo Blues.
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The diver, tired of working in amusement parks, has managed to get a casino to hire him to do his show—diving from eight stories high. We enter Tunica, south of Memphis, deep in Confederate territory. Three hundred pages later, the reader is immersed in the racism, drugs, poverty, and ignorance of the American South, Civil War reenactments, the history of the blues in the region, and the myth of musicians who sold their souls to the devil in exchange for fame. Leonard has woven all these themes together without the reader noticing, as he is engrossed in the story, until he finally understands that this is what is happening: the diver also has to decide whether to sell his soul to the devil.
Remember what we discussed at the beginning? It applies here too. Writers who know what they’re doing make writing look easy.
P.S.: Tishomingo Blues is translated into Spanish as El Blues del Misisipi. But if you can get any of Leonard’s books, they are definitely worth it.
2024-07-23 12:14:00