To write or not to write

Is it just me or does everyone dream of one day writing a book? In my fantasies I like to fast forward to inking a multi-book deal, framing positive literary reviews (hopefully), or finding myself in a bookstore where someone is picking up a copy of something I've written. These scenarios are glorified and lovely and easy to skip to because the truth is that writing a decent, nevertheless good, novel is hard. Creating three dimensional characters and bringing the readers into their lives in an attention-grabbing manner takes a lot of time and thought. For those of us that are yet to be dissuaded, however, author Elmore Leonard created a list of tips and general guidelines that he has found helpful when creating work of his own.  Here are a couple of tips that I found interesting and insightful:

1. Never open a book with weather. - If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control. - You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. - Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. - A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.