A Cat called Bartok

(Or how to avoid writing that sounds like writing)

Malcolm Pryce
The Writing Cooperative
4 min readMay 12, 2019

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Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

Five years before he died, Elmore Leonard published his Ten Rules of Writing.

I agree with them all, but happily break most of them on the grounds that there is no ‘ Writing Cop’.

But of his ten rules the one I like best is Rule №11:

When you find writing that sounds like writing, cut it.

It’s great advice, especially for student writers, but the problem is, it is clearly a paradox and not immediately obvious what it means.

What exactly is ‘writing that sounds like writing’?

Let us start with a prime example: that moment when the dying rays of the sun glint on the handle of the knife still sticking out of the postman’s eye. The murdered man lies in a pool of blood and the protagonist, weary from all that killing and troubled at heart, walks across the room and out on to the veranda. He looks up at the sky over the lake and ‘Noticed how blue and still the night was, how impossibly blue and still.’

(Note: all the examples here are slightly disguised and taken from genuine student assignments. I just hope they are not reading.)

OK, there’s nothing specifically wrong with that passage, and if I had only ever encountered it…

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