토론:엘모어 레너드

글쓰기의 10가지 규칙

• 좋은 저자는 보이지 않는 인물이다 Being a good author is a disappearing act. by Elmore Leonard.(발췌)

이것들은 내가 책을 쓸 때 내가 안보이게 만들어주고, (사람들에게) 뭔가를 말해주는 게 아니라, 뭐가 일어나고 있는지를 보여주도록 도와주는 몇 가지 원칙들이다. 만일 당신이 특별한 언어나 상상력을 갖고 있다든가, 당신이 듣기에도 좋은 목소리를 갖고 있다면 당신이 '안보이도록' 하는 것에 대해서 별 관심이 없을 수도 있으니 그렇다면 안 읽어도 좋다. (These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.)

1. 날씨 얘기로 시작하지 말 것.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.

2. 서문을 피할 것. Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

3. '말했다'는 말 이외의 말을 쓰지 말 것. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. '말했다'는 말을 다른 말로 바꾸려고 하지 말 것. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

5. 감탄 부호를 절제할 것. 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.

6. '갑작스럽게' 따위의 말을 쓰지 말 것. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.” This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly”tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. 특유의 방언을 쓰되 아낄 것. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories “Close Range.”

8. 자세한 인물묘사를 피할 것. 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.

9. 장소나 사물에 대한 지나치게 세밀한 묘사를 피할 것. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill. And finally:

10. 독자가 건너뛸 부분이라면 쓰지 마라. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip when 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.

10가지를 모두 합쳐서 한 가지로 만든다면, 만일 쓴 것처럼 보인다면, 다시 쓴다는 것이다. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Totos (토론) 2008년 8월 16일 (토) 23:51 (KST)