Don't get hooptedoodle mixed up with your story

Novelist Elmore Leonard gives valuable writing advice. [Hat tip Stephen Hicks]

Top two tips for mine:

• Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip. You know, the hooptedoodle.
  
• If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.

Bad advice for a blogger:

• Being a good author is a disappearing act.

A good novelist shold be invisible. True. Unless you're Truman Capote. For a columnist or a blogger however, being invisible is career poison -- if indeed there were such a thing as a blogging career path. Be visible. That's my own advice to writers of blogs: Let us hear your voice. And avoid passive verbs like the plague.

LINKS: Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing - The Official Elmore Leonard Website
When Passive Verbs Attack - Peter Cresswell