Wednesday, December 8, 2010  Elmore & Eudora  Last night I heard
Elmore Leonard read, the last of Butler University’s visiting
writers this semester. He’s in his mid-eighties now, but the
moment he began reading from his novel, Freaky Deaky, years fell
away and he was at the same his own low-life characters carrying
on a hilarious dialogue about a gangster who might or might not
be about to get blown up by a bomb and the writer delighting in
his own words, sometimes half-chuckling at a line.  During the
Q&A a guy asked, “What’s the secret to good dialogue?” Leonard
looked bemused. “Don’t you hear it?” he asked. “There are people
all around us, talking. I listen.”  Someone else asked if he
knew what the end of a story would be when he started it. He
said, no, he just got a couple of interesting people talking and
let them go. If someone gets boring, he shoots him. About three-
quarters of the way through the book, he starts thinking about
how it could end. A book could end in a lot of different ways,
he said.