The late great Elmore Leonard left us his Ten Rules for Writing. They have been widely quoted, which is to be expected. Leonard was one of the most successful American crime writers of the last several decades, and if he laid down the rules for writing, beginners and lesser writers hoping to improve should follow his rules, right?

Wrong. Let's take a hard look at these rules.

Rule Number One is, Never open a book with weather. Sounds good. Meteorological scene-setting is tedious, and "It was a dark and stormy night" is one of the most ridiculed first lines ever. But one of the best-known and most admired openers is, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." So George Orwell broke Leonard's rule, and produced 1984, a book that's not just a classic but an enduring bestseller.

Rule Two: Avoid prologues. Does "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again" ring any bells? Yes, it's the first line of the prologue to Rebecca, a crime novel that has sold better and longer than any of Leonard's.

Rule Three: Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue. "'What's keeping Newt?' Augustus asked," writes Larry McMurtry on p. 10 of Lonesome Dove. On p. 12 he writes, "'That old man can barely cook,' Pea Eye remarked."

Rule Four: Never use an adverb to modify the verb 'said.' "She said severely, 'You're lucky,'" writes Ian Fleming on p. 21 of Thunderball.

Rule Five: Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. Alistair MacLean used four just on p. 7 of The Guns of Navarone

Rule Six: Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose'. Tennessee Williams titled a play Suddenly Last Summer. NBC correspondent Richard Engel titled a book And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East.

Rule Seven: Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn entirely in regional dialect, patois.

Rule Eight: Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. "A man entered who could hardly have been less than six feet eight inches in height," writes Arthur Conan Doyle, beginning half a page of description of a character in "A Scandal in Bohemia.The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"

Rule Nine: Don't go into great detail describing places and things. In "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," Conan Doyle devotes several pages to describing a hat. First Watson describes it and misses everything important, then Holmes describes it and deduces a complete biography of its owner. Such passages are some of the most admired in crime fiction--more admired than anything Leonard has written.

Rule Ten: Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip. Millions of readers have adored Anna Karenina--and many of them have skipped the chapters in which Levin sets down his theory and practice of successful farming.

So if authors with more critical kudos and book sales than Leonard--we're talking Tolstoy now--break Leonard's rules, what good are they?

Okay. You think I'm being very obtuse, failing to see that Leonard isn't really laying down the rules for all writers. It's just his attention-getting way of pointing out and ridiculing things other writers do that he doesn't like. His piece is funny and forceful. He's a great novelist, and I've only been pretending to diss him to make a point.

Here's the point. Beginning writers can be over-awed by a master like Leonard. They may believe he's saying, imitate me--and you may enjoy a bit of my success.

What he's really saying here is the opposite. Don't imitate other writers. Find out what works for you and do it. Leonard was brilliant at dialogue, and he was able to find ways to write novels that consisted almost entirely of dialogue. It worked for him. It may not work for you.