Up in Elmore's Room

Tuesday brings Elmore Leonard's 41st novel, Up in Honey's Room, which is final installment of a loose trilogy that began with The Hot Kid. (The middle part was Leonard's New York Times serial, Comfort to the Enemy.) Leonard's hitting the Free Library Philly this Thursday, and I was lucky enough to score a 30-minute phone interview with him this past Friday. The complete Q&A will appear at www.citypaper.net this Wednesday evening (or whenever the new issue is uploaded), but here's a little sneak preview for you. Leonard told me that his plots always come out of his characters, and I asked if he ever had an end point in mind. His response:

No, I’m always making it up as I go along. The first 100 pages seem to work, because I’m introducing characters, and we find out what their angle is. But then from 100—and I always think of it that way, in three parts—but from 100 to 200 is when I have to do a little plotting. And I don’t want the plot to be obvious. I want the reader to wonder what’s going to happen and be surprised at what develops. Because now in that second act some of the secondary characters will get into action. And then, of course, there's the third act. In the past my manuscripts all run around 350-360 pages. So once I approach page 300, I have to start thinking of the ending. And there are always several different ways you can end it. I choose one that I like and just go for it.