Elmore Leonard's Night Before Christmas
Elmore Leonard’s Night Before Christmas Author’s Note: This short story is the result of a writing challenge. A close friend of mine, who likes to throw these challenges out there to his writer friends, asked me if I would be willing to do a rewrite of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas” using the writing style of a favorite author. I told him that one of my favorite writers was Elmore Leonard. He said cool, do that. Hemingway was already taken anyway. He showed me the Hemingway version that someone did and it was pretty much a straightforward rewrite using Hemingway's prose style. That was way too boring for my tastes so when I got home I sat down, started doodling, and when I was about four hundred words in I sent my friend a message on Facebook letting him know that I hadn’t even bothered to re-read the source material yet. That’s just how I roll, ya’ll. We both thought it was pretty funny. Anyway by the time I had the story more than halfway finished I did