How to Write Like Tolstoy

A Journey into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers

Richard Cohen

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786070227
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies

A charming, eloquent love letter to the stories and writers we love
A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR

‘This book is a wry, critical friend to both writer and reader.’ Hilary Mantel

‘There are three rules for writing a novel,’ Somerset Maugham once said. ‘Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.’

So how to bring characters to life, find a voice, kill your darlings, avoid plagiarism (or choose not to), or run that most challenging of literary gauntlets—writing a good sex scene?

Veteran editor and author Richard Cohen takes us on a fascinating excursion into the lives and minds of our greatest writers—from Balzac and Eliot to Woolf and Nabokov, through to Zadie Smith and Stephen King, with a few mischievous detours to Tolstoy along the way. In a glittering tour d’horizon, he lays bare their tricks, motivations, techniques, obsessions and flaws.

* Includes revealing insights from the lives of Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, J. D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Kate Atkinson, Philip Roth, Emily Brontë, Ali Smith, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Agatha Christie and many more *

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1 Grab, Invite, Beguile: Beginnings
• CHAPTER 2 Circular Ruins: Creating Character
• CHAPTER 3 Stolen Words: Three Forms of Plagiarism
• CHAPTER 4 The Trick of It: Points of View
• CHAPTER 5 Says You: The Art and Craft of Dialogue
• CHAPTER 6 Secret Trapdoors: The Power of Irony
• CHAPTER 7 Grabbing Fiction by the Tale
• CHAPTER 8 Waves in the Mind: Rhythm in Prose-Writing
• CHAPTER 9 “Just Like Zorro”: Writing About Sex
• CHAPTER 10 Vision and Re-vision (Part 1)
• CHAPTER 11 Vision and Re-vision (Part 2)
• CHAPTER 12 The Sense of an Ending
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Credits and Permissions
• Copyright