HOW TO WRITE LIKE TOLSTOY:

'There are three rules for writing a novel,' Somerset Maugham once said. 'Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.' Here's 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 his engaging style he invites us to grab, invite and beguile with cracking openings, create charactera, points of view, the art and craft of dialogue, the power of irony, and vision and revision. In a glittering tour d'horizon, he lays bare their tricks, motivations, techniques, obsessions and flaws. Behind every acclaimed work of literature is a trove of heartfelt decisions. The best authors put painstaking - sometimes obsessive - effort into each element of their stories, from plot and character development to dialogue and point of view. Veteran editor and teacher Richard Cohen draws on his vast reservoir of a lifetime's reading and his insight into what makes good prose soar. Here are Gabriel Garcia Márquez's thoughts on how to start a novel ("In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book"); Virginia Woolf offering her definition of style ("It is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words"); and Vladimir Nabokov on the nature of fiction ("All great novels are great fairy tales"). The result is a unique exploration of the act and art of writing that enriches our experience of reading both the classics and the best modern fiction. 'This book is a wry, critical friend to both writer and reader. It is filled with cogent examples and provoking statements. You will agree or quarrel with each page, and be a sharper writer and reader by the end.' - Hilary Mantel. Illus and Archive photos, 323 page paperback.