How to write like tolstoy6/29/2023 The whole book is a super-charged recommended reading list.Īs well as fiction, Cohen cites letters from editors to authors, manuscripts, anecdotes, essays, conversations with authors, interview transcripts, and critical reviews. In fact, reading this book is like standing in a literary hailstorm. The chapter on dialogue has changed the way I read and appreciate fiction, as has the analysis of the different effects achieved by direct speech, reported speech, and free indirect speech.Ĭohen’s arsenal of examples is vast: Aristotle, Gustave Flaubert, Robert Frost, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Tom Stoppard, Thomas Hardy, Agatha Christie, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, Salman Rushdie, and so many more. He discusses what works and what doesn’t, presenting numerous examples to illustrate. Psst! It’s not actually an analysis of Leo Tolstoy.Ĭohen addresses ten literary topics: beginnings and endings, dialogue, creating characters, irony, rhythm, sex, point of view, plagiarism, and revision. It put me in such a fever of love for literature. My favourite book of the year so far is Richard Cohen’s How to Write Like Tolstoy, published in 2016.
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