How to write like Tolstoy : a journey into the minds of our greatest writers /
Richard Cohen.
- New York : Random house, 2016.
- xi, 323 p. : 25 cm.
It includes bibliographies.
Grab, invite, beguile: beginnings -- Circular ruins: creating character -- Stolen words: three forms of plagiarism -- The trick of it: points of view -- Says you: the art and craft of dialogue -- Secret trapdoors: the power of irony -- Grabbing fiction by the tale -- Waves in the mind: rhythm in prose-writing -- "Just like Zorro": writing about sex -- Vision and re-vision (part 1) -- Vision and re-vision (part 2) -- The sense of an ending.
Cohen has researched the published works and private utterances of our greatest authors to discover the elements that made their prose memorable. Evoking the marvelous, the famous, and the irreverent, he reveals the challenges that even the greatest writers faced--and how they surmounted them.