How to Write Like Tolstoy

A¿Spectator¿Best Book of the Year

¿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.