My favourite book of the year so far is Richard Cohen’s How to Write Like Tolstoy, published in 2016. It put me in such a fever of love for literature.

Psst! It’s not actually an analysis of Leo Tolstoy.

Cohen addresses ten literary topics: beginnings and endings, dialogue, creating characters, irony, rhythm, sex, point of view, plagiarism, and revision. He discusses what works and what doesn’t, presenting numerous examples to illustrate. 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.

Cohen’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. In fact, reading this book is like standing in a literary hailstorm.

The whole book is a super-charged recommended reading list.

As well as fiction, Cohen cites letters from editors to authors, manuscripts, anecdotes, essays, conversations with authors, interview transcripts, and critical reviews.

I already want to reread the entire thing.

“Becoming involved in the lives of fictional characters has not only been my main pastime, it has shaped my moral world.” - Richard Cohen, xv.

Further reading:

-Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer

-James Wood, How Fiction Works