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How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers
A thought-provoking journeyinside the minds of the world’s most accomplished storytellers, from Shakespeare to Stephen KingNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SPECTATOR •“Richard Cohen’s book acted as a tonic to me. It didn’t make me more Russian, but it fired up my imagination. I have never annotated a book so fiercely.”—Hilary Mantel“There are three rules for writing a novel,� Somerset Maugham is said to have said. “Unfortunately, no one knowswhat they are.� How then to bring characters to life, find a voice, kill your darlings, or run that most challenging of literary gauntlets, writing a sex scene? What made Nabokov choose the name Lolita? Why did Fitzgerald use firstperson narration in The Great Gatsby ? How did Kerouac, who raged against revision, finally come to revise On the Road ?Veteran editor and author Richard Cohen takes us on an engrossing journey into the lives and minds of the world’s greatest writers, from Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot to Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith—with a few mischievous detours to visit Tolstoy along the way. In a scintillating tour d’horizon, Cohen lays bare the tricks, motivations, and techniques of the literary greats, revealing their obsessions and flaws and how we can learn from them along the way.
308 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 24, 2016
226 people are currently reading
2784 people want to read
About the author
Richard A. Cohen
33books25followersRichard A Cohen is the author of Chasing the Sun: the story of man's relationship to that star, By the Sword: a history of sword fighting and How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers.
From 2015 to 2017, he was been the tour expert for the New York Times tour of the World War I battlefields of France and Belgium.
He is a former publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder & Stoughton, and the founder of Richard Cohen Books, as well as former director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature.
He is a five-time U.K. national sabre champion and was selected for the British Olympic fencing team in 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984. He lives in New York City with his wife, the literary agent Kathy Robbins.
From 2015 to 2017, he was been the tour expert for the New York Times tour of the World War I battlefields of France and Belgium.
He is a former publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder & Stoughton, and the founder of Richard Cohen Books, as well as former director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature.
He is a five-time U.K. national sabre champion and was selected for the British Olympic fencing team in 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984. He lives in New York City with his wife, the literary agent Kathy Robbins.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 130 reviews
December 11, 2019
I’m a fan of books about writing. I can’t explain why they fascinate me so much but they tend to make me less lonely as a writer. The really good ones do anyway. They remind me perseverance in writing can heed staying results. To write well, you must first write badly, etc. So when a book like this comes along (the title was enough to hook me, though this isn’t a book about writing like Tolstoy as much as it’s a book about writing as well as Tolstoy, essentially), I have to take a peek.
I don’t know if I can express how well this project is put together. Cohen has compiled some terrific examples, and he’s found a way to weave them seamlessly throughout his narrative. His book is informative, with chapters on openings, endings, revisions, sex, and everything in-between, but also it’s an effortless read, which means it’s not only well written but meticulously so.
I couldn’t put this one down. I never got bored -- even when he revisited well known anecdotes and advice -- because this one is packed all the way through. It’s a clever book, a fun read, and a useful text. My copy was from the library, so I’ll have to buy it. There’s too much good stuff not to fill in the margins. I was itching to pick up my pencil and mark it up.
Cohen peels back a curtain, then opens the window behind it, then leads you out onto the fire escape to where the not-so-mainstream tidbits rest. For instance, his section on irony has you thinking about it in new ways. He discusses the things that get left out, using Salinger’s bananafish and Paolo Maurensig’s “The Lüneburg Variation� to make his points. The result for me was eye opening.
Perhaps that’s it. Like all good books about writing, Cohen uses literature to make his points. He doesn’t give you banal directives, but shows you not only what works, but how it does, letting you think it to pieces. His literary selections are curated with the eye (or perhaps the heart) of a bibliophile, and he’s found a way to bring current fiction (think Fifty Shades of Grey, though it’s only mentioned in a footnote) in conversation with the really, really old stuff (think Greek and Egyptian). He’s also chosen the best example in each case to serve his point. This is a talent in itself.
But what’s most appealing about the read is that he reveals the mind of the writer, which must be attributed to his experience as an editor. It’s refreshing to read about the collaboration involved, the ways in which writers not only interact with editors and other writers, but their readers as well. The novel is not often thought of as a collective experience, and yet it most certainly is. I look forward to reading this one a second time, with my pencil poised and ready.
I don’t know if I can express how well this project is put together. Cohen has compiled some terrific examples, and he’s found a way to weave them seamlessly throughout his narrative. His book is informative, with chapters on openings, endings, revisions, sex, and everything in-between, but also it’s an effortless read, which means it’s not only well written but meticulously so.
I couldn’t put this one down. I never got bored -- even when he revisited well known anecdotes and advice -- because this one is packed all the way through. It’s a clever book, a fun read, and a useful text. My copy was from the library, so I’ll have to buy it. There’s too much good stuff not to fill in the margins. I was itching to pick up my pencil and mark it up.
Cohen peels back a curtain, then opens the window behind it, then leads you out onto the fire escape to where the not-so-mainstream tidbits rest. For instance, his section on irony has you thinking about it in new ways. He discusses the things that get left out, using Salinger’s bananafish and Paolo Maurensig’s “The Lüneburg Variation� to make his points. The result for me was eye opening.
Perhaps that’s it. Like all good books about writing, Cohen uses literature to make his points. He doesn’t give you banal directives, but shows you not only what works, but how it does, letting you think it to pieces. His literary selections are curated with the eye (or perhaps the heart) of a bibliophile, and he’s found a way to bring current fiction (think Fifty Shades of Grey, though it’s only mentioned in a footnote) in conversation with the really, really old stuff (think Greek and Egyptian). He’s also chosen the best example in each case to serve his point. This is a talent in itself.
But what’s most appealing about the read is that he reveals the mind of the writer, which must be attributed to his experience as an editor. It’s refreshing to read about the collaboration involved, the ways in which writers not only interact with editors and other writers, but their readers as well. The novel is not often thought of as a collective experience, and yet it most certainly is. I look forward to reading this one a second time, with my pencil poised and ready.
non-fiction-to-read
October 21, 201622 Sept 2015
okay ŷ, I've marked this book tbr. When it is released in May 2016 I want an email from you to tell me it's out. You wanna give me a link to buy the book on Amazon and I will not complain at all. Please can this be a feature I can have?
22 Oct 2016; requested via library
okay ŷ, I've marked this book tbr. When it is released in May 2016 I want an email from you to tell me it's out. You wanna give me a link to buy the book on Amazon and I will not complain at all. Please can this be a feature I can have?
22 Oct 2016; requested via library
April 18, 2018
Rocketing up the charts to take
SECOND PLACE
in my all time favourite books about the love of literature.
My favourite remains .
Both books share something beautiful: a shining love of reading, writing, and literature. An infectious love which spills into your heart, and a friendly style, so that you feel all at once as if the author is your new best friend, and you suddenly love everything that they love. Francise Prose made me love Chekhov; Richard Cohen might've persuaded me to give Philip Roth another try, and I've been meaning to get round to Colette for ages.
These two books should be read together. Francine Prose takes you via the front door of literature, lovingly displaying the finished art: perfectly structured sentences, paragraphs, chapters. Richard Cohen takes you through the back door, and shows you the kitchen and the authors sweating away at their work: the troubles of writing sex scenes, when and how to plagiarise, what's a great opening, the difficulty of finishing, and rewriting, rewriting, rewriting.
This book is absolutely stuffed to the gills with quotes and references; it feels like a cosy gossip about people who you desperately admire and have always wanted to be friends with: how Hemmingway wrote (standing up, apparently); how authors feel about plot (E.M. Forster passionately in favour; Stephen King passionately against); what authors are like to edit (Fay Weldon apparently wonderfully willing to take criticism) - it's not in the book but an anecdote that I heard about Diana Wynne Jones was that her editor would tell her that certain sections needed to be changed, Wynne Jones would dutifully cut out the offending parts and then paste them all back in exactly the same place, and the editor would say it was much improved and accept it!
If you love books and books about books then definitely read this one!
My favourite remains .
Both books share something beautiful: a shining love of reading, writing, and literature. An infectious love which spills into your heart, and a friendly style, so that you feel all at once as if the author is your new best friend, and you suddenly love everything that they love. Francise Prose made me love Chekhov; Richard Cohen might've persuaded me to give Philip Roth another try, and I've been meaning to get round to Colette for ages.
These two books should be read together. Francine Prose takes you via the front door of literature, lovingly displaying the finished art: perfectly structured sentences, paragraphs, chapters. Richard Cohen takes you through the back door, and shows you the kitchen and the authors sweating away at their work: the troubles of writing sex scenes, when and how to plagiarise, what's a great opening, the difficulty of finishing, and rewriting, rewriting, rewriting.
This book is absolutely stuffed to the gills with quotes and references; it feels like a cosy gossip about people who you desperately admire and have always wanted to be friends with: how Hemmingway wrote (standing up, apparently); how authors feel about plot (E.M. Forster passionately in favour; Stephen King passionately against); what authors are like to edit (Fay Weldon apparently wonderfully willing to take criticism) - it's not in the book but an anecdote that I heard about Diana Wynne Jones was that her editor would tell her that certain sections needed to be changed, Wynne Jones would dutifully cut out the offending parts and then paste them all back in exactly the same place, and the editor would say it was much improved and accept it!
If you love books and books about books then definitely read this one!
September 26, 2022
Despite the How To title this is not really a writing guide per se so much as a collection of anecdotes, quotations, and sample passages illustrating the (often contradictory) techniques of highly-regarded fiction writers, with some thin connective tissue courtesy of author Cohen. (Who should not be confused—as I learned the hard way when I Googled him—with Washington Post columnist and noted sex pest/racist , nor conversion therapy advocate , though GR seems to have conflated him with the latter.) Inevitable chapters on characterization, POV, dialogue, etc. but also more novel stuff like irony, avoiding plagiarism, and writing effective sex scenes.
I could've done with a bit less name-dropping and accomplishment-flagging by Cohen, evidently a lifelong publishing industry type; this is the sort of book where a one-line quotation by Norman Mailer will be prefaced with a totally extraneous paragraph about how Cohen used to do passes on Mailer's manuscripts. (For that matter, it's also the type of book—published in 2016—where a glance at the index reveals at least nine in-text references to Mailer and 13 to John Updike but not a single mention of James Baldwin*.) Interestingly I can't find any indication that Cohen himself has ever published any fiction, despite having copy-edited quite a bit of it, which makes him an odd fit for a book like this. Not a phenomenon unique to him, of course, but always a curious one. Then again, as mentioned before, his main role here is as a compiler, not an instructor.
If you've read much about writers and writing it's unlikely anything here will blow your mind, but I knew what I was in for and my expectations were largely met. I'm a sucker for craft talk and authorial anecdotes, and I find this sort of thing helpful in re-stoking excitement for my own literary projects. Beyond that, I can't imagine it will linger in my mind very long.
----
* Though actually Baldwin does appear once, in a footnote alongside several other authors whom Cohen assures us write good gay sex.
I could've done with a bit less name-dropping and accomplishment-flagging by Cohen, evidently a lifelong publishing industry type; this is the sort of book where a one-line quotation by Norman Mailer will be prefaced with a totally extraneous paragraph about how Cohen used to do passes on Mailer's manuscripts. (For that matter, it's also the type of book—published in 2016—where a glance at the index reveals at least nine in-text references to Mailer and 13 to John Updike but not a single mention of James Baldwin*.) Interestingly I can't find any indication that Cohen himself has ever published any fiction, despite having copy-edited quite a bit of it, which makes him an odd fit for a book like this. Not a phenomenon unique to him, of course, but always a curious one. Then again, as mentioned before, his main role here is as a compiler, not an instructor.
If you've read much about writers and writing it's unlikely anything here will blow your mind, but I knew what I was in for and my expectations were largely met. I'm a sucker for craft talk and authorial anecdotes, and I find this sort of thing helpful in re-stoking excitement for my own literary projects. Beyond that, I can't imagine it will linger in my mind very long.
----
* Though actually Baldwin does appear once, in a footnote alongside several other authors whom Cohen assures us write good gay sex.
December 13, 2017
I’d probably rate this a little higher (not quite 3.5), especially for the range of examples (it’s not limited to Tolstoy; the title is a wee misleading) and topics (irony, plagiarism, and prose reading). The anecdotes do make it memorable and fun. Still, he doesn’t give enough actionable advice � unlike, say, John Gardner or Alice LaPlante.
November 17, 2019
I wasn't too sure what I was getting into with How to Write Like Tolstoy, there is some degree of irony that it's difficult to judge books 'on writing' until you've actually read them. Some readers may be relieved to know there isn't an over-focus on Tolstoy per se, but a useful examination of a range of authors.
Cohen mostly focuses on literary fiction, however I think the material is useful for all writers. It was to my surprise but eventual glee that Cohen includes chapters on irony and sex scenes, awkwardly going where many teachers don't dare. I also have to confess that some of the topics went over my heard, especially the section on rhythm (I mean I get iambic pentameter, but what exactly is a dactyl) which is explained in text but I struggle with.
In short, How to Write Like Tolstoy might not stand out with flashy promises, but is probably one of the more thorough and engaging books on writing I've read.
Cohen mostly focuses on literary fiction, however I think the material is useful for all writers. It was to my surprise but eventual glee that Cohen includes chapters on irony and sex scenes, awkwardly going where many teachers don't dare. I also have to confess that some of the topics went over my heard, especially the section on rhythm (I mean I get iambic pentameter, but what exactly is a dactyl) which is explained in text but I struggle with.
In short, How to Write Like Tolstoy might not stand out with flashy promises, but is probably one of the more thorough and engaging books on writing I've read.
January 17, 2024
El nombre del libro se presta intencionalmente a confusión: por supuesto que nada ni nadie te puede enseñar algo parecido a escribir cómo Tolstoi. De hecho, es bastante discutible que se pueda "enseñar a escribir" aunque me parece indiscutible que se puede aprender a escribir mejor, si uno ya trae el impulso de hacerlo.
Lo que se esconde detrás del título grandilocuente (en la traducción al castellano es incluso peor: "Cómo piensan los escritores" es una larga compilación de anécdotas y reflexiones sobre el oficio de escribir a cargo de Richard Cohen, que entre muchas otras cosas fue editor de John Le Carre y Martín Amis.
Lo mejor del libro: Cohen es una máquina de repartir ejemplos y anécdotas sobre el mundo literario. Cada uno de sus capítulos (desde el comienzo hasta el final pasando por los diálogos, los personajes, las escenas de sexo, etc.) están plagados de buenos y malos ejemplos de la literatura clásica y contemporánea. El punto débi, en mi humildísima opinión, es que tiene tantos casos para compartir que le suele costar salir del ejemplo y hacer algo parecido a una teoría. Si uno no leyó nada sobre teoría literaria, sale con una gran compilación de buenos y malos comienzos, pero problablemente sin una clara idea de qué es lo que hace un buen ejemplo.
Igual vale la pena, pero para alguien que quiera una primera aproximación al oficio literario me parece mucho más recomendable El arte de la ficción, de David Lodge, que también tiene ejemplos por doquier, pero acompañados de un poco más de contexto y definiciones.
Lo que se esconde detrás del título grandilocuente (en la traducción al castellano es incluso peor: "Cómo piensan los escritores" es una larga compilación de anécdotas y reflexiones sobre el oficio de escribir a cargo de Richard Cohen, que entre muchas otras cosas fue editor de John Le Carre y Martín Amis.
Lo mejor del libro: Cohen es una máquina de repartir ejemplos y anécdotas sobre el mundo literario. Cada uno de sus capítulos (desde el comienzo hasta el final pasando por los diálogos, los personajes, las escenas de sexo, etc.) están plagados de buenos y malos ejemplos de la literatura clásica y contemporánea. El punto débi, en mi humildísima opinión, es que tiene tantos casos para compartir que le suele costar salir del ejemplo y hacer algo parecido a una teoría. Si uno no leyó nada sobre teoría literaria, sale con una gran compilación de buenos y malos comienzos, pero problablemente sin una clara idea de qué es lo que hace un buen ejemplo.
Igual vale la pena, pero para alguien que quiera una primera aproximación al oficio literario me parece mucho más recomendable El arte de la ficción, de David Lodge, que también tiene ejemplos por doquier, pero acompañados de un poco más de contexto y definiciones.
September 29, 2018
My attitude to this work is quite ambivalent. On the one hand it provides the reader with a potpourri of quotes and provocative statements from authors, editors and critics, collected under 12 chapters (11 actually, since there are two chapters on “Vision and Revision�) dealing with different aspects on writing. Lots of insights. At the same time, the excerpts are often contradictory. Lots of fun. Irony?
The title of this book suggests that by following the advice proffered within, an aspiring writer might well result in ending up writing like Tolstoy. Sounds impressive. [I would imagine the first step in learning to write like Tolstoy would be to learn Russian � but there is no Russian grammar anywhere in the book! (Joke.)] But on the other hand, why would any aspiring writer want to write like Tolstoy, when Tolstoy does such a good job of it himself� Either way, the book includes the suggestion that, ultimately, any writer should just get down and write. Let the creative juices flow� And ultimately you can rely on a good editor to clean up any mistakes, and put some polish on the finished product.
For some writers, editors are the unsung heroes of their works; for others they are the devil incarnate.
But even before one has to deal with editors, one needs to get through to the publisher. The Publishing House usually has its own style, so there is no point in submitting writing that is not part of their style or output. This book does show you what the editor’s role is in general, not in specifics; but the writers quoted include many and varied writers, juxtaposing all types of output: serious, light, horror, crime, science fiction, historical, etc. Obviously, each type of writing uses different approaches. Does a quote from a writer of one type of writing really relate to another type? Yet here they are all willy-nilly linked together. On the one hand this can be very liberating and stimulating; on the other hand it could stifle and discourage. Take your pick.
The title of this book suggests that by following the advice proffered within, an aspiring writer might well result in ending up writing like Tolstoy. Sounds impressive. [I would imagine the first step in learning to write like Tolstoy would be to learn Russian � but there is no Russian grammar anywhere in the book! (Joke.)] But on the other hand, why would any aspiring writer want to write like Tolstoy, when Tolstoy does such a good job of it himself� Either way, the book includes the suggestion that, ultimately, any writer should just get down and write. Let the creative juices flow� And ultimately you can rely on a good editor to clean up any mistakes, and put some polish on the finished product.
For some writers, editors are the unsung heroes of their works; for others they are the devil incarnate.
But even before one has to deal with editors, one needs to get through to the publisher. The Publishing House usually has its own style, so there is no point in submitting writing that is not part of their style or output. This book does show you what the editor’s role is in general, not in specifics; but the writers quoted include many and varied writers, juxtaposing all types of output: serious, light, horror, crime, science fiction, historical, etc. Obviously, each type of writing uses different approaches. Does a quote from a writer of one type of writing really relate to another type? Yet here they are all willy-nilly linked together. On the one hand this can be very liberating and stimulating; on the other hand it could stifle and discourage. Take your pick.
May 26, 2023
I don't think this book will actually teach you how to write like Tolstoy, but it will help you get into Tolstoy's head just a little bit, as well as the heads of several other famed authors ranging from Shakespeare to Vladimir Nabokov. Cohen went through several old journals, newspaper interviews and scholarly articles that these authors contributed to over the years, and then took the time to painstakingly outline the sections where they specifically spoke on their craft. He divided up their thoughts into the various chapters that comprise this book, and some are better than others. My favorite chapters were the ones on first sentences, writing about sex (obviously) and the two-part analysis on revising, which any writer knows is THE MOST GOD AWFUL (yet necessary) process in the world. The bits where Cohen goes into irony and rhythm were less interesting to me, but depending on your style of writing or preferred genre of novel, your mileage may vary.
I also have to add one bizarre thought: If a book of this same vein is published a hundred years from now focusing on the writers of today and their techniques, it'll probably be pulling quotes from their Twitter and Facebook accounts. Zounds. (Imagine if Tolstoy had been on social media and War & Peace was composed of a series of five million 140-character tweets? Jeebus.)
I also have to add one bizarre thought: If a book of this same vein is published a hundred years from now focusing on the writers of today and their techniques, it'll probably be pulling quotes from their Twitter and Facebook accounts. Zounds. (Imagine if Tolstoy had been on social media and War & Peace was composed of a series of five million 140-character tweets? Jeebus.)
April 25, 2016
I received a galley copy of this book for review. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. While the book is more about how great literature is written rather than teaching a novice to write, a chief way for anyone to begin to learn the craft to by reading great writers. Cohen has experience as a long time editor and is well versed in classic and contemporary literature. I was surprised and disappointed when I finished this book because I wanted more. This text could be considered for background reading with graduate work.
November 15, 2017
Brilliant. Now I'm going to read it again
September 11, 2022
I loved this. The only problem is, I now want to write a novel. Which probably isn't a good idea.
June 15, 2020
Good book to check. Enjoyed reading it, especially references to all classics :) and who wouldnt like to write like Tolstoy?
Currently reading
December 7, 2018My fav quotes (not a review):
-Page 28 |
"“We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.�"
-Page 30 |
"Mark Twain chose to open The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) with the “notice�: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. Twain not only sidestepped the problem of finding a suitable first paragraph by putting up a satirical defense of the whole novel, he also, crucially, was establishing a voice. He charms us into reading on."
-Page 38 |
"A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight that our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion."
-Page 40 |
"Do you remember…the way Homer conveys Helen’s beauty? With these simple words: “When Helen walked in, at the sight of her beauty old men rose to their feet.� One pictures the radiance of that beauty right away. No need to describe her eyes, her mouth, her lips. Everyone is left free to imagine Helen in his own way, but everyone is struck by this beauty that draws old men to their feet at the mere sight of it."
-Page 40 |
“Turgenev complains that the historical passages, “which the readers adore, are absolutely farcical, a charlatan’s tricks.� Tolstoy delights the reader with “the pointed tip of Alexander’s boot,� or “Speransky’s laugh…in order to make him think that he knows everything about the matter since he goes into such detail, whereas all he knows are only these small trifles—a trick and no more, but the public falls for it.�
Turgenev goes on: “There is no development of character…just an immense amount of the old psychological business (‘What do I think? What is thought about me? Do I love or detest?�).� He complains of Tolstoy’s repeated resort to “vibration and oscillation of feeling� as just a writerly device, like the repeated mention of small traits, “the down on Princess Volkonsky’s upper lip,� and the like.
The truth is, what Turgenev labeled “tricks� can be an economical way of conveying aspects of character and are part of a novelist’s skill set. In Tolstoy’s case, a steward twiddling his fingers behind his back or the set of Vronsky’s teeth signal something about them (as do—despite Julian Barnes’s clever comment in the epigraph that heads this chapter—Anna’s “shining gray eyes�) and stop short of being contrivances because they work at an appropriate level of tension and power. Their author’s energy prevents such details becoming stagnant. We don’t know what Anna looks like besides the odd detail, nor Karenin, but consider this description of the latter as seen by his wife:
At Petersburg, so soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted her attention was her husband. “Oh mercy! Why do his ears look like that?� she thought, looking at his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears that struck her at the moment as propping up the brim of his round hat�. We take in something of Karenin’s cold, authoritative posture, but more how his ears grow in proportion to his wife’s disaffection with him—they tell us a little about how Karenin looks but a great deal about Anna’s feelings."
-Page 79 |
Interviewed about the choice of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov was expansive:
For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is “L.� The suffix �-ita� has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as…most Americans pronounce it. Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy “L� and a long “o.� No, the first syllable should be as in “lollipop,� the “L� liquid and delicate, the “lee� not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress.
-Page 82 |
Balzac believed that invented names “did not give life to imaginary beings,� and only those that really belonged to someone were endowed with vitality; he once dragged a friend over half Paris in search of a suitable name for the hero of a story, eventually discovering “Marcas� over a tailor’s shop, to which he added, as “a flame, a plume, a star,� the initial “Z.� “Z. Marcas,� he said, conveyed to him the idea of a great, if unknown, philosopher or poet.
-Page 47 |
"“She always stood sideways so people could see how thin she was.� The description does double duty, letting the reader see the character’s attitudes, while at the same time we learn that she is lean."
-Page 44 |
"“You must consider how the name looks on the page, how it sounds in your head and how it sounds if said out loud. All three count.�"
-Page 44 |
"Common names can create notable characters, from Elizabeth Bennet and Isabel Archer to Philip Marlowe and James Bond (of contemporary authors, David Mitchell is particularly good here), but the out of the ordinary can be effective: Huckleberry Finn, Atticus Finch, Jay Gatsby are not only memorable—they identify an era, a mood."
-Page 48 |
"Victor Hugo constantly made notes about everything—even in mid-conversation he would turn aside and scribble down something he’d just said, or heard, as something he might be able to use."
-Page 90 |
"One final rule, Knox declared: The narrator himself should never be the one who commits the crime."
-Page 129
"There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them. LOUIS ARMSTRONG"
-Page 130
"Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.� It soon becomes clear Jane Austen means something very different: Marriageable women—or their mothers—are often desperately on the lookout for a well-heeled husband. In an ironic reversal, the desire ascribed to wealthy bachelors is actually one felt by acquisitive potential spinsters."
-Page 133
"Then there’s the Aesop fable where a king is told that his son will be killed by a lion, so he forbids him to venture into the outside world. One day the young prince, wandering around the palace, sees a tapestry in which a lion features. He strikes the featured beast with his fist, gashes his skin on a nail beneath the tapestry, and dies of gangrene."
-Page 133
"Hinckley, Jr., attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, and every one of his shots missed. However, a round ricocheted off the bulletproof presidential limousine and struck Reagan in the chest. Thus a vehicle made to protect the president from gunfire was partly responsible for his being shot."
-Page 140
"“A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire,� Kipling says (using the same fireside image as Martin Amis—ironically), “that has been poked. One does not know that the operation has been performed, but every one feels the effect.�"
-Page 144
"“For a long time no one could find a source for “sardonic� in any Indo-European-based language. Sardanios is the original Greek word, but whence did it come? Then someone pointed out that in Sardinia there’s a local plant which if you eat it you die—but with a strange, mocking look on your face."
-Page 145
"Freud named this effect the unheimlich, or uncanny, which he defined as “in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.� The German word Heim means “home�; the uncanny is “what was once…homelike� but now feels strange or mystifying."
-Page 146
"No, no! The adventures first…explanations take such a dreadful time. LEWIS CARROLL, ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND"
-Page 147
"I asked the class to play “Consequences�: Everyone had to take a piece of paper and write down a name (even in these days, a man’s name), then pass the paper on to the person sitting in the adjacent seat. Each student was expected to add a further name, so that “A� would “meet� B, the second name. The papers were passed on again. The third entry would be where A and B met. Then “he said to her,� then “she said to him,� “and the consequence was,� “and the World said”…seven entries in total, after all of which sixty rough and often ridiculous stories had been created."
-Page 147
"Adolf Hitler (met) Jane Austen Near the roundabout at the Fair. (He said to her): My mother warned me about girls like you. (She said to him): Why bother with convention? You know I’ve always loved you. (And the consequence was) Mass emigration throughout Belgium (And the world said) They made a lovely couple"
-Page 147
"After a few students had read their stories out loud, I asked the class to add characterization, context, and incidental detail to whatever lines had ended up on their desks. It didn’t matter that most of the concoctions were surrealist at best: When the students read their revised stories each had a different feel. Hitler now fidgeted with his mustache. Jane Austen found herself blushing uncontrollably, the fairground meeting was at night, with punk rock gangs roaming the stalls. And Hitler, hearing that he had won the love of a fine woman, was encouraged to invade Belgium, so the story suddenly had cause and effect."
-Page 148
"Leo Tolstoy reportedly once commented, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.�"
-Page 152
"The basic stories are few in number; how then each successful story seizes our interest is up to the author’s skill in creating characters, situations, and language that are original and satisfying. Alberto Manguel puts it well in his A History of Reading, “We read to find the end, for the story’s sake. We read not to reach it, for the sake of the reading itself.� It’s the ‘how� that is all-important."
-Page 153
"In the chapter entitled “Story,� Forster famously makes this distinction: “ ‘The king died, and then the queen died� is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief� is a plot.� Story is one event after another; plot is controlled by causality. If it is a story, Forster says, we ask, “And then?� A story “can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.�"
-Page 157
"Finnegans Wake is about the most B novel we have."
-Page 162
"That was when she told me how she asks her students—not all of them, and not all the time, but often enough—to balance a raw egg vertically, either on a china plate or on her carpet. She says it’s a matter of locating the yolk, getting your breathing just right, and knowing when to let go. Once they’ve succeeded, she’ll wave them to the piano stool, now calm and ready to play. Nor is that all. Depending on the day, she may ask a pupil to walk across the room like Groucho Marx or dance a Chopin mazurka. She teaches “rhythm talk,� which entails saying a word such as “little,� again and again, varying the pitch. All this to get her students to coordinate their breathing with their music."
-Page 164
"If you’re writing prose, the best guide is to cultivate an instinct for the difference between what sounds right and what sounds wrong, a syllable-by-syllable attention to sound, a feel for rhyme and breath. You do this—according to Fowler—by one method only: by reading aloud."
-Page 182
“Tennyson told friends that there was a single word in English for which he could not find a rhyme—scissors. He might have added orange."
-Page 28 |
"“We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.�"
-Page 30 |
"Mark Twain chose to open The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) with the “notice�: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. Twain not only sidestepped the problem of finding a suitable first paragraph by putting up a satirical defense of the whole novel, he also, crucially, was establishing a voice. He charms us into reading on."
-Page 38 |
"A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight that our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion."
-Page 40 |
"Do you remember…the way Homer conveys Helen’s beauty? With these simple words: “When Helen walked in, at the sight of her beauty old men rose to their feet.� One pictures the radiance of that beauty right away. No need to describe her eyes, her mouth, her lips. Everyone is left free to imagine Helen in his own way, but everyone is struck by this beauty that draws old men to their feet at the mere sight of it."
-Page 40 |
“Turgenev complains that the historical passages, “which the readers adore, are absolutely farcical, a charlatan’s tricks.� Tolstoy delights the reader with “the pointed tip of Alexander’s boot,� or “Speransky’s laugh…in order to make him think that he knows everything about the matter since he goes into such detail, whereas all he knows are only these small trifles—a trick and no more, but the public falls for it.�
Turgenev goes on: “There is no development of character…just an immense amount of the old psychological business (‘What do I think? What is thought about me? Do I love or detest?�).� He complains of Tolstoy’s repeated resort to “vibration and oscillation of feeling� as just a writerly device, like the repeated mention of small traits, “the down on Princess Volkonsky’s upper lip,� and the like.
The truth is, what Turgenev labeled “tricks� can be an economical way of conveying aspects of character and are part of a novelist’s skill set. In Tolstoy’s case, a steward twiddling his fingers behind his back or the set of Vronsky’s teeth signal something about them (as do—despite Julian Barnes’s clever comment in the epigraph that heads this chapter—Anna’s “shining gray eyes�) and stop short of being contrivances because they work at an appropriate level of tension and power. Their author’s energy prevents such details becoming stagnant. We don’t know what Anna looks like besides the odd detail, nor Karenin, but consider this description of the latter as seen by his wife:
At Petersburg, so soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted her attention was her husband. “Oh mercy! Why do his ears look like that?� she thought, looking at his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears that struck her at the moment as propping up the brim of his round hat�. We take in something of Karenin’s cold, authoritative posture, but more how his ears grow in proportion to his wife’s disaffection with him—they tell us a little about how Karenin looks but a great deal about Anna’s feelings."
-Page 79 |
Interviewed about the choice of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov was expansive:
For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is “L.� The suffix �-ita� has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as…most Americans pronounce it. Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy “L� and a long “o.� No, the first syllable should be as in “lollipop,� the “L� liquid and delicate, the “lee� not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress.
-Page 82 |
Balzac believed that invented names “did not give life to imaginary beings,� and only those that really belonged to someone were endowed with vitality; he once dragged a friend over half Paris in search of a suitable name for the hero of a story, eventually discovering “Marcas� over a tailor’s shop, to which he added, as “a flame, a plume, a star,� the initial “Z.� “Z. Marcas,� he said, conveyed to him the idea of a great, if unknown, philosopher or poet.
-Page 47 |
"“She always stood sideways so people could see how thin she was.� The description does double duty, letting the reader see the character’s attitudes, while at the same time we learn that she is lean."
-Page 44 |
"“You must consider how the name looks on the page, how it sounds in your head and how it sounds if said out loud. All three count.�"
-Page 44 |
"Common names can create notable characters, from Elizabeth Bennet and Isabel Archer to Philip Marlowe and James Bond (of contemporary authors, David Mitchell is particularly good here), but the out of the ordinary can be effective: Huckleberry Finn, Atticus Finch, Jay Gatsby are not only memorable—they identify an era, a mood."
-Page 48 |
"Victor Hugo constantly made notes about everything—even in mid-conversation he would turn aside and scribble down something he’d just said, or heard, as something he might be able to use."
-Page 90 |
"One final rule, Knox declared: The narrator himself should never be the one who commits the crime."
-Page 129
"There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them. LOUIS ARMSTRONG"
-Page 130
"Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.� It soon becomes clear Jane Austen means something very different: Marriageable women—or their mothers—are often desperately on the lookout for a well-heeled husband. In an ironic reversal, the desire ascribed to wealthy bachelors is actually one felt by acquisitive potential spinsters."
-Page 133
"Then there’s the Aesop fable where a king is told that his son will be killed by a lion, so he forbids him to venture into the outside world. One day the young prince, wandering around the palace, sees a tapestry in which a lion features. He strikes the featured beast with his fist, gashes his skin on a nail beneath the tapestry, and dies of gangrene."
-Page 133
"Hinckley, Jr., attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, and every one of his shots missed. However, a round ricocheted off the bulletproof presidential limousine and struck Reagan in the chest. Thus a vehicle made to protect the president from gunfire was partly responsible for his being shot."
-Page 140
"“A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire,� Kipling says (using the same fireside image as Martin Amis—ironically), “that has been poked. One does not know that the operation has been performed, but every one feels the effect.�"
-Page 144
"“For a long time no one could find a source for “sardonic� in any Indo-European-based language. Sardanios is the original Greek word, but whence did it come? Then someone pointed out that in Sardinia there’s a local plant which if you eat it you die—but with a strange, mocking look on your face."
-Page 145
"Freud named this effect the unheimlich, or uncanny, which he defined as “in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.� The German word Heim means “home�; the uncanny is “what was once…homelike� but now feels strange or mystifying."
-Page 146
"No, no! The adventures first…explanations take such a dreadful time. LEWIS CARROLL, ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND"
-Page 147
"I asked the class to play “Consequences�: Everyone had to take a piece of paper and write down a name (even in these days, a man’s name), then pass the paper on to the person sitting in the adjacent seat. Each student was expected to add a further name, so that “A� would “meet� B, the second name. The papers were passed on again. The third entry would be where A and B met. Then “he said to her,� then “she said to him,� “and the consequence was,� “and the World said”…seven entries in total, after all of which sixty rough and often ridiculous stories had been created."
-Page 147
"Adolf Hitler (met) Jane Austen Near the roundabout at the Fair. (He said to her): My mother warned me about girls like you. (She said to him): Why bother with convention? You know I’ve always loved you. (And the consequence was) Mass emigration throughout Belgium (And the world said) They made a lovely couple"
-Page 147
"After a few students had read their stories out loud, I asked the class to add characterization, context, and incidental detail to whatever lines had ended up on their desks. It didn’t matter that most of the concoctions were surrealist at best: When the students read their revised stories each had a different feel. Hitler now fidgeted with his mustache. Jane Austen found herself blushing uncontrollably, the fairground meeting was at night, with punk rock gangs roaming the stalls. And Hitler, hearing that he had won the love of a fine woman, was encouraged to invade Belgium, so the story suddenly had cause and effect."
-Page 148
"Leo Tolstoy reportedly once commented, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.�"
-Page 152
"The basic stories are few in number; how then each successful story seizes our interest is up to the author’s skill in creating characters, situations, and language that are original and satisfying. Alberto Manguel puts it well in his A History of Reading, “We read to find the end, for the story’s sake. We read not to reach it, for the sake of the reading itself.� It’s the ‘how� that is all-important."
-Page 153
"In the chapter entitled “Story,� Forster famously makes this distinction: “ ‘The king died, and then the queen died� is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief� is a plot.� Story is one event after another; plot is controlled by causality. If it is a story, Forster says, we ask, “And then?� A story “can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.�"
-Page 157
"Finnegans Wake is about the most B novel we have."
-Page 162
"That was when she told me how she asks her students—not all of them, and not all the time, but often enough—to balance a raw egg vertically, either on a china plate or on her carpet. She says it’s a matter of locating the yolk, getting your breathing just right, and knowing when to let go. Once they’ve succeeded, she’ll wave them to the piano stool, now calm and ready to play. Nor is that all. Depending on the day, she may ask a pupil to walk across the room like Groucho Marx or dance a Chopin mazurka. She teaches “rhythm talk,� which entails saying a word such as “little,� again and again, varying the pitch. All this to get her students to coordinate their breathing with their music."
-Page 164
"If you’re writing prose, the best guide is to cultivate an instinct for the difference between what sounds right and what sounds wrong, a syllable-by-syllable attention to sound, a feel for rhyme and breath. You do this—according to Fowler—by one method only: by reading aloud."
-Page 182
“Tennyson told friends that there was a single word in English for which he could not find a rhyme—scissors. He might have added orange."
July 20, 2016
I requested this book mainly because of the word "Tolstoy", not "How to", because me and writing long stories don't really mix (I like reading them, but I can't write them :p). Which is a good thing, because this is less of a how-to book than it is a discussion of the different aspects of a novel.
Richard Cohen takes the reader through the different aspects of the novel, from the beginning to characters to revising and the ending, and even the tricky issue of sex in writing. It's less instructional and more "this is how different writers do things". For sure, he does tell you when he thinks a writer has failed in a particular aspects, but rarely does anything become a rule, probably because you can always find an exception to a rule.
Plus, things are never really clear cut. For example, what is irony? The book has an entire chapter on it, and he talks about a bunch of people's opinions, but it does not end in a conclusion. It ends with his opinion, but it (and a few other chapters) feel a lot like "well, we don't really know, but if it works, does it really matter?" (The answer is no. I think.)
Oh, but if you want to really enjoy this, you should (ideally) be widely read. It's ok if you're unfamiliar with the literary criticism, but if you don't know Lolita, Austen, Madame Bovary, Tolstoy (obviously), then even the quote excerpts won't help much, I think. I appreciated all the different references, but from the few that I didn't get, I imagine it can be quite confusing to others.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I like the tons of references to the classics - it felt like I was revisiting a lot of old friends, and I think the book was written in a very understandable way. Definitely recommended to people interested in literature and books.
Disclaimer: I got a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a free and honest review.
This review was first posted at
Richard Cohen takes the reader through the different aspects of the novel, from the beginning to characters to revising and the ending, and even the tricky issue of sex in writing. It's less instructional and more "this is how different writers do things". For sure, he does tell you when he thinks a writer has failed in a particular aspects, but rarely does anything become a rule, probably because you can always find an exception to a rule.
Plus, things are never really clear cut. For example, what is irony? The book has an entire chapter on it, and he talks about a bunch of people's opinions, but it does not end in a conclusion. It ends with his opinion, but it (and a few other chapters) feel a lot like "well, we don't really know, but if it works, does it really matter?" (The answer is no. I think.)
Oh, but if you want to really enjoy this, you should (ideally) be widely read. It's ok if you're unfamiliar with the literary criticism, but if you don't know Lolita, Austen, Madame Bovary, Tolstoy (obviously), then even the quote excerpts won't help much, I think. I appreciated all the different references, but from the few that I didn't get, I imagine it can be quite confusing to others.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I like the tons of references to the classics - it felt like I was revisiting a lot of old friends, and I think the book was written in a very understandable way. Definitely recommended to people interested in literature and books.
Disclaimer: I got a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a free and honest review.
This review was first posted at
June 2, 2016
OK, I have no hopes or aspirations to write like Tolstoy, but taking a journey into the minds of our greatest writers; count me in. Richard Cohen provides the reader with so many fascinating examples of what makes our most famous writers tick you're bound to come across something, about one of your favorite writers, that you weren't aware of. And will say to yourself, "Awesome", I know I did.
December 21, 2020
Questions about what one's dream career is are one of the gateways to more stimulating conversations and my usual answer is being a prog rock guitar virtuoso - like John Petrucci - even though playing drums or keyboards would be more fun but less cool. When pressed for a honest answer - as my often hypothetical conversation partners are wont to do - I change to a writer-slash-whisky bar owner/bartender (think L&B whisky cafe in Amsterdam, which I can't advertise enough). The issue with being a writer is - paraphrasing Douglas Adams - that you have to write something, and I struggle with discipline. Fortunately, once in a blue moon, something - usually a book - comes around that manages to convince me, before I've started reading it - that there is a different catch, something I can overcome way more easily, and finally, after reading it, I'll be able to embark on a career I was meant to do. Mind you, nowhere does the book actually say so apart from in my head, but still. How To Write Like Tolstoy was the latest of its kind.
Richard Cohen is a seasoned editor and thus knows a thing or two about what works in fiction. His book touches on many aspects of writing - opening, dialogue, sex scenes etc etc - and offers plethora of advice and examples on how to tackle them. Reading it can be very good for your inner literary snob, who will keep score on how many of the examples you've been aware of/read. Actual advice tends to be less frequent than the actual advice, but that's perhaps to be expected as none of these are hard rules. One thing I really liked were examples of before/after writing from famous works of literature, showing how craftful editing - whoever it is that performs it - can add focus, change the angle or stress an aspect of a scene to no end. On the lighthearted note, I appreciated a mention of the Bad Sex in Fiction award in the appropriate chapter, but missed any mention of The Bulwer Lytton Fiction contest for the worst opening sentence (despite the person that gave it name - and its original entry - makes an appearance).
Will this book turn you into a writer? No, for that you'll have to write stuff, not just read it. Will it make you write more? Also no, and I wonder whether there is a thing with that power out there apart from assault weapons and/or upcoming deadlines. Why should you read it then? Apart from the inherent entertainment value, it might help you with those pesky details that you just can't seem to get right. As well as to give you hope since many - if not most - of the literary diamonds might have very well started as less than lumps of coal that got transformed with time and effort.
Richard Cohen is a seasoned editor and thus knows a thing or two about what works in fiction. His book touches on many aspects of writing - opening, dialogue, sex scenes etc etc - and offers plethora of advice and examples on how to tackle them. Reading it can be very good for your inner literary snob, who will keep score on how many of the examples you've been aware of/read. Actual advice tends to be less frequent than the actual advice, but that's perhaps to be expected as none of these are hard rules. One thing I really liked were examples of before/after writing from famous works of literature, showing how craftful editing - whoever it is that performs it - can add focus, change the angle or stress an aspect of a scene to no end. On the lighthearted note, I appreciated a mention of the Bad Sex in Fiction award in the appropriate chapter, but missed any mention of The Bulwer Lytton Fiction contest for the worst opening sentence (despite the person that gave it name - and its original entry - makes an appearance).
Will this book turn you into a writer? No, for that you'll have to write stuff, not just read it. Will it make you write more? Also no, and I wonder whether there is a thing with that power out there apart from assault weapons and/or upcoming deadlines. Why should you read it then? Apart from the inherent entertainment value, it might help you with those pesky details that you just can't seem to get right. As well as to give you hope since many - if not most - of the literary diamonds might have very well started as less than lumps of coal that got transformed with time and effort.
January 10, 2022
This isn't actually a craft book, it's more of a conversational piece that explores how great writers approached various writing topics. Topics like sex, character, endings, and revision/editing. Richard Cohen presents the information in a conversational, fun, and engaging tone. At the same time he provides plenty of specific and varied examples, backed with interesting little footnotes. This was a thoroughly enjoyable read. While reading, I found myself feeling like I was participating in some super-literary conversation with literary academics and historians. Really good stuff!
January 19, 2018
It's about beginnings, and endings...and everything in between. A methodical study of literary tropes sounds very dull.... but it's a treasure trove of gems, written with wit and humour. I had no idea that...Dickens invented 13,000 characters, Lee Child got 20 Aston Villa footballers' names into his Reacher stories and Conrad during a mental breakdown, conversed with his characters in Polish. Cohen uses many wonderful quotations from writers as varied as Banks and Balzac, and my reading list is now seriously out of control. But his hero is Tolstoy, and the unforgettable moment when Kitty grasps Levin's coded proposal in 'Anna Karenina' (sigh).
November 16, 2021
Anyone who loves to read would enjoy this book.
December 20, 2021
In twelve chapters, Cohen draws on his experiences as a writer, teacher, and publishing director to offer tips and reflections on writing. The title is somewhat of a misnomer, as it suggests an exclusive focus on Tolstoy, when, in fact, Cohen draws heavily on the words and works of authors in a variety of genres—from writers of literary fiction to horror. Overall, this is a readable book that blends useful tips with fun facts.
� “John Gardner believed that ‘writing ability is mainly a product of good teaching supported by a deep-down love of writing,� and pointed out that Hemingway, although on record (and echoing Behan) as declaring that the only way for a writer to learn his craft was to go away and write, took hours of tutorials from Gertrude Stein� (xvii).
� “Beginnings are notoriously difficult. E.L. Doctorow tells of being asked by his daughter to give her an absence note for her school teacher. He started to write, then thought, ‘No that’s not it,� and started again. The second version didn’t hit the required note either. Further drafts followed, until his young daughter was in a state of panic and there was a pile of crumpled pages on the floor. Finally his wife came in and, with a look of disbelief, dashed off the required short letter� (4).
� “Thomas Mann was similarly unhappy about over-planning, confiding, ‘Certainly, to envisage too clearly beforehand all the difficulties of a task . . . would be enough to make one shudder and forgo it’� (15).
� Paul Scott: “Images do not have exact time schedules. Names, locations, time schedules, plot references—these are what the images create. In the original image are the seeds of all your novel. See your image, feel it, work it out in all its complexity to the best of your ability, and then try to put it on the page� (16).
� Opening of Huck Finn: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot� (20).
� “The novel rises in antiquity, fades away into romance, reemerges in Japan and Spain, then settles down in France and England during the eighteenth century. The shift from the stress on the outer life to the inner arrived with what has been dubbed ‘the petty bourgeois realist novel’—and was later reinforced by the development of analytic psychology, so that we generally now believe that character is the most important single component of a work of fiction� (26).
� “Plato remarks in The Republic that bad characters are volatile and interesting, whereas uncomplicated good characters are dull and always the same. Through the centuries, novelists have found it difficult to portray goodness, but we scarcely mind so long as we can hiss the villain� (27).
� “The act of writing can release thoughts that have not been on the conscious level, so a character may seem to take control, and that may even be to the story’s benefit� (48).
� Vladimir Nabokov: “A character dies on the page if you can’t hear his or her voice. In a very limited sense, I suppose, this amounts to ‘taking over� and ‘telling you� what the characters will and won’t do. But the reason the character can’t do something is that you can’t. The task then becomes to figure out what the character can do—to try to stretch the narrative as far as possible, to be sure to not overlook exciting possibilities in yourself, while continuing to bend the narrative in the direction of meaning� (50).
� “For them [writers like Joyce or Woolf], character is not unified or coherent so ‘development� is a chimera. Which view one subscribes to is a matter of individual belief, and for most modern writers shifts in personality can be slight and still be effective. Still, when contemplating whether a character is being ‘true� to his or her nature, one should remember Oscar Wilde’s definition of truth: ‘one’s latest mood’� (51).
� Gail Godwin: “Fact and fiction, fiction and fact. Which stops where, and how much to put in of each? At what point does regurgitated autobiography graduate into memory shaped by art? How do you know when to stop telling it like it is, or was, and make it into what it ought to be—or what would make a better story?� (53).
� “French theorists like Barthes and Foucault have long argued that in the strictest sense there is no such thing as an ‘author,� because all writing is collaborative and produced by a kind of cultural collective� (66).
� “In other narratives, a framing device—a story within a story—presents the narrator as a character who begins to recount his own tale. This technique has a long history, dating back at least to the beginning section of The Odyssey, and even before that, to the Sanskrit epics of India in the tenth century BC. This form gradually spread west from Asia and became popular, encouraging such frame collections as The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales� (85).
� “What has come to be called style indirect libre, or free indirect speech, is where the narrative seems to tell the truth plain and simple—to have all the certainty that third-person point of view provides, but where something more complex is being attempted, some of the characteristics of third person being mixed (usually) with another voice or voices. Austen, Goethe, and Flaubert were early practitioners� (93).
� “In the eighteen century (which even went through a phase of ‘it narratives,� where stores were told from the point of view of money, corkscrews, lapdogs, or the like), epistolary novels were immensely popular. Jane Austen’s first draft of Sense and Sensibility was in letter form, but her revised version was prophetic of the decline of the epistolary novel in the century to follow, and in the age of the phone it became rarer still� (96).
� “Dostoyevsky initially envisaged Crime and Punishment as a novella with four first-person tellings . . . Throughout the novel, the narrator enjoys no consistent perceptual advantage: He sees the world through the same haze of subjective doubt as Raskolnikov. / Francine Prose, who with Norman Mailer has provided some of the best insights into how a novelist chooses a point of view, gives this gloss: ‘Ultimately, he [Dostoyevsky] realized that, given the problems caused by the fact that his hero was to be semi-delirious for significant portions of the narrative, he could maintain the same intensity by sticking to a close third-person narration that, at critical junctures, merges with the consciousness of the protagonist’� (100-101).
� Nell Leyshon: “If I picked up a book with no dialogue, I felt unable to breathe, as though I was choking with words. I learned to look at pages and see whether there was white down the right-hand side. I learned that the sculptural shape on a page bears a relationship to the reading experience. I realized that where there is space and air in the prose, I am able to interpret and draw conclusions� (104).
� “The novelist writes dialogue to be convincing; the nonfiction author so that he or she is true to the intentions of the person quoted� (116).
� “Henry James and Joseph Conrad were good friends, and in mid-career both agreed that in their future books none of the characters would reply to a question directly, but only comment obliquely—which would add tension� (118).
� “In his language guide, The King’s English, Henry Fowler says: ‘Any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same� (126-127).
� “Using Wikipedia is supposed to be a descent into hell—a vortex of plagiarism, superficiality, laziness, and idiocy—but its entry on irony is helpful and suggests that the concept is every bit as complicated as I have suggested. For example, there is playful irony, whimsical irony, sardonic irony, quiet irony, and so on . . . According to Wikipedia, irony’s essential feature is the indirect, often understated presentation of a contradiction between an action or expression and the context in which it occurs. Wikipedia then goes further, distinguishing four variations: verbal irony—when a speaker says one thing and intends another; dramatic irony—when words and actions have a significance that the listener understands but the speaker or character does not; situational irony—when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect; and finally ‘cosmic irony’—the disparity between what humans desire and what the world actually serves up—the whims of the gods� (129-130).
� “If it is true that all novels are essentially about the passage from innocence to experience, about discovering the reality that underlies appearances, then not surprisingly, irony pervades fiction. Irony is about concealment, and the truth of what is written may grow on us . . .� (132).
� Thornton Wilder: “Art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time� (140).
� “Leo Tolstoy reportedly once commented: ‘All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town’� (145).
� “In the late eighteen century, an Italian playwright, Carlo Goldoni, proposed that there were thirty-six ‘dramatic situations� . . . that could be turned into comedy or tragedy as preferred� (145).
� “Gustav Freytag (1816-95), a German novelist and playwright, declared that all stories could be divided into five parts: exposition (of the situation), rising action (through conflict), climax (or turning point), falling action, and resolution� (146).
� E.M. Forster: “‘The king died, and then the queen died� is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief� is a plot. Story is one event after another; plot is controlled by causality� (150).
� “If an author plans everything he wants his characters to do, the story becomes schematized. But seen at their best, story and plot intertwine and compliment each other . . . Story isn’t just one even after another—it can include characterization, causality, and description—but these elements tend to be of a basic kind. Plot includes story, but suggests greater complexity� (156).
� Virginia Woolf: “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it� (160-161).
� Milan Kundera: ‘In Goethe’s time, prose could not make the aesthetic claims of poetry; perhaps not until the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of aesthetic inferiority� (166).
� “The first technique authors should master is antithesis—arranging ideas as well as syllables into some kind of symmetry. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times� or ‘Four legs good, two legs bad� are made more memorable, and more effective, because of the balance between their two halves� (170).
� “Just as the art of war largely consists of deploying the strongest forces at the most strategic points, so the art of writing depends on putting the strongest words in the most important places . . . A good example can be found in Francis Bacon’s essay on friendship: ‘A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love’� (170).
� “Every language has words framed to exhibit the noises they seek to express—thump, rattle, growl, hiss—but they are relatively few. Verbs like crawl, creep, and dawdle have long vowels and suggest slow movement, and skip, run, hop have short vowels and suggest intense brevity� (171).
� “Flaubert, a fanatical reviser, proclaimed that a would-be author should read fifteen hundred books in order to write one. ‘Prose is like hair,� he would say, ‘it improves with combing.� Edith Warton told a friend enthusiastically, ‘I am engaged in the wholesale slaughter of adjectives.� ‘I revise every minute of every day,� wrote Virginia Woolf� (212).
� “Anton Chekhov, besieged by writers wanting his opinion on their work, would advise them all, ‘Cut, cut, cut!� ‘Writing a book is like building a coral reef,� P.G. Wodehouse considered. ‘One goes on by adding tiny bits. I must say the result is much better. With my stuff it is largely a matter of adding color and seeing that I don’t let anything through that’s at all flat’� (215).
� “According to neuropsychiatry, writing and editing employ different brain functions, and many writers are unable to switch easily from one to the other� (216).
� “Chekhov wrote ‘Dissatisfaction with oneself is one of the cornerstones of every real talent’� (216).
� An excerpt on editing from George Bernard Shaw’s letter to The Times: “There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of his time to chasing split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman splits his infinitives when the sense demands it. I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no concern whether he decided ‘to go quickly� or ‘quickly to go� or ‘to quickly go.� The important thing is that he should go at once� (217).
� Hemingway: “Write drunk, edit sober� (228).
� “In English alone, a new word is said to be coined every ninety-eight minutes. Writers, who love words, are often tempted to make them up—Shakespeare, for instance, introduced more than 1,700� (232).
� “They [commas] were a High Renaissance invention, attributed to a Venetian printer named Aldo Manuzio, who around 1490 was working on the Greek classics and, wanting to avoid confusion, began separating words and clauses: komma is Greek for ‘something cut off’� (233).
� “Henry James pioneered the ‘open� ending, often cutting off a story or novel mid-conversation� (241-242).
� Francine Prose: “We want to believe in enduring love partly because we know that we will always be subject to, and at the mercy of, the pendulum swing between chaos and cohesion, happiness and heartbreak. And so we continue to root for the enchanted couple� (253-254).
� “Don’t think that at the end of what you have written, he [Illtyd Trethowan] would tell us, you have to sum up with some great statement or wearisome recapitulation of arguments already made. When you have said what you want to say, / Stop� (256).
� “John Gardner believed that ‘writing ability is mainly a product of good teaching supported by a deep-down love of writing,� and pointed out that Hemingway, although on record (and echoing Behan) as declaring that the only way for a writer to learn his craft was to go away and write, took hours of tutorials from Gertrude Stein� (xvii).
� “Beginnings are notoriously difficult. E.L. Doctorow tells of being asked by his daughter to give her an absence note for her school teacher. He started to write, then thought, ‘No that’s not it,� and started again. The second version didn’t hit the required note either. Further drafts followed, until his young daughter was in a state of panic and there was a pile of crumpled pages on the floor. Finally his wife came in and, with a look of disbelief, dashed off the required short letter� (4).
� “Thomas Mann was similarly unhappy about over-planning, confiding, ‘Certainly, to envisage too clearly beforehand all the difficulties of a task . . . would be enough to make one shudder and forgo it’� (15).
� Paul Scott: “Images do not have exact time schedules. Names, locations, time schedules, plot references—these are what the images create. In the original image are the seeds of all your novel. See your image, feel it, work it out in all its complexity to the best of your ability, and then try to put it on the page� (16).
� Opening of Huck Finn: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot� (20).
� “The novel rises in antiquity, fades away into romance, reemerges in Japan and Spain, then settles down in France and England during the eighteenth century. The shift from the stress on the outer life to the inner arrived with what has been dubbed ‘the petty bourgeois realist novel’—and was later reinforced by the development of analytic psychology, so that we generally now believe that character is the most important single component of a work of fiction� (26).
� “Plato remarks in The Republic that bad characters are volatile and interesting, whereas uncomplicated good characters are dull and always the same. Through the centuries, novelists have found it difficult to portray goodness, but we scarcely mind so long as we can hiss the villain� (27).
� “The act of writing can release thoughts that have not been on the conscious level, so a character may seem to take control, and that may even be to the story’s benefit� (48).
� Vladimir Nabokov: “A character dies on the page if you can’t hear his or her voice. In a very limited sense, I suppose, this amounts to ‘taking over� and ‘telling you� what the characters will and won’t do. But the reason the character can’t do something is that you can’t. The task then becomes to figure out what the character can do—to try to stretch the narrative as far as possible, to be sure to not overlook exciting possibilities in yourself, while continuing to bend the narrative in the direction of meaning� (50).
� “For them [writers like Joyce or Woolf], character is not unified or coherent so ‘development� is a chimera. Which view one subscribes to is a matter of individual belief, and for most modern writers shifts in personality can be slight and still be effective. Still, when contemplating whether a character is being ‘true� to his or her nature, one should remember Oscar Wilde’s definition of truth: ‘one’s latest mood’� (51).
� Gail Godwin: “Fact and fiction, fiction and fact. Which stops where, and how much to put in of each? At what point does regurgitated autobiography graduate into memory shaped by art? How do you know when to stop telling it like it is, or was, and make it into what it ought to be—or what would make a better story?� (53).
� “French theorists like Barthes and Foucault have long argued that in the strictest sense there is no such thing as an ‘author,� because all writing is collaborative and produced by a kind of cultural collective� (66).
� “In other narratives, a framing device—a story within a story—presents the narrator as a character who begins to recount his own tale. This technique has a long history, dating back at least to the beginning section of The Odyssey, and even before that, to the Sanskrit epics of India in the tenth century BC. This form gradually spread west from Asia and became popular, encouraging such frame collections as The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales� (85).
� “What has come to be called style indirect libre, or free indirect speech, is where the narrative seems to tell the truth plain and simple—to have all the certainty that third-person point of view provides, but where something more complex is being attempted, some of the characteristics of third person being mixed (usually) with another voice or voices. Austen, Goethe, and Flaubert were early practitioners� (93).
� “In the eighteen century (which even went through a phase of ‘it narratives,� where stores were told from the point of view of money, corkscrews, lapdogs, or the like), epistolary novels were immensely popular. Jane Austen’s first draft of Sense and Sensibility was in letter form, but her revised version was prophetic of the decline of the epistolary novel in the century to follow, and in the age of the phone it became rarer still� (96).
� “Dostoyevsky initially envisaged Crime and Punishment as a novella with four first-person tellings . . . Throughout the novel, the narrator enjoys no consistent perceptual advantage: He sees the world through the same haze of subjective doubt as Raskolnikov. / Francine Prose, who with Norman Mailer has provided some of the best insights into how a novelist chooses a point of view, gives this gloss: ‘Ultimately, he [Dostoyevsky] realized that, given the problems caused by the fact that his hero was to be semi-delirious for significant portions of the narrative, he could maintain the same intensity by sticking to a close third-person narration that, at critical junctures, merges with the consciousness of the protagonist’� (100-101).
� Nell Leyshon: “If I picked up a book with no dialogue, I felt unable to breathe, as though I was choking with words. I learned to look at pages and see whether there was white down the right-hand side. I learned that the sculptural shape on a page bears a relationship to the reading experience. I realized that where there is space and air in the prose, I am able to interpret and draw conclusions� (104).
� “The novelist writes dialogue to be convincing; the nonfiction author so that he or she is true to the intentions of the person quoted� (116).
� “Henry James and Joseph Conrad were good friends, and in mid-career both agreed that in their future books none of the characters would reply to a question directly, but only comment obliquely—which would add tension� (118).
� “In his language guide, The King’s English, Henry Fowler says: ‘Any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same� (126-127).
� “Using Wikipedia is supposed to be a descent into hell—a vortex of plagiarism, superficiality, laziness, and idiocy—but its entry on irony is helpful and suggests that the concept is every bit as complicated as I have suggested. For example, there is playful irony, whimsical irony, sardonic irony, quiet irony, and so on . . . According to Wikipedia, irony’s essential feature is the indirect, often understated presentation of a contradiction between an action or expression and the context in which it occurs. Wikipedia then goes further, distinguishing four variations: verbal irony—when a speaker says one thing and intends another; dramatic irony—when words and actions have a significance that the listener understands but the speaker or character does not; situational irony—when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect; and finally ‘cosmic irony’—the disparity between what humans desire and what the world actually serves up—the whims of the gods� (129-130).
� “If it is true that all novels are essentially about the passage from innocence to experience, about discovering the reality that underlies appearances, then not surprisingly, irony pervades fiction. Irony is about concealment, and the truth of what is written may grow on us . . .� (132).
� Thornton Wilder: “Art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time� (140).
� “Leo Tolstoy reportedly once commented: ‘All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town’� (145).
� “In the late eighteen century, an Italian playwright, Carlo Goldoni, proposed that there were thirty-six ‘dramatic situations� . . . that could be turned into comedy or tragedy as preferred� (145).
� “Gustav Freytag (1816-95), a German novelist and playwright, declared that all stories could be divided into five parts: exposition (of the situation), rising action (through conflict), climax (or turning point), falling action, and resolution� (146).
� E.M. Forster: “‘The king died, and then the queen died� is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief� is a plot. Story is one event after another; plot is controlled by causality� (150).
� “If an author plans everything he wants his characters to do, the story becomes schematized. But seen at their best, story and plot intertwine and compliment each other . . . Story isn’t just one even after another—it can include characterization, causality, and description—but these elements tend to be of a basic kind. Plot includes story, but suggests greater complexity� (156).
� Virginia Woolf: “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it� (160-161).
� Milan Kundera: ‘In Goethe’s time, prose could not make the aesthetic claims of poetry; perhaps not until the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of aesthetic inferiority� (166).
� “The first technique authors should master is antithesis—arranging ideas as well as syllables into some kind of symmetry. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times� or ‘Four legs good, two legs bad� are made more memorable, and more effective, because of the balance between their two halves� (170).
� “Just as the art of war largely consists of deploying the strongest forces at the most strategic points, so the art of writing depends on putting the strongest words in the most important places . . . A good example can be found in Francis Bacon’s essay on friendship: ‘A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love’� (170).
� “Every language has words framed to exhibit the noises they seek to express—thump, rattle, growl, hiss—but they are relatively few. Verbs like crawl, creep, and dawdle have long vowels and suggest slow movement, and skip, run, hop have short vowels and suggest intense brevity� (171).
� “Flaubert, a fanatical reviser, proclaimed that a would-be author should read fifteen hundred books in order to write one. ‘Prose is like hair,� he would say, ‘it improves with combing.� Edith Warton told a friend enthusiastically, ‘I am engaged in the wholesale slaughter of adjectives.� ‘I revise every minute of every day,� wrote Virginia Woolf� (212).
� “Anton Chekhov, besieged by writers wanting his opinion on their work, would advise them all, ‘Cut, cut, cut!� ‘Writing a book is like building a coral reef,� P.G. Wodehouse considered. ‘One goes on by adding tiny bits. I must say the result is much better. With my stuff it is largely a matter of adding color and seeing that I don’t let anything through that’s at all flat’� (215).
� “According to neuropsychiatry, writing and editing employ different brain functions, and many writers are unable to switch easily from one to the other� (216).
� “Chekhov wrote ‘Dissatisfaction with oneself is one of the cornerstones of every real talent’� (216).
� An excerpt on editing from George Bernard Shaw’s letter to The Times: “There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of his time to chasing split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman splits his infinitives when the sense demands it. I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no concern whether he decided ‘to go quickly� or ‘quickly to go� or ‘to quickly go.� The important thing is that he should go at once� (217).
� Hemingway: “Write drunk, edit sober� (228).
� “In English alone, a new word is said to be coined every ninety-eight minutes. Writers, who love words, are often tempted to make them up—Shakespeare, for instance, introduced more than 1,700� (232).
� “They [commas] were a High Renaissance invention, attributed to a Venetian printer named Aldo Manuzio, who around 1490 was working on the Greek classics and, wanting to avoid confusion, began separating words and clauses: komma is Greek for ‘something cut off’� (233).
� “Henry James pioneered the ‘open� ending, often cutting off a story or novel mid-conversation� (241-242).
� Francine Prose: “We want to believe in enduring love partly because we know that we will always be subject to, and at the mercy of, the pendulum swing between chaos and cohesion, happiness and heartbreak. And so we continue to root for the enchanted couple� (253-254).
� “Don’t think that at the end of what you have written, he [Illtyd Trethowan] would tell us, you have to sum up with some great statement or wearisome recapitulation of arguments already made. When you have said what you want to say, / Stop� (256).
June 10, 2023
Which parts you find most useful will depend on who you are, what you have read, what you have already written (I, for example, concentrated my sticky flags in the early middle but you may have to wait some time for your aha!s) but nearly everyone who aspires to good writing should read it. (Note: the book's title is misleading, but don't hold that against it.)
November 27, 2018
Must read for aspiring writers, but the name of the book should be 'Whatever floats your boat, man!'
April 7, 2016
How to Write Like Tolstoy
A Journey into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers
by Richard Cohen
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Random House
Nonfiction (Adult)
Pub Date 17 May 2016 | Archive Date 25 Jul 2016
I was given a Copy of How to Write Like Tolstoy through the publisher and their partnership with Netgalley in exchange for my honest review which is as follows:
Written by a former university professor How to Write Like Tolsoy reminds us that we must begin at the beginning. Cohen points out that every author must discover the style that best suits the individual author. He also talks about finding out whether your book is told in 1st, or third person or more rarely second person.
Richard Cohen reminds us to question what makes good fiction. This book talks about many aspects of writing.
I recommend How to Write Like Tolstoy to authors and aspiring Authors.
Five out of five stars
Happy Reading...
June 6, 2016
I started this to help me get in the grad school frame of mind when I go this fall. It didn't help. The topics it covers are great for both improving writing and reading closely, but the method of communication isn't the best choice. There are too many examples and not enough explanation as to how/why these devices or choices work. It should've been much shorter. The first two chapters really didn't hold me. I skipped to chapters that I thought would be more interesting and more clear, but that didn't help. The chapter on irony confused me, and I had a good grasp of it before reading this. Also, for the author having had such a prolific career, I was surprised at the grammatical errors I found. Now I do believe the author knows the subject very well (I have a feeling he's a good lecturer) and there are parts of each chapter that are well done, but I think a different method of delivery would've helped.
May 9, 2018
One of the best books I've read this year (2018). If you are a writer then this book is for you. If you are an avid reader of books, especially the classics then again this book is for you. The book is not a heavy read & is very informative. It is a great guide as well as a splendid work on the analysis about the art of writing & how to pen a story. Tolstoy lovers will appreciate this book. I got a lot of book recommendations through this book & they are on my TBR list. Excellent, literary & very well written. This book is beautiful. (P.S. Don't skip the notes)
September 22, 2016
Though many of Cohen’s ideas are familiar and some have already been thoroughly explored, he shares them through his unique lens and sheds new light on a familiar subject. Part of the reason he does this so effectively is that he is a prolific reader with a lifetime of savoring and digesting literature behind him as well as a background teaching writing.
December 26, 2016
A very worthwhile book for writers. Cohen combines writing advice with literary history, with loads of examples from classic as well as more modern books. As a long-time editor he offers insider insights drawn from personal knowledge and author interactions. If you're a writer (or want to be), read this book.
June 30, 2016
Love this book! I think the author did a really good job of providing new ideas to improve your writing. I have read a lot of writing books and sadly they tend to be really repetitive. This book was a breath of fresh air! Also this author seems really cool. I loved his book on fencing as well.
July 4, 2016
An elegant, insightful primer for writers, as well as an instruction manual for readers ... filled with fertile ideas gleaned from world literature ... wanders down many an intriguing pathway, yet always returning to the structures beloved of English teachers ... a most satisfying read ...
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