Richard Cohen, How to Write like Tolstoy (OneWorld)Not everything does what it says on the tin. Thankfully, this book doesn't because even if one could be shown, not everybody might want to be. The desirability of creative writing manuals, when writers should really find out and decide how to do it for themselves, is not the issue.
Richard Cohen has had a long career as an editor of many big names in contemporary fiction as well as having apprently read the whole canon of English and American literature and much more besides in translation. What he provides is a survey of the options available to the novelist under various headings from beginnings to endings and that which comes in between. It makes its points in the brief intervals in the torrent of anecdotes and examples from the lives and practice of some notable names.
If at times Cohen might prefer some strategies in fiction writing over others, he does well not to let his preferences dominate and quotes from his wide stock of examples which might be general observations like,
If it sounds like writing. I rewrite it. (Elmore Leonard)
or the more detailed debate about the ending of Great Expectations.
Writers most often used in evidence are Henry James, Hemingway, George Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Jane Austen and it is almost a worrying indicator for anybody who thought they were a major novelist if they can't find themselves somewhere in this text. Martin Amis crops up a few times but mostly for what he said about writing than his actual writing.
Like any schoolboy's dictionary, the pages likely to be most grubbily marked in time will be those of chapter 9, on writing about sex, but the advice there is more didactic than anywhere else in the book and it says that it is a very difficult area and more likely to make you a laughing stock than admired, which I'm sure is what happens to many of us in life as well as writing fiction.
Cohen's points might make us think many things, most obviously what an artifice the novel is. But, of course it is. The art of art is to make it seem natural, if you don't want it to look deliberately artificial, and the amount of work that goes into seeming natural is why it is hard to do. Thus, one can not even try, and thus be self-consciously artificial, or be consigned to that level of hypocrisy in which Jack Kerouac works very hard at revising to make his writing look spontaneous, unrevised and carefree when that was the last thing it was. Since the other writer I heard that said about was Allen Ginsberg, my more mature, revised opinion of the Beat Generation is confirmed - that they were a bunch of frauds. But I've only read Ginsberg. I doubt if I'll ever bother with Kerouac.
One is also a bit overwhelmed by the teeming variations set out before us. Since Modernism, Finnegans Wake, Beckett and suchlike, we now live in a post-modern world where that is all behind us and now the 'unreliable narrator' is even past its high point. But there are more novels being published than one could ever dream of knowing about. And publishers' in-trays are full of manuscripts that stand no chance whatsoever of being wrapped in hard covers and so, as ever, there is much more effort going into writing than reading and yet those that arrive as best-sellers or literary critical successes arrive by an arduous route against almost impossible odds.
What will survive of us, I hope and suspect, is irony. From it, so much more becomes possible. And it is possibly our last defence.
It is a terrifying prospect that every word in a novel has to be considered as carefully as one in a short poem but they do. I don't understand how anybody can find the time, stamina and determination to re-write as many times as some novelists quite clearly do, and there are several examples here of those who revised endlessly. Or how they can worry over one word out of so many. It is an abnegation of life itself to have to sit and do it and yet the writer needs to be living, or have lived, some sort of life before they have any raw material to draw upon.
I remember once, aged about 18 or 19, introducing myself to a meeting of poets by saying that I was a poet because I couldn't write novels. That has remained so and reading this impressive account of the main principles involved belatedly provides me with much of the supporting evidence why not. It's not just the words you need, it is the alarming levels of dedication and the poet can only look at the novelist with the kind of admiration that the short-distance runner must look at the iron triathlete.
It was a tremendous book to receive for my birthday, which is today, and I thank its kindly sender for their thoughtful and much appreciated choice.
