The Jane Austen Writers’ Club

by Rebecca Smith

Bloomsbury, £16.99

How To Write like Tolstoy

by Richard Cohen

Oneworld, £16.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

WRITING fiction has never been anything but hard. You can’t help feeling, however, that it is more difficult now than it was in Emily Bronte’s or Ernest Hemingway’s day. It is not that the act itself has become more demanding, but that so much attention is now directed on the process – an entire new industry in fact – that it requires great powers of assurance or determination or a good set of earplugs to avoid the cacophony of advice. Should one wish to avoid it, of course.

As in Laurence Sterne’s time so in ours: the best route to becoming a writer is to read. This does not preclude taking a creative writing course or joining a writers’ group, but the whole enterprise should be underpinned by books that none but the very few could ever hope to match. Indeed, I have heard seasoned writing tutors say that the best thing they have offered aspiring novelists is a good reading list.

Given that too many writers teaching in universities appear to have adapted the alarming old medical saw to their own ends – “read one, write one, teach one” – the guides offered by Rebecca Smith and Richard Cohen are as useful a starting point as any formal instruction. Smith takes Jane Austen as an exemplar while Cohen starts with Tolstoy and branches out to many of the best in the canon. His is an anecdotal, breezy and comprehensive approach, befitting a career that started as editor of writers such as Kingsley Amis and VS Pritchett, then as a publisher and latterly as a university professor of writing. He has the air of a man who would make a dash blindfolded across Spaghetti Junction to hear a scurrilous story, and his gossipy, urbane tone makes for an entertainingly slick read.

Smith’s voice is bubbly, but more motherly. She is Jane Austen’s five-times-great-niece, but this is no claim to distinction, she writes, considering the number of children the novelist’s siblings produced. One does not need to be related to Austen to hold her in awe and it is intriguing to observe Smith offering an A to Z of how to write a novel using the relatively small but rich oeuvre of one of the world’s pre-eminent writers. She starts with advice on how to plan a story, and create characters and their backdrop. In this she is aided by Austen’s letters to her niece Anna, who committed the sort of errors of judgement all but the most gifted beginners make. “I have scratched out Sir Thos. from walking with the other men to the stables, etc. the very day after breaking his arm,” writes Austen, “for, though I find your papa did walk out immediately after his arm was set, I think it can be so little usual as to appear unnatural in a book.”

Drawing on well-loved passages for direction, Smith shows Austen’s use of irony, her hawk-like eye for detail and even keener ear for the manner in which people speak. Conversation, the bugbear of many a writer, is Austen’s forte. As Smith writes: “This whole book could be devoted to Jane Austen’s use of dialogue.”

You might ask why a work such as this is necessary, when one could simply read Austen’s novels and her correspondence with its insightful literary advice. To question the point of this guide, however, would be to invalidate not merely the creative writing culture of our times, but the encouragement and companionship books like this can offer.

Cohen’s touch is more bracing, as he sets out the myriad ways in which the greats have tackled all aspects of fiction. Like Smith, he addresses the novelist’s stations of the cross in chapters that suggest ways of beguiling readers into reading beyond the first sentence, how to bring a novel to a resounding conclusion, and all points between. He offers vignettes that illustrate his various points, such as EL Doctorow unable to write a letter excusing his daughter from school, throwing away attempt after attempt until his wife comes to the rescue and dashes off the required note. As Doctorow later reflected: “Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.” This is where How To Write Like Tolstoy sings, writers’ hard-earned experience memorably recorded. In similar vein is Vladimir Nabokov’s horror at the idea that a character might take on its own life and disrupt his plans for the novel. Oh no, he told one interviewer, “my characters are galley slaves”.

Less useful is where Cohen peppers the page with examples of the different means by which various writers, for instance, start a story, be it William Thackeray’s comic scene-setting or JD Salinger’s “bloody-minded” narrator’s unintentional humour. However, the moral of this, as he rightly says, is that there is “different bait for different fish”. That, in fact, is the most important point for any would-be novelist to take from this or any guide or course. While there are innumerable ways of writing badly, there is no single way to get it right. This should be taken as encouragement, of a sort.