How to Write Like Tolstoy

Question 1

Beginning

Answer 1

question is not just how you begin a story, but how you begin a story to get someones attention.

Question 2

Beginnings–Grabbers

Answer 2

a type of opening immediately starting the narrative with a bang “ the night marco was shot he saw it coming”

” As Gregor Sansa awake that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect. “

“Hale knew they meant to murder hi m before he had been in Brighton three hours”

Question 3

Every opening is a grabber in some sense;

Answer 3

it is meant to make the reader want to read on.

Question 4

Beginning, Here I am:

Answer 4

the narrator announcing himself or herself as the centre of the story. Forces the reader into a dialogue with the writer.

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. “

Question 5

Show boating beginning

Answer 5

“it was the day my grandmother exploded.” Can lead to anticlimax, flailing for attention and making attention known.

Question 6

The goal is an invitational beginning:

Answer 6

one that doesn’t shout for attention but one that promises, there is an interesting world here, there is much to involve you. You should read on.

Question 7

Old Man +Sea beginning

Answer 7

“he was an old man who fished alone in a skiff on the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days his parents had told him that the old man was…”

Question 8

Invitational intro has the advantage because it

Answer 8

need not keep up the fireworks.

Question 9

Passage to India beg:

Answer 9

“except for the marabar caves–and they are twenty miles off– the city of chandrapore presents nothing extraordindary.”

Question 10

Starting a novel in the middle of a conversation,

Answer 10

giving oblique clues as to the motivations that the viewers have to assembly. “Abrupt plunging of a reader into the middle of an ongoing life”

Question 11

Grand declaration Opening:

Answer 11

“it was the best of times it was the worst of times”. Can slip into didacticism and pomposity.

Question 12

Quieter summing up, emotional taking stock more intimate and personal:

Answer 12

Louis edrich tracks” we started dying before the snow and like the snow we continued to fall”.

Question 13

Frame story:

Answer 13

Narrator explaining how the main account was discovered. Turn of the screw, finding a journal.

Question 14

The “before the curtain note”:

Answer 14

“people attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted”, sets the tone, can provide a panorama of what we will see.

Question 15

The first sentence must flow through the rest of the story.

Answer 15

In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems in your book. The theme is defined, the style the tone.

Question 16

Aristotle Poetics:

Answer 16

drama was a representation of action not of persons.

Question 17

The novel offers us a closeness to the thoughts and actions of an individual that no other form can

Answer 17

Can show reasons for acting in intimate detail.

Question 18

Small details that cause a reaction in the reader/ audience and characters in the scene

Answer 18

Helen’s beauty caused men to rise to their feet” picture the reaction and let the reader fill in the cause.

Body the character forth.

Question 19

What kind of person would actually do that thing, if you follow that question to a truthful end

Answer 19

you will have an interesting character.

Question 20

Idea of a merging sympathy with a character and their viewpoint are one of the central functions of fiction.

Answer 20

Can sneer at one character and then merging see their motivations and impulses.

Question 21

Exposition as ammunition–

Answer 21

use it only when you need it to serve some direct purpose that can’t be otherwise filled by the character

Question 22

first Person

Answer 22

lends itself to a vantage point closer to the emotional blast radius– can be powerful. Can be a documentation of the action making clear it is a story.

Question 23

First Person POV Options

Answer 23

Can come from a rival– Anna Karenina, can come from someone close to the protagonist, which combines an immediacy to the action with a distance that allows for some wider shot. Unreliable narrator a useful form of this. Some impairment or skewing of perspective can lend energy to the narration.

Character recounting his experiences or tale. Heard through someone else.

Question 24

Third Person

Answer 24

War and peace pan in– start wide on the war, into an individual character and then start the ball with him. Intimacy for sacrifice to know where we are before getting the emotion strumming.

Question 25

Dramatic reporting–

Answer 25

what can be seen or heard. “It was clear that”, “it seems”, representing a narrative voice centre of consciousness.

Question 26

Keeping all summary in the minds of the characters

Answer 26

to make a puzzle piece rather than a grid.

Question 27

Dialogue

Answer 27

One can be easily tempted to employ dialogue to deliver information that would be an unlikely part of the conversation

Question 28

Simple dont’s of dialogues

Answer 28

can’t use words that weren’t around at the time. Study the sub dialects of the characters to form syntactically different dialogue.

Question 29

Irony

Answer 29

In fiction two and two are always more than four. The writer always leaves things out. The reader makes the connection from things he is shown.

Question 30

We cease to wonder at

Answer 30

what we understand

Question 31

Only some way into animal farm do

Answer 31

you realize it is about tyranny.

Question 32

The pleasure of the absent is

Answer 32

one of the cardinal marks of good fiction.

Question 33

Details become a story once

Answer 33

causality is introduced to the proceeding

Question 34

Events in a plot need to relate to one another

Answer 34

by being necessary or probable.

Question 35

Too much plot:

Answer 35

scheme which the characters are forced to do certain things that don’t seem true to the reader in order to invoke a response. Impatiently and clumsily rushing for the response with force but not argument in your corner.

Question 36

The more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get onto a sheet of paper

Answer 36

the more literary you are. Telling detail. Fresh detail.

Question 37

All Plot is useless if

Answer 37

we don’t care about the people at the centre of our stories

Question 38

Reading aloud is the best way to

Answer 38

get the Rythmns right.

Question 39

Repetition of a phrase as a leitmotif throughout a novel,

Answer 39

coming in waves and gathering meaning as it occurs

Question 40

First technique authors should master is antithesis–

Answer 40

arranging ideas and syllables into a kind of symmetry: it was the best of times it was the worst of times.

Question 41

Word order for rythmn and clarity,

Answer 41

putting the most important words in the points of attention. Top spot is the end of the sentence, next top one in the beginning.

Question 42

Safety in variety

Answer 42

Disguising metrical rythmn can be achieved partly by moderate use, partly by variation in the rythmns employed, and partly by increasing the variety of their length.

Question 43

A work of fiction is always a balance between the recreation of the detail in an accurate and moving way,

Answer 43

and its importance relative to the current of the story– a broken glass, however accurately rendered, should not take a paragraph.

Question 44

Things to look out for when revising:

Answer 44

sentimentality, weak narrative, overly lyrical prose, solipsism, self indulgence, misogyny and parochialisms, sterile game playing, didacticism, moral simplicity, unnecessary difficulty, Informational fetishes, too many characters, wrong tone or pace, muddled exposition.

Question 45

All writing is a campaign against cliche,

Answer 45

of the mind, of the word, of the heart.