How to write like Tolstoy : a journey into the minds of our greatest writers

"“There are three rules for writing a novel,” Somerset Maugham is said to have said. “Unfortunately, no one knows what 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...