Writing Lessons From CS Lewis

Peter, the other half, was at a business dinner this week and – bless him! – took the opportunity to tell the people he was chatting to that I had a new book out.  (Trouble Brewing – brilliant stuff!) Here's Minou, the cat, "helping" me sign some copies.

Now, what should have happened (this is the dream scenario, you understand) that everyone there should have whipped out their smart phones and ordered a copy.  Yeah, right.  What actually happened was that they all stood round and said how they couldn’t imagine how anyone actually made this stuff up and where did you start and how hard it must be and then moved on.

It’s interesting, isn’t it?  I mean, how do you – and me, for that matter - make the stuff up?  Almost anyone can come up with a few ideas, but putting it all together is another matter.  Books on writing, funnily enough, don’t seem to be much help.  I’ve read loads and they all stress the importance of character (tick) of setting (tick) getting a theme (half a tick) and then wander off into chapters entitled something like:  Make it Come Alive!  How to write believable dialogue!

Hang on a minute.  This sort of stuff might help you wrote isolated scenes, but I can’t believe for a minute that anyone you’re not related to would ever want to actually read them.  So where does the story come from?

If you’ve got an idea, what you want to know is how to translate that story into a coherent narrative.  And the best way to learn how to do that is to put all the How-To books to one side (you can refer to them later) and pick up a book that you love and know well.  Any book will do, but it has to be one you know.  Then, with pen in hand, write down what actually happens.

Let’s take The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe for instance.  CS Lewis recorded how he’d had the picture in his mind for ages of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels by a lamppost in a snowy wood.  So how does that turn into a story?

Well, it’s clearly not the world as we know it, so it’s another world, but allied to ours.  The lamppost tells us that. The faun isn’t the quite scary faun of Greek legend but, with his umbrella and parcels, rather an attractive, cosy figure.  Or is he?  Question one.

Fauns should be in Greece, among hot sun and shady woodland.  Something – the snow – has obviously gone wrong with the faun’s world.   What? Question two.

Who’s seeing the faun?  He has to interact with someone, and that someone is – it’s a children’s story -  is Lucy, the child from our world.  How did she get there?  Question Three.

So from that one image, there’s some backstory.  There’s questions to be answered, about the Faun’s motives, the world he lives in and where Lucy comes from.

As it’s a magical world. there’s clearly something magical wrong with it, which gives us the villian, the White (snow) Witch. A villian has to have a hero to defeat them.  Who’s that?  The kids, yes, but they could do with some magical help and that’s where Aslan comes bounding in.

Lewis was writing in 1949 and, with the war fresh in everyone’s mind, it’s only natural that the war should inform his imagination. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are evacuees from the London Blitz but the war is happening in Narnia, too.

Narnia is occupied territory under an oppressive regime, complete with a Secret Police, random killings and disappearances, and Peter, Susan and Lucy have to be wary who they can trust.  When Edmund becomes a traitor, he’s seduced by sweets, a nod to how rationing sharpened everyone’s appetite for luxuries.

All these ingredients and many more, such as Lewis’s vivid Christian imagination, go into the story but, if you’re struggling with the idea of how to covert ideas into narrative, just – pen in hand – read the book, seeing how one idea leads to another.  It’s a cracking lesson in how to write a story.