Writing can take many different forms. Rumer Godden wrote with a dip pen because it slowed her down. She said she needed the thinking time. Henry James (writing a few years earlier in the same house) dictated all his novels to a secretary. Some authors use typewriters, others use pencils or pens or computers. There’s no single way to do it. Someone I know who lectures at a university uses voice recognition technology and “writes” all his lectures by walking up and down his office while apparently talking to himself.
So choose the approach that works for you.
But what about C. S. Lewis? J. R. R. Tolkien thought that Lewis wrote far too quickly, but it still took Lewis about a year to write each Narnia book. So you need to take your time too. Writing good stories can take weeks or even years.
Every writer writes and then rewrites their books. Unfortunately, C. S. Lewis threw away most of his first drafts so we’ve only got a few snippets of his first attempts. Snippets like this one:
This book is about four children whose names were Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter. But mostly it is about Peter who was the youngest. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of the Air Raids, and because Father, who was in the army, had gone off to the war and Mother was doing some kind of war work. They were sent to stay with a relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived by himself in the country.
That’s not quite The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe we know and love! So here’s the first piece of advice:
Write your story and then leave it for a few days or weeks. Then rewrite it. Don’t be afraid to change words, sentences, or whole sections if they don’t feel quite right.
But how do you tell a story? Let’s look at what C. S. Lewis’s advice in the Chronicles of Narnia, starting with Trumpkin in Prince Caspian. Like the Dufflepuds, he gets very muddled at first:
“Oh dear,” said the Dwarf. “I’m doing this very badly. Look here: I think I’ll have to go right back to the beginning and tell you how Caspian grew up in his uncle’s court and how he comes to be on our side at all. But it’ll be a long story.”
“All the better,” said Lucy. “We love stories.”
There are two interesting things to note here:
You should probably start your story at the beginning (though, as we’ll see, that’s not always the best approach).
You should include lots of little details (because we love long stories).
But,
Don’t tell us everything at once. For example, the narrator doesn’t tell us that the Dwarf is Trumpkin until much later in the book.
We see Aravis taking a similar approach in The Horse and His Boy. In Chapter Three, she starts her story at the beginning but keeps some information back to make it more exciting. Shasta finds this very frustrating!
“But what was in the letter?” asked Shasta.
“Be quiet, youngster,” said Bree. “You’re spoiling the story. She’ll tell us all about the letter in the right place. Go on, Tarkheena.”
As I suggested in my last post, we really need to read The Horse and His Boy twice. That’s because C. S. Lewis also kept back some really crucial information until the end of the book. Don’t rush your story!
In his Narnia books, C. S. Lewis gave us a lot more advice on how to write well but I’m going to join him in keeping that advice back for now. Part 2 will follow in a week’s time. Can you bear the suspense?