On Writing (and Writers): a Miscellany of Advice and Opinions Read online

  Letter to the Cambridge Broadsheet, March 9, 1960 (CL 3)

  ON PLAGIARISM

  I only once detected a pupil offering me someone else as his own work. I told him I was not a detective nor even a schoolmaster, nor a nurse, and that I absolutely refused to take any precaution against this puerile trick: that I’d as soon think it my business to see that he washed behind his ears or wiped his bottom. He went down of his own accord the next week and I never saw him again. I think you ought to make a general announcement of that sort . . . .

  What staggers me is how any man can prefer the galley-slave labor of transcription to the freeman’s work of attempting an essay on his own.

  Letter to Alastair Fowler, December 10, 1959 (CL 3)

  On the Writing Process

  INK IS THE GREAT CURE

  Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

  Letter to Arthur Greeves, May 30, 1916 (CL 1)

  INK IS A DEADLY DRUG

  Ink is a deadly drug. One wants to write. I cannot shake off the addiction.

  Letter to Martyn Skinner, October 11, 1950 (CL 3)

  THE FREEDOM TO WRITE WHATEVER ONE WANTS

  There is one comfort which must inevitably be wanting anywhere except at home—namely, the ability to write whenever one wishes. For, though of course there is no formal obstacle, you will readily see that it is impossible to take out one’s manuscript and start to work in another’s house. And, when ideas come flowing upon me, so great is the desire of framing them into words, words into sentences, and sentences into meter, that the inability to do so is no light affliction.

  Letter to Arthur Greeves, November 4, 1914 (CL 1)

  SOME ARE BORN TO WRITE

  I am sure that some are born to write as trees are born to bear leaves: for these, writing is a necessary mode of their own development. If the impulse to write survives the hope of success, then one is among these. If not, then the impulse was at best only pardonable vanity, and it will certainly disappear when the hope is withdrawn.

  Letter to Arthur Greeves, August 28, 1930 (CL 1)

  WRITING IS LIKE SCRATCHING AN ITCH

  As to the reward for printed work (apart from money), one’s first good reviews are very sweet—perhaps dangerously so—and fame has one really solid good about it in so far as it makes some strangers approach you with a friendliness they would not have felt otherwise. It may even win you their prayers (as I hope I have yours: you certainly have mine). The rest is all in the order of those things which it is painful to miss but not really very nice to get. (It is painful not to be able to scratch a place in the middle of one’s back, yet scratching doesn’t rank very high among our pleasures).

  Letter to Vera Gebbert, July 16, 1953 (CL 3)

  ACADEMIC WRITING VS. IMAGINATIVE WRITING

  Academic work and imaginative writing are incompatible only in the same sense as playing the piano and taking hot baths: i.e. they can’t be done at the same time.

  Letter to Alastair Fowler, May 19, 1955 (CL 3)

  THE AUTHOR WITHIN VS. THE WHOLE PERSON

  “There are usually two reasons for writing an imaginative work, which may be called author’s reason and the man’s. If only one of these is present, then, so far as I am concerned, the book will not be written. If the first is lacking, it can’t; if the second is lacking, it shouldn’t.”

  In the sixteenth century when everyone was saying that poets (by which they meant all imaginative writers) ought “to please and instruct,” Tasso made a valuable distinction. He said that the poet, as poet, was concerned solely with pleasing. But then every poet was also a man and a citizen; in that capacity he ought to, and would wish to, make his work edifying as well as pleasing.

  Now I do not want to stick very close to the renaissance ideas of “pleasing” and “instructing.” Before I could accept either term it might need so much redefining that what was left of it at the end would not be worth retaining. All I want to use is the distinction between the author as author and the author as man, citizen, or Christian. What this comes to for me is that there are usually two reasons for writing an imaginative work, which may be called author’s reason and the man’s. If only one of these is present, then, so far as I am concerned, the book will not be written. If the first is lacking, it can’t; if the second is lacking, it shouldn’t.

  In the author’s mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariably begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a form: verse or prose, short story, novel, play, or whatnot. When these two things click you have the author’s impulse complete. It is now a thing inside him pawing to get out. He longs to see that bubbling stuff pouring into that form as the cook longs to see the new jam pouring into the clean jam jar. This nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his meals. It’s like being in love.

  While the author is in this state, the man will of course have to criticize the proposed book from quite a different point of view. He will ask how the gratification of this impulse will fit in with all the other things he wants, and ought to do or be. Perhaps the whole thing is too frivolous and trivial (from the man’s point of view, not the author’s) to justify the time and pains it would involve. Perhaps it would be unedifying when it was done. Or else perhaps (at this point the author cheers up) it looks like being “good,” not in a merely literary sense, but “good” all around.

  This may sound rather complicated but it is really very like what happens about other things. You are attracted by a girl; but is she the sort of girl you’d be wise, or right, to marry? You would like to have lobster for lunch; but does it agree with you and is it wicked to spend that amount of money on a meal? The author’s impulse is a desire (it is very like an itch), and of course, like every other desire, needs to be criticized by the whole man.

  Let me now apply this to my own fairy tales. Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out “allegories” to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images: a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. It was part of the bubbling.

  Then came the form. As these images sorted themselves into events (i.e., became a story) they seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that I fell in love with the form itself: its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections, and “gas.” I was now enamored of it. Its very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction, as the hardness of the stone pleases the sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnet delights the sonneteer.

  On that side (as author) I wrote fairy tales because the fairy tale seemed the ideal form for the stuff I had to say.

  Then of course the man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices, almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past
those watchful dragons? I thought one could.

  That was the man’s motive. But of course he could have done nothing if the author had not been on the boil first.

  You will notice that I have throughout spoken of fairy tales, not “children’s stories.” Professor J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings has shown that the connection between fairy tales and children is not nearly so close as publishers and educationalists think. Many children don’t like them and many adults do. The truth is, as he says, that they are now associated with children because they are out of fashion with adults; have in fact retired to the nursery as old furniture used to retire there, not because the children had begun to like it but because their elders had ceased to like it.

  I was therefore writing “for children” only in the sense that I excluded what I thought they would not like or understand; not in the sense of writing what I intended to be below adult attention. I may of course have been deceived, but the principle at least saves one from being patronizing. I never wrote down to anyone; and whether the opinion condemns or acquits my own work, it certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then. The inhibitions which I hoped my stories would overcome in a child’s mind may exist in a grown-up’s mind too, and may perhaps be overcome by the same means.

  The fantastic or mythical is a mode available at all ages for some readers; for others, at none. At all ages, if it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus instead of “commenting on life,” can add to it. I am speaking, of course, about the thing itself, not my own attempts at it.

  “Juveniles,” indeed! Am I to patronize sleep because children sleep sound? Or honey because children like it?

  “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” Of Other Worlds

  WRITING IS LIKE A LUST

  But to speak of the craft itself, I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer. Writing is like a “lust,” or like “scratching when you itch.” Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I for one must get it out.

  “Heaven, Earth, and Outer Space,” Decision II, 1963

  WRITING IS LIKE BUILDING A NEST

  The bee builds its cell and the bird its nest, probably with no knowledge of what purpose they will serve: another sees to that. Nobody knows what the result of your writing, or mine . . . will be. But I think we may depend upon it that endless and devoted work on an object to which a man feels seriously impelled will tell somewhere or other: himself or others, in this world or others, will reap a harvest proportional to the output.

  Letter to Arthur Greeves, August 28, 1930 (CL 1)

  MOTIVES FOR WRITING

  As for the real motives for writing after one has “got over” the desire for acknowledgment: in the first place, I found and find, that precisely at the moment when you have really put all that out of your mind and decided not to write again—or if you do, to do it with the clear consciousness that you are only playing yourself—precisely then the ideas—which came so rarely in the days when you regarded yourself officially as an author—begin to bubble and simmer, and sooner or later you will have to write: and the question why won’t really enter your mind.

  Letter to Arthur Greeves, August 28, 1930 (CL 1)

  WRITING AS VICARIOUS EXPERIENCE

  You ask me whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not quite such a fool as all that. But if one is only to talk from firsthand experience on any subject, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the thing they call love, I have what is better—the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catullus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Brontë, of, of—anyone else I have read. We see through their eyes. And as the greater includes the less, the passion of a great mind includes all the qualities of the passion of a small one. Accordingly, we have every right to talk about it.

  Letter to Arthur Greeves, October 12, 1915 (CL 1)

  HUMAN AUTHORS ARE NOT TRULY “CREATIVE”

  “Creation” as applied to human authorship . . . seems to me an entirely misleading term. We make ἐξὑποκειμένων [with regard to what lies at hand], i.e. we rearrange elements He has provided. There is not a vestige of real creativity de novo [entirely new] in us. Try to imagine a new primary color, a third sex, a fourth dimension, or even a monster which does not consist of bits of existing animals stuck together! Nothing happens. And that surely is why our works (as you said) never mean to others quite what we intended: because we are recombining elements made by Him and already containing His meanings. Because of those divine meanings in our materials it is impossible we should ever know the whole meaning of our own works, and the meaning we never intended may be the best and truest one.

  Writing a book is much less like creation than it is like planting a garden or begetting a child: in all three cases we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream which works, so to speak, in its own way. I would not wish it to be otherwise. If one could really create in the strict sense, would one not find one had created a sort of Hell?

  Letter to Sister Penelope, February 20, 1943 (CL 2)

  ON HIS OWN STRUGGLES WITH REDUNDANCY

  Why can I never say anything once? (“Two and two make four. These pairs, in union, generate quaternity, and the duplication of duplicates leaves us one short of five.”) Well, all’s one. Plague of these pickled herrings!

  Letter to Owen Barfield, May 17, 1943 (CL 2)

  WRITING AND THINKING AS A SINGLE PROCESS

  “I once asked [Lewis] how he managed to write with such ease, and I think his answer tells us more about his writing than anything else he said. He told me that the thing he most loved about writing was that it did two things at once. This he illustrated by saying: ‘I don’t know what I mean till I see what I’ve said.’ In other words writing and thinking were a single process.”

  Walter Hooper, Preface to CL 3

  RETURNING TO A WRITING TASK

  Returning to work on an interrupted story is not like returning to work on a scholarly article. Facts, however long the scholar has left them untouched in his notebook, will still prove the same conclusions; he has only to start the engine running again. But the story is an organism: it goes on surreptitiously growing or decaying while your back is turned. If it decays, the resumption of work is like trying to coax back to life an almost extinguished fire, or to recapture the confidence of a shy animal which you had only partially tamed at your last visit.

  English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)

  DEFINING TERMS

  Unless we are writing a dictionary, or a textbook of some technical subject, we define our words only because we are in some measure departing from their real current sense.

  Introduction, Studies in Words

  THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE

  Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.

  “At the Fringe of Language,” Studies in Words

  ON WRITING TO FRIENDS

  After all, what is the object of writing to friends except that of talking oneself into a state of self-importance and the belief that one’s own perversities are a matter of universal sympathy.

  Letter to Leo Baker, September 25, 1920 (CL 1)

  On Writing Fiction

  CHARACTERIZATION IN ROMANCE STORIES

  Just as a lobster wears its skeleton outside, so the characters in romance wear their character outside. For it is their story that is their character.

  “The Misery
of Florimel,” Spenser’s Images of Life

  STORIES WITH PLOT AND STORIES WITH “ATMOSPHERE”

  “In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive.”

  It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to story considered in itself. Granted the story, the style in which it should be told, the order in which it should be disposed, and (above all) the delineation of the characters, have been abundantly discussed. But the story itself, the series of imagined events, is nearly always passed over in silence, or else treated exclusively as affording opportunities for the delineation of character . . . .