by Barnabas Piper

Whether you fell in love with C.S. Lewis through his Chronicles of Narnia, his collections of brilliant essays and radio addresses like The Weight of Glory or God in the Dock, or his numerous longer works it is undeniable that he was, unhyperbolically, one of the most brilliant thinkers and writers ever. He has shaped the minds and craft of innumerable Christian writers over the decades, and I number him among my greatest influences and inspirations. Here are 30 pieces of writing advice from the man himself, drawn from this wonderful collection, C.S. Lewis on Writing (and Writers). They are practical, inspiring, clever, and true–just as you would expect.

  1. In writing don’t merely adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”: make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please, will you do your job for me?”
  2. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”: otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. 
  3. Write about what really interests you . . .if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about.
  4. The shocking truth is that, while insincerity may be fatal to good writing, sincerity, of itself, never taught anyone to write well. It is a moral virtue, not a literary talent.
  5. The greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. 
  6. Every thought can be expressed in a number of different ways: and style is the art of expressing a given thought in the most beautiful words and rhythms of words. . .thus by the power of style, what was nonsense becomes ineffably beautiful.
  7.  A plague on these moderns scrambling for what they call originality–like men trying to lift themselves off the earth by pulling at their own braces: as if by shutting their eyes to the work of the masters they were likely to create new things themselves.
  8. No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake, and what men call originality will come through.
  9. What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least that is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can.
  10. Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.
  11. The more abstract the subject, the more our language should avoid unnecessary  abstraction.
  12. Adverse criticism should diagnose and exhibit faults, not abuse them.
  13. 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.
  14. 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. 
  15. It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then. 
  16. 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.
  17. I don’t know what I mean until I see what I’ve said. In other words writing and thinking were a single process.
  18. The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can only come once) but for a certain surprisingness. The point has often been misunderstood. . .We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savor the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. 
  19. Great subjects do not make great poems; usually, indeed, the reverse.
  20. The critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown-up because it is grown-up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish: these things are the mark childhood and adolescence. 
  21. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. 
  22. But surely arrested development consist not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? . . . A tree grows because it adds rings: a train doesn’t grow by leaving one station behind and puffing on to the next. 
  23. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his lifelong enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing.
  24. Since it is so likely that [children]  will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. 
  25. I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable. For in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones: and the terrible figures are not merely terrible, but sublime. It would be nice of no little boy in bed, hearing, or thinking he hears, a sound, were ever at all frightened. But if he is going to be frightened, I think it better that he should think of giants and dragons than merely of burglars.
  26. Whatever in art is not doing good is doing harm: no room for passengers. (In a good black-and-white drawing the areas of white paper are essential to the whole design, just as much as the lines. It is only in a child’s drawing that they’re merely blank paper.) 
  27. Every sentence should be tested on the tongue, to make sure that the sound of it has the hardness or softness, the swiftness or languor, which the meaning of it calls for. 
  28. It is very dangerous to write about a kind [of genre or style] you hate. Hatred obscures all distinctions. 
  29. I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning.
  30. You waste on calling me a liar and a hypocrite  time you ought to have spent on refuting my position. Even if your main purpose was to gratify resentment, you have gone about it the wrong way. Any man would much rather be called names than proved wrong.