More writing advice from Lewis

Years and years ago I collected lists of writing advice from three authors—CS Lewis, George Orwell, and Elmore Leonard—and shared them here, both for my own reference and for anyone else who might benefit from them. The Lewis advice came from two separate sources, a letter from the 1950s and his final interview in 1963, and came to eight interrelated points about clarity and precision.

This morning I came across the following, from a 1959 letter to an American schoolgirl collected in Letters of CS Lewis. I own this book, so I don’t know how I’ve missed this set of writing advice before, especially since it may be the best and most systematic that I’ve seen from Lewis. I reproduce it here in full:

It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt.

(1) Turn off the Radio.

(2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.

(3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd. hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.

(4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about. . . .)

(5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he wants to know—the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.

(6) When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.

(7) Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.

(8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.

Excellent, generally applicable advice. I’d say his attempt succeeds. A few of my own glosses:

#1 is a good caution against technological or media distraction. Most of the advice from the last few years will have something about staying off Twitter or putting your phone in another room while writing. Same principle.

#2 is evergreen but perhaps even more important now thanks to the exponential proliferation of trash reading material on the internet. AI-generated textual “content” will only aggravate the problem. Read old books of a wide variety.

Speaking of Elmore Leonard, he’s a good illustration of #3. His dialogue always sounds natural and his third-person narration is so effortlessly conversational that one is not conscious, after a while, of reading it. Great writers can achieve this effect in a variety of ways, not necessarily Leonard’s.

My worst experience with #5 is simply leaving a detail out. Attentive readers of Griswoldville might note the word musketoon in the glossary at the back, though the word appears nowhere in the novel. Well, it was supposed to. One character, a cavalryman who encounters the narrator just before the climactic battle, rests a musketoon on his thigh in my head, but that detail either never made it onto paper or was trimmed and never reinserted in a better place. Fortunately this omission affects nothing in the scene negatively, but it has always bothered me—and cautioned me to make sure I know which details I’ve actually written.

This is where revision and having other people read your manuscript proves most helpful. When writing The Snipers, I had a clear, concrete picture of all of its locations in my head, but I didn’t effectively describe all of them on paper. JP Burten (whose second novel has just come out, by the way) pointed out that the geography of one early scene was totally unclear. I worked hard to fix that, and it strengthened that scene.

#8 has been on my mind a lot recently thanks to YouTube. Listening to—rather than watching—a lot of aspiring YouTube documentarians (I have specifically American YouTubers in mind) has made me wonder whether they know how English works or what words mean. Malapropisms abound. Most often they misuse words as they strain to sound more serious and intellectual than necessary. Basic attention to meaning is sacrificed for a pretentious (or portentous) tone. Which becomes self-defeating, in the manner of Michael Scott trying to use big words.

The mercenary aspect of seeking views by producing videos on the same handful of sensational stories—how many Dyatlov Pass documentaries does a man need?—also plays a role. Per #4, someone who isn’t interested in material for its own sake will not take the care over it that Lewis’s advice requires.