Here’s a letter that C.S. Lewis wrote to a first-time author. It’s pretty funny in how blunt it is. It also has a wealth of good-advice that I wish more modern fantasy authors would take. Still how would you feel if you got this letter from C.S. Lewis?
My wife and I have just been reading you book and I to tell you that I think it a quite amazing achievement — incomparably beyond anything I could have done at that age. The story run, on the whole, very well and there is some real imagination in it. The idea of the gigantic spoiled brat (had you a horrid baby brother once?) is really excellent: perhaps even profound. Unlike most modern fantasies your book also has a firm core of civilized ethics. On all these grounds, hearty congratulations.
On the other hand there is no reason at all why your next should not be at least twice as good. I hope you will not think it impertinent if I mention (this is only one man’s opinion of course) some mistakes you can avoid in the future.
1. In all stories which take one to another world, the difficulty (as you and I know) is to make something happen when we’ve got there. In face, one needs “filling”. Yours is quite sufficient in quantity (almost too much) but not quite, I think, of the right sort. Aren’t all these economic problems and religious differences too like the politics of our own world? Why go to faerie for what we already have? Surely the wars of faerie should be high, reckless, heroical, romantic wars — concerned with the possession of a beautiful queen or an enchanted treasure? Surely the diplomatic phase of them should be represented not by conferences (which, on your showing, are as dull as ours) but by ringing words of gay taunt, stern defiance, or Quixotic generosity, interchanged by great warriors with sword in hand before the battle joins?
2. This is closely connected with the preceding. In a fantasy every precaution must be taken never to break the spell, to nothing which will wake the reader and bring him back with a bump to the common earth. But this is what you sometimes do. The moving van on which they travel is a dull invention at best, because we can’t help conceiving it as mechanical. But when you add upholstered seats, lavatories, and restaurants, I can’t go on believing in faerie for a moment. It has all turned into commonplace. Similarly even a half-fairy ought not climb a fairy hill carrying a suitcase full of new nighties. (Notice too, the disenchanting implication that the faeries can’t make for themselves lingerie as good as they can get — not even in Paris, which would be bad enough — but, of all places, in London.)
3. Never use adjectives or adverbs which are mere appeals to the reader to feel as you want him to feel. He won’t do it just because you ask him: you got to MAKE him. No good TELLING us a battle was “Exciting”. If you succeeded in exciting us the adjective will be unnecessary: if you don’t, it will be useless. Don’t tell us the jewels had an “emotional” glitter; make us feel the emotion. I can hardly tell you how important this is.
4. You are too fond of long adverbs like “dignifiedly”, which are not nice to pronounce. I hope, by the way, you always write by ear not by eye. 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.
5. Far less about clothes, please! I mean, ordinary clothes. If you had given your fairies strange and beautiful clothes and described THEM, there might be something in it. But your heroine’s tangerine skirt! For whom do you write? No man wants to hear how she was dressed, and the sort of women who does seldom reads fantasy: if she reads anything it is more like to be the Women’s Magazines. By the way, these are a baneful influence on your mind and imagination. Beware! they may kill your talent. If you can’t keep off them, at least, after each debauch, give your imagination a good mouth-wash by a reading (or would it be a re-reading) of the the Odyssey, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, the romantics of Stephens, and all the early mythical plays of W.B. years. Perhaps a touch of Lord Dunsany too.
6. Names not too good. They ought to be beautiful and suggestive as well as strange: not merely odd like Enaj (which sounds as if it came out of Butler’s Erewhom).
I hope all this does not enrage you. You’ll get so much bad advice that I felt I must give you some of what I think good.
C.S. Lewis
2. September 1957
