Neil Jopson's Blog - Posts Tagged "cs-lewis"
Stuck for inspiration? CS Lewis can help
Don’t trust authors. That was the advice given by C.S. Lewis in his essay It All Began with a Picture…. He didn’t mean you should watch your wallet around literary types. Nor that that writers were somehow more dishonest than the rest of the population. But it was a health warning.
Writers, he said, were too caught up in the creative act to be able to give an accurate account of it. This was particularly true for any explanation they might give of how they found inspiration. Happily, warning given, Lewis tried to explain as honestly as he could where his own inspiration came from. And the little account he produced, tucked into the pages of his collection of essays Of This and Other Worlds, provides us with a few gems we can use to inspire our own work:
1. Inspiration can come from anywhere. Lewis describes how the Narnia series came from a simple image. A picture that appeared in his mind. The same happened with his space trilogy. Narnia came from the vision of a fawn standing in a snowy wood. A whole universe was born.
An image may not pop fully formed into our own heads. But we live in a visual world. Glance through magazines, newspapers, the internet. Experiment with AI to create images. Does a picture catch your eye. Write a story about it. Describe what is happening. See where it takes you.
2. Inspiration doesn’t have to be new. An old memory, object, or thought you tucked away decades ago might be waiting to be used. Lewis had the fawn in his head for over 20 years before it became the inspiration for a children’s classic.
3. Just start writing. Lewis had no idea what his story would be when he started writing about the fawn. But he just went for it. And don’t forget…
4. Choosing to act on inspiration leads to more inspiration. Aslan, the core of the Narnia stories, suddenly appeared once Lewis started writing. Don’t know where your story is going? You’ll never find out if you don’t start writing! And you can use the method in point 1 again to help at any point in a story. Remember, inspiration can also be a word, phrase, image, memory. Anything really.
Lewis describes writing as an all-consuming act. We too need to throw our entire selves into it. Ignoring doubt, anxiety or second guessing. Remember inspiration is about getting those ideas down on paper (or into pixels). The fine tuning comes later. Whether we are going to write a thriller or create great literature we need to have something to work with, an initial draft of our story. Inspiration helps us to produce that raw material. Inspiration is not magic. We can work with it. We can create with it. And we can find it anywhere.
Writers, he said, were too caught up in the creative act to be able to give an accurate account of it. This was particularly true for any explanation they might give of how they found inspiration. Happily, warning given, Lewis tried to explain as honestly as he could where his own inspiration came from. And the little account he produced, tucked into the pages of his collection of essays Of This and Other Worlds, provides us with a few gems we can use to inspire our own work:
1. Inspiration can come from anywhere. Lewis describes how the Narnia series came from a simple image. A picture that appeared in his mind. The same happened with his space trilogy. Narnia came from the vision of a fawn standing in a snowy wood. A whole universe was born.
An image may not pop fully formed into our own heads. But we live in a visual world. Glance through magazines, newspapers, the internet. Experiment with AI to create images. Does a picture catch your eye. Write a story about it. Describe what is happening. See where it takes you.
2. Inspiration doesn’t have to be new. An old memory, object, or thought you tucked away decades ago might be waiting to be used. Lewis had the fawn in his head for over 20 years before it became the inspiration for a children’s classic.
3. Just start writing. Lewis had no idea what his story would be when he started writing about the fawn. But he just went for it. And don’t forget…
4. Choosing to act on inspiration leads to more inspiration. Aslan, the core of the Narnia stories, suddenly appeared once Lewis started writing. Don’t know where your story is going? You’ll never find out if you don’t start writing! And you can use the method in point 1 again to help at any point in a story. Remember, inspiration can also be a word, phrase, image, memory. Anything really.
Lewis describes writing as an all-consuming act. We too need to throw our entire selves into it. Ignoring doubt, anxiety or second guessing. Remember inspiration is about getting those ideas down on paper (or into pixels). The fine tuning comes later. Whether we are going to write a thriller or create great literature we need to have something to work with, an initial draft of our story. Inspiration helps us to produce that raw material. Inspiration is not magic. We can work with it. We can create with it. And we can find it anywhere.
