Creative Writing for People Who Can't Not Write

I started teaching English to ninth-graders when I was 22 years old (I loved it), and I ended up teaching English to undergraduate and graduate students when I was 52 (I loved it). But at that point I was forced to give up classroom teaching forever because I was housebound.

I thought it would be a shame for no more students to profit from my hardwon insights into the English language and good writing, and so I decided to set forth all I could in a book that would be practical and fun to read. I found the perfect illustrator, Patrick Wynne, and the perfect editor, Leonard Goss -- and the book was soon a reality.

Introduction

"If you understand me so well, you will understand other authors too."
—C. S. Lewis wrote to me in 1957

I hope he was right.

The purpose of this book is to enable authors—people who want to write or have to write—to do it better and to enjoy it more. I designed the book for creative writing classes and for creative writers far from the classroom. But I frankly hope the book will be used also as a supplementary textbook for college composition classes and for homiletics classes in seminaries. I am always thinking of the people who want to express themselves better for personal or professional reasons.

Today's wonderful new technology enables people to cover more pages faster with multiple copies of turgid writing that no one will ever really read. What the writer experienced as mindless drudgery is worse than mindless drudgery for readers. Both writers and readers need all the help they can get.

Writing carelessly is easy enough for most people, but writing one's very best is hard, hard work; so we might as well be clear about what we are doing and why. All the things we write are in essence various kinds of letters to ourselves or to other people. Further, they are letters that we HAVE TO WRITE, or that we SHOULD WRITE, or that we WANT TO WRITE.

Everyone understands the NEED to write reports, applications, and business letters. And everyone understands the DUTY to write greetings, personal records, and family letters. But not everyone understands the DESIRE to write. Some of us desire to write in order to be creative, to develop an inborn talent, to find out what we think and feel, to share our ideas and feelings, to intensify life by writing about it, or to experiment on paper because we have a love affair with words.

Needless to say, in a given case we may change our minds about whether we have to write something, whether we should write something, or whether we want to write something. But those are the three valid reasons behind the struggle to put words on paper well. In every chapter of this book the emphasis is upon making conscious, informed choices.

I wrote the book with serious purpose but with the intentionally warm and lively style reflected in the title. Throughout, I was modeling some of the techniques that I am teaching. Because the book is far-ranging, it touches only lightly on most topics and often refers students to good sources for further reading. Many of the footnotes contain valuable material that would have cluttered the text; I hope that readers refer to them. At the end of every chapter I suggest activities meant to illustrate and apply part of what was in the chapter.

Topics in this book include discoveries about creativity, the cost of clarity and brevity, common pitfalls, evocative prose, peculiar properties of the English language, word wealth, rewards of writing, facts about publication, the nature of poetry, how to hit the heart, pathways to print, writers' temperament types, writing tools, and writers as readers. The next-to-last chapter contains an outpouring of reflections and advice from an array of contemporary writers who were kind enough to contribute; and the final chapter brings together for the first time a collection of writing advice from one of our century's foremost writers and teachers, C. S. Lewis.

Here are the ten chapter titles with their opening quotations and their contents.

Appendices

• Annotated list of suggestions for further reading
• "Pure Poppycock" essay

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