Writing Advice from C.S. Lewis
Five Things that Really Matter in Writing
On description
Lewis wrote to a young girl dated June 26, 1956. Joan had apparently described a very special night in her letter and then asked Lewis a few questions about writing.
Lewis responded positively to Joan’s writing:
“You describe the place & the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well—and not the thing itself—the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His Prelude is full of moments in which everything except the thing itself is described.”1
“If you become a writer you’ll be trying to describe the thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across.”
One might interpret Lewis here as suggesting that the experience of beauty or wonder compels description and that we find ourselves not describing the thing itself, but our experience of it.