C.S. Lewis on Writing

I'm quite sure they already do. The persistence of writing that tells rather than shows owes to the usual causes, i.e. a shortage of motivation, confidence, ability and/or time on the part of the writer.

Critical advice.

It's a safe bet that no fourth grader, no matter how extraordinary, has come across those two words by that point in his life. So, of course, everyone in the class was puzzled by them. The phrase might as well have been some ancient, Latin dictum -- and, for all we knew, it was.

Finally, one day, someone mustered the courage to ask her what the words meant.

"It's a rule for good writing," she said. "When you understand what it means, you're already in danger of breaking it."

-- @stevenkaas

Still very much fun to read these old classics, and the intention of the writer comes through despite these 1920's pulp idioms, so it was intensely enjoyable, but I would say that this style of writing definitely shows its age.

(I also recently read John Carter and the Princess of Mars, which was written around the same era, and it's equally silly but for different reasons.)

Better yet, the entire year. It's the single most valuable concept they teach in high school writing.

"Show, don't tell" without any adjectives can only be pure narration of events and metaphor. Maybe that is good. But it can take more words to say the same thing, and it's difficult. A good exercise though.

Though to be fair at this point the only books on the craft I buy talk about specific topics (Dialogue, description, subtext, etc).

One recommendation that stuck with me is to avoid words ending in "ly". I now make that effort, and the results are an improvement.

I can't remember a case where he spoke or wrote about writing in a similar fashion to what C.S. Lewis wrote in his letter, but his 5 rules of writing[1] have been influential for many writers. Once, in an Annapolis address, he explained that the rules were simple (1. You must write. 2. You must finish what you write. ...) but only 1 in 10 would follow each step. This was how you could get from half of the adult US population wanting to be a writer to less than a thousand actually being members of the writing guild he belonged to.

[1] http://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm

Often it's a case of writers trying to be overly clever with their wordplay. For example, you wouldn't want to say something like, "her posterior condition was greatly exaggerated," when what you meant was, "she has a big ass". Sure, the first sentence is "clever", but it's not very clear. The second sentence is right to the point; there's no mistaking the meaning, and it paints a better picture in one's mind.

It's similar to active voice vs. passive voice. "Dan hit the ball," is clear and to the point. "The ball was hit by Dan," paints a weaker picture, even if it says the same thing. Why is "ball" the subject of the sentence. Are we supposed to care about this ball? Aren't we talking about Dan here?

Clarity in writing is important. Readers don't like to be confused. Anything that breaks the "flow" should be avoided, unless that is your goal (e.g. to stop the reader and make them think).

At any rate, his previous point about there being no "right" or "wrong" language is something that is absolutely true. I think that's the most important point in the letter, which is outside his list of five points.

> Point 3 peaked my interest

The homonym you want here is pique[1]

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pique definition 3

I think that, in my opinion at least, these instructions apply VERY well to journalism, or perhaps certain types of fiction, but not fiction on the whole.

One of my recently favorite authors is Elmore Leonard, who breaks most of these rules with great ferocity, and is a fantastic writer on the whole.

He has his own rules on writing, but the first is:

"My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

In contrast to CS Lewis' writings, this leads to much more believable dialog, but that doesn't necessarily conform to any of Lewis' rules. Characters are seldom terse when they could instead be interesting. Characters are seldom cautious to take care that the reader can fully understand what they're saying. Characters are seldom as specific as you might like them to be.

I find this to be much more natural, and feels much less "like writing" than most other authors and for that, I appreciate him immensely.

For example, The Elements of Style tells you to avoid the passive voice, on the grounds that sentences like "The sandwich was eaten by me," are much more awkward than "I ate the sandwich." It gives three sentences in support of this: "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground," "It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had," and "The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired." None of these sentences actually contain a passive: the first is an existential sentence, the second is a simple copula, and the third uses the copula with an adjective, not a participle.[1]

All of which is to say—Strunk and White did not know what a passive was. The actual advice they meant to give is something along the lines of, "Don't be vague about agency," but that is a different proscription. There are places where you should avoid the passive, and there are also places where you should employ the passive, because it is clearer than the alternative. For example, if your documentation says, "Our software product is used to [blah]", you should not change it to, "People use our software product to [blah]," because those people do not matter. By avoiding the passive, you have made your writing less clear by introducing unnecessary information.

Strunk and White have a lot of advice which is merely harmless, but it is not a spectacular writing guide, except for the simplest, least elaborate kinds of writing. Truly great writing is not writing which follows those rules, but writing that knows when to follow such rules. For example, Orwell and Churchill, both quite excellent writers, use the passive significantly more than journalists of the time[2].

[1]: The passive transforms sentences of the form "{noun1} {verb} {noun2}" into "{noun2} {be} {verb}ed [by {noun1}]"; it is (or should be) clear that these sentences cannot be transformed from the latter pattern into the former.

[2]: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003414.h...