Susanna here. Last week, on November 29, this Tweet from Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown (my UK agency) crossed my timeline and caught my attention:
C.S. Lewis was born 120 years ago today. His writing tips in this letter to a fan are as spot on now as they were when sent.
“Instead of telling us a thing is terrible, describe it so we’ll be terrified”.
Encapsulated in the Tweet was an image of a page on which were written five of Lewis's writing tips. For the benefit of people who might not be able to read them in the image, here's what C.S. Lewis wrote to his fan:
What really matters is:—
1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us delighted when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”
5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
Initially, on reading those, I thought, “That’s good advice.”
And then I thought: “Except for number four.” Because it is, sometimes. And other times, it isn’t.
C.S. Lewis, after all, was the same writer who, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, wrote what I’ve always considered to be one of the best descriptions of a battlefield ever, bar none—and he did it in a single sentence, using one of those single adjectives he claims writers shouldn’t use. It’s a sentence written from the perspective of the youngest girl, Lucy, when she first arrives in the thick of the battle:
“Horrible things were happening wherever she looked.”
Simply that.
And the reason it works, for me, is exactly because of what Lewis observes in his rules—because it invites me, the reader, to do part of the job of the writing.
Writing is, in my view, a sort of partnership between the writer and the reader anyway. Like those games where you sketch a few lines on a paper and your friends figure out right away what you’re drawing.
Normally I’m very descriptive, but as a writer, sometimes I don’t want to give you the whole picture—I want to give you just enough that you can fill the rest in for yourself, from your experience, and to your taste. My idea of a handsome man may not be your idea of a handsome man, but if I say someone was “handsome” you’ll fill in the details as you see fit.
It’s a trick of word association that allows a reader to complete the picture. It allowed me, as a child, to read that sentence from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and see that battlefield as clearly as if I had been standing on it beside Lucy, my own mind filling in what, to me, were horrible images of warfare. Today, those images have been supplanted by what my adult mind perceives as horrible, and so the battlefield has changed. But I still see it, when I read that sentence.
Just as when Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray tells his friend Harry, “Suddenly something happened that made me afraid. I can’t tell you what it was, but it was terrible”, my own mind fills in versions of what terrible things might have made him afraid, without him needing to supply them.
Not that I don’t understand what C.S. Lewis is trying to say, in that fourth piece of advice. He's saying don't be lazy; respect your reader enough to take the time to find the best words and phrases to use. But sometimes “delightful” or “terrible” is the best word to use.
And it’s not always bad when the reader does part of the work.
At least, that’s what I think.
What’s your view? Do you like things to be better described for you, or are you fine with shorthand, sometimes?