C.S. Lewis’s Advice to Young Writers

The teacher must insist that students read beyond themselves, that they wander into linguistic territories unknown, that they subject their prose to the refining fire of literary exemplars.

C.S. Lewis, medievalist, Christian apologist, and sometime architect of fantastical worlds, dispensed advice to young writers with the same clarity he brought to his prose: read, and read well. This was no idle encouragement, no genteel endorsement of print for print’s sake, but a directive, a call to arms. To read well was not a passive act but a discipline, a rigorous training of the mind, a method of apprenticeship in which one’s mentors were the best who had ever put pen to paper. To Lewis, writing was not about invention ex nihilo but about inheritance, an absorption of language in its richest, most distilled form, drawn from the deep wells of literary tradition.

He scoffs—politely, but still—with the dismay of a man who has seen too many slovenly compositions, at the notion that one might write without first having steeped oneself in the greatest works of the past. “The most important thing about your language,” he states in a letter to a young writer, “is that it should be unmistakably English; and you will not find that out unless you read English.” The unspoken corollary is that the English he has in mind is not the modern, flattened patois of contemporary periodicals or the pedestrian dialect of bureaucratic memorandum, but rather the sonorous, the tested, the refined: Milton’s blank verse, Chaucer’s rime royal, Austen’s witticism, Dickens’s effusive exuberance. To read these authors is to drink from deep wells.

O sudden grief that ever finds its way,
Befalling those who feel too safe and free!
O worldly joys that swiftly fade away!
Trust in this world is blind security,
A web of falsehood and uncertainty.
He who is highest soon may be brought low,
And he who falls no happiness shall know.

from "The Man of Law’s Tale," The Canterbury Tales,  Geoffrey Chaucer

Lewis’s counsel, however, is not that of the pedant who delights in the enumeration of dead authors merely for their lifeless accumulation. There is no fetishizing of the past for its own sake; rather, he posits that great writers speak across time, their words carrying within them not merely linguistic construction but the pulse of culture, the moral imagination, the sedimentary wisdom of civilization itself. The young writer, in Lewis’s eyes, should aspire not to novelty for novelty’s sake—he regarded this impulse with suspicion—but to clarity, precision, and force, and these things are best learned from the best teachers: the masters of the craft who, through the alembic of history, have distilled the English tongue into its richest expression.

But reading alone, however vigorous and sustained, is insufficient if undertaken in the manner of a magpie collecting bright fragments. There is an art to reading, a vigilance against what he called the “chronological snobbery” that presumes newer works must be superior simply by virtue of their modernity. Lewis encourages the young writer to read “old books” not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a means of perspective, of aerating the mind, of escaping the myopia of the present. The books of the past correct the errors of today, not because the past is infallible, but because it is different. The careful reader learns from contrast, and in that learning, the young writer begins to discern the structures of language, the veins of metaphor, the breath of cadence.

Yet Lewis, ever the generous tutor, does not stop at reading. Writing well demands a discipline beyond mere exposure to great texts; it necessitates a kind of internalized apprenticeship. He warns against verbosity, the temptation of the grandiose. “Always prefer the plain word to the fancy,” he writes in Letters to Children, a dictum which, despite its simplicity, contains the seeds of profound stylistic discipline. To write well is to write with intent, and intent requires both clarity of thought and an economy of expression.

“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 say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description.”

Letters to Children, C.S. Lewis

In another letter, he chastises the creeping disease of cliché, urging his correspondent to “never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do.” Writing, in his view, must be vivid, tactile, rooted in the tangible world. Abstractions—those nebulous latencies that clutter bureaucratic reports and modernist experiments alike—should be replaced with images, the sinew and bone of sensory reality.

And then, almost in passing, there is the matter of truthfulness. Not truthfulness in the jejune, autobiographical sense, nor the pedestrian accuracy of mere reportage, but a deeper fidelity to reality, to the way things actually are, which demands both moral and intellectual honesty. Lewis saw the writer’s task as a species of craftsmanship, yes, but also as a vocation. The words must not only be arranged well, they must mean something, must aim toward some illumination, whether it be in the humor of Austen or the profundity of Dante.

Thus the road to becoming a better writer, as paved by Lewis, is a long one, demanding diligence, discernment, and a resistance to the prevailing winds of fashion. It is a road walked in the company of the greats, a road lined with bookshelves and echoing with the cadences of the past, a road on which the traveler learns not merely how to write, but how to think,

how to see, how to articulate what is real. And if, along that road, one encounters, as Lewis himself did, the occasional faun at the lamp-post or a whisper of Aslan in the wind, so much the better.

If Lewis set forth a program of literary apprenticeship, a rigorous submersion into the pure waters of English at its most resplendent, then it falls upon the instructor of writing not merely to echo this counsel in desiccated truisms but to enforce it, embody it, cultivate the sensibility that reading and writing are no mere academic exercises but a manner of perceiving the world itself. The teacher must—if he is to be of any real use—engage in a kind of intellectual alchemy, transmuting raw material into something resembling gold, guiding the student not toward mere competence but toward mastery, toward prose with tensile strength and aesthetic grace, toward a rhythm of language that moves as a river does, with both force and inevitability.

The tragedy, of course, is that in this age of truncated attention spans and ceaseless digital murmurs, the notion that writing should be studied as a craft, that sentences ought to be shaped with deliberation and care, appears almost quaint. Amid the constant flux of passing trends, the teacher must remain a steadfast guardian, insisting that students develop a patience they have never been trained to hold and a sensitivity to language they have never been encouraged to nurture. Here, Lewis’s exhortation to read well reasserts itself not as suggestion but as mandate, for how can one be expected to construct a luminous sentence if one has never encountered one? If all they have ever known are the skeletal syntax and anemic diction of contemporary convenience, how shall they learn the symphonic potential of English, its capacity to contain multitudes, to stretch across epochs, to cradle in its embrace the thoughts of the dead and the dreams of the living?

Thus, the teacher must insist, with the obstinacy of an old prophet, that students read beyond themselves, that they wander into linguistic territories unknown, that they subject their prose to the refining fire of literary exemplars. The sine qua non of good writing instruction, then, is a curriculum built not on the shifting sands of pedagogical fashion but on the rock of enduring literary achievement. It is not enough to assign books; the right books must be assigned, books that stretch the ear, sharpen the eye, broaden the linguistic palate.

Yet to read well is not only to observe; it is to mimic, to digest, to metabolize what one has taken in and render it anew. The student who reads Dickens should attempt, however falteringly, a Dickensian sentence, should roll on the tongue the sheer excess of clause upon clause, should revel in the carnival of adjectives and the periodic thrill of deferred meaning. The student who reads Austen should practice the scalpel-like incision of her irony, the precise calibration of word and tone, the impeccable timing of her understatement. This is apprenticeship in its truest sense—not the passive absorption of rules but the active engagement with living language, an apprenticeship in which the teacher functions as both guide and taskmaster, coaxing, correcting, demanding more.

“The room was so full of people, that the very chairs and tables seemed to be crowded, and when the bell rang for dinner, it rang as if it were the last sound that would be heard, and all the company seemed to be ready to go away at the sound of it.”

from Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

But here, caution. For there lurks the temptation to make of writing instruction a mere technical exercise, to elevate grammar above grace, mechanics above meaning. Lewis himself, despite his love of clarity, had no patience for sterile composition drilled into lifelessness. “Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing,” he wrote. “I mean, instead of telling us a thing was ‘terrible,’ describe it so that we’ll be terrified.” This is the essence of what must be imparted: not rules for their own sake, but rules that serve a higher purpose, rules as the scaffolding upon which beauty is built. The teacher’s role is not to churn out grammarians but to foster stylists, writers whose work bears the mark of intention, of care, of artistry.

And beneath it all, beneath the lessons on clarity and economy, beneath the warnings against vagueness and abstraction, there lies a deeper imperative, one that Lewis understood well: the imperative to tell the truth. The young writer must be taught that words are not playthings, not mere decorations arranged for effect, but conveyors of reality, bearers of meaning. To write dishonestly—to inflate, to obscure, to manipulate without cause—is to betray not only language but thought itself. Thus the teacher of writing is, in the final estimation, a guardian not merely of style but of truth, an advocate for precision in an era of obfuscation, a protector of words against their own misuse.

So let the teacher arm himself accordingly, with patience and rigor, with books that demand attention and exercises that refine instinct, with a vision of writing not as a tedious requirement but as a discipline worthy of devotion. Let him set his students to the task of reading well, writing well, thinking well. And if, in the process, they discover in themselves something of the wonder that Lewis found in the play of words, in the music of a sentence well made, then perhaps they will have begun not only to write, but to see.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human (Angelico), Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.