Robert reports:
Hi Ben,
I just wrote a post on my Compelling Input Facebook page. It includes a quote from CS Lewis on the way he wrote his Narnia books. I’ve known for a long time that Lewis worked from images, but he explains the process in more detail here.
Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child psychology and decided what age-group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out “allegories” to embody them. This is pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images: a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. It was part of the bubbling.
Then came the Form. As these images sorted themselves into events (i.e., became a story) they seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the Form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that I fell in love with the Form itself: its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections and “gas.” I was no enamoured of it. Its very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction; as the hardness of the stone pleases the sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnet delights the sonneteer.
On that side (as Author) I wrote fairy tales because Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.
Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.
The two sentences that need to come together here are
- Everything began with images
- These images sorted themselves into events (I.e. became a story)
In the post I mention your work with bringing this not so new process into the classroom. That is the innovation – making an individual, often unconscious, process corporate (in the sense of a group working as a body) – that you have made. In the past, when people have said, “He isn’t doing anything new”, they have looked only at the idea of moving from image to story; they haven’t recognized the work that went into bringing that from the domain of the individual to the domain of the classroom without turning it into another “educational delivery mechanism” for purveyors of educational delivery services.
Have a great day.
Robert