THROUGH THE WARDROBE: How C.S. Lewis Created Narnia

Congratulations to Sarah Maury Swan who won ORDINARY HAZARDS off last week's blog.

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REVIEW

Last fall I attended the SCBWI-Carolinas panel in which Lina Maslo co-presented "Bringing Your Voice to Non-Fiction."  I heard about her forthcoming book, THROUGH THE WARDROBE which she wrote and illustrated.  Immediately I knew I wanted to share it with all of you--and with my grandchildren.

This non-fiction picture book provides enough details about C.S. Lewis's childhood and adult traumas to help the reader understand how the world of Narnia came into existence. 

"As a boy, Clive Staples Lewis did not like his name. He imagined himself as more of a... Jack. When he was four years old, he changed it."

Since Jack didn't always like his own world, he imagined and wrote about other worlds. That was a precursor of things to come.

Jack lived in Ireland where it rained a lot. He and his older brother spent hours reading about talking animals and knights in armor. They made up a world populated with frogs, mice, and rabbits who argued about politics and went on quests to defeat evil cats. Conquering evil played a part in Jack's early stories.

Jack's pleasant childhood ended when he was nine. His mother died and he and his brother were sent to a boarding school in England--a horrible experience for him. Jack finished his education with a tutor and was on his way to being a teacher when WWI broke out. Jack went into the army but was determined to be a writer. After the war, he "pushed his imagination away." He taught at Oxford University and wrote many books about "pain, faith, love; about medieval times; about people discovering strange planets."

"But in the back of his mind, Jack had characters waiting for a story of their own."

During WWII, Jack took in evacuees. One day, a little girl asked him if there was anything behind [his] old wardrobe.

That started him thinking. He "decided to write a fairy tale...about a land unlike the dreary one they lived in, and about the characters in his imagination."

Jack's publisher, and his good friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, didn't like his first ideas about Narnia, so he put it aside. But when he got sick, he decided he didn't care what others thought. He would write a story about four children who had been sent far from home during the war. "It was raining, and they were stuck inside a house of endless hallways. They found a wardrobe and crawled in. But as they pushed back the old fur coats, they fell into a magical realm..."

Narnia was a place that children learned about characters who stood up to bullies and that "the worst moments of your life were only leading you to become the person you were meant to be."

Children wrote to him and begged for more stories about Narnia. But by the time he wrote the seventh book, he knew he was finished. "This time, it was up to others--to discover a world only they could imagine and to find the door they were destined to open."

SOME FINAL NOTES

Look closely at the clever cover of the book pictured above and notice what Lina incorporated into it. If you get the book for a young reader--as I hope you will--you'll discover that the hardback cover is a wardrobe. Young readers open the doors of this beautifully written book and step inside C.S. Lewis's life.  

Make sure you don't skip over the endpapers. In the front are imagined letters from children to C.S. Lewis. Since he destroyed all of his correspondence, Maslo created these. The back endpapers are actual letters from Jack to children which can be found in C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children. Back matter includes interesting facts about Jack and an extensive bibliography.

A PERSONAL NOTE

I love stories within stories and in fact, this is a picture book about a man who loved reading and writing books. The illustrations are accessible to children; the color pallet which Lina Maslo used is beautiful. Although C.S. Lewis ages in the book, he still has a child-like wonder in his facial expressions. 

I bought this book for my not-quite-five-year-old granddaughter since I knew her father had already read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to her. During the Covid quarantine, my daughter suggested that I read books to her via Skype. I happily obliged. After my granddaughter received Through the Wardrobe she asked if I could read it to her. I was glad I had saved the F and G's so I could read the book to her.

GIVEAWAY

I have a special giveaway for you! Lina Maslo is donating a personally autographed copy of THROUGH THE WARDROBE for you or for a young reader in your life. All you have to do is leave me a comment (please include your email address if you are new to my blog) by Friday, June 19 at 5 PM. Want extra chances? Share this on social media and tell me what you did. 

Writing Resources Part III: Panster vs. Plotter and a Giveaway!

Congratulations to Vijaya Bodach who won James Scott Bell's book, The Art of War for Writers.

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I recently completed reading, My Brother's Shadow by Monica Schroeder. When I wrote to Monica and asked her if she would share a few nuggets of wisdom for my readers, she sent the following article which first appeared on writingteennovels.com.

It has been said that there are those writers who plan and those who “fly by the seats of their pants.” I am part of the second group and before I began working on my novel, My Brother’s Shadow, I only had a rough idea of who Moritz, the main character, was and what would happen in the story. 

I encountered a surprise in the first few pages. Moritz was telling his story in first person and used the present tense. Hadn’t I read in many books about writing that the first person, present tense point-of-view was difficult to write? My first two novels were told in the voice of third person omniscient narrators reflecting on past events, and I had no intention of changing from what I knew by writing in first person and in present tense.

I rewrote the beginning in past tense but couldn’t force Moritz to tell his story in hindsight, so I stuck to the immediacy of present tense. The story is set in 1918 Berlin. I needed to convey a lot of background information. It seemed such a daunting task to introduce the reader to starvation and despair in Berlin as well as the anticipation of military defeat without the omniscient perspective of third person POV. 

In the first chapter I needed to set the stage, let Moritz introduce himself and his family, and find an intriguing ending to the chapter that would entice readers to go on. Moritz came to my rescue. As an apprentice in a print shop of a Berlin newspaper he could read the headlines of the paper he just helped print and thereby inform the readers of my novel of the state of affairs in Germany in October 1918.  The newspaper became a vehicle to disseminate information about the setting without interrupting the flow of the narrative. Moritz also meets Herr Goldman, a journalist with the paper who takes a liking to Moritz and ultimately helps him to fulfil his dream to become a reporter.  Moritz is able to tell the reader about the most pressing and newsworthy current events through his conversations with Herr Goldman. Apparently there was a way for me to write in first person, present tense and still give the reader a sense of the setting.

About halfway in, the story took an unexpected turn and once again I had trouble letting myself deviate from my original plan. Moritz had met a girl who had completely flummoxed him with her wit. Granted, it was not so unlikely that a 16-year old boy would take an interest in a girl but I had not anticipated a romance.

I had never expected to write about young love. Now here was Rebecca, the smart daughter of a Jewish bookseller who attended the same political meetings as Moritz’s mother and sister. After their first encounter on the train, it was clear that they had to meet again. Yet the book takes place in 1918, so they wouldn’t go “all the way.” I was able to braid his discovery of love together with the story of Moritz’s relationship with his brother, who returns from the trenches a maimed and bitter veteran. Rebecca’s presence even gave me the opportunity for a hopeful conclusion to leave readers satisfied after Moritz’s intense final confrontation with his brother.

Writing My Brother’s Shadow has taught me to trust the process along the way. A quote by E. L. Doctorow showed me that I am not alone with this approach: “Writing is like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Monika with her dog, Frank.
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I enjoy hearing other writers describe their journeys and find it interesting to compare them to my own. When I first started Half-Truths I was definitely a panster--I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing. Unlike Monika though, I had several years of false starts and finding my way. Somewhere between the second and third draft I realized I need an outline so that both girls could have their own stories.  Now, I can't operate without one! These roadmaps help me to see where I'm going and how to get there--but I still discover some surprises along the way.

I also experimented with point of view and tense until I settled on two protagonists, each written in first person and present tense. None of these decisions have been easy. 

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To win an autographed copy of In My Brother's Shadow please leave me your name along with your email address if you are new to this blog. Let me know some of the difficult decisions you've had to make with your WIP and I'll enter your name twice. Hurry! I'm drawing a name on Thursday, February 5!