“C.S. Lewis had an amazing ability to write under the most trying of circumstances” by Harry Lee Poe
“C.S. Lewis had an amazing ability to write under the most trying of circumstances. His brother noted how Minto constantly interrupted his writing with little chores at the Kilns. Various of his pupils and friends observed his ability to pick up his pen immediately after an interruption and begin writing again as if nothing had intervened to shake his train of thought.
Alastair Fowler thought that Lewis’s writing ability had to do with the way he composed in his head before he ever began writing. We have observed how he first had developed ideas for books that he did not begin writing until later. Fowler speculated that he could do this because of his remarkable memory, which allowed him to quote long passages or to recall the substance of a page. Fowler told the story of how Lewis challenged Kenneth Tynan:
“to choose a number from one to forty, for the shelf in Lewis’s library; a number from one to twenty, for the place in this shelf; from one to a hundred, for the page; and from one to twenty-five for the line, which he read aloud. Lewis had then to identify the book and say what the page was about.”
George Watson said that Lewis had the opposite of writer’s block. The words always seemed to flow from his pen. Watson once asked him if he ever found it difficult to write. Lewis replied, sometimes “when I come back in the evening after dinner, I tell myself I am too tired and shouldn’t write anything. But I always do.”
Yet Lewis started many writing projects that he never completed. Sometimes he tired of them. Sometimes he did not know what would happen next. This would seem to be writer’s block, except it never kept him from writing.
Most remarkably, he worked on multiple projects at the same time in a grand literary juggling act. It had been that way for years. While writing The Allegory of Love, he wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress and several important academic articles. It had been that way with The Screwtape Letters, Perelandra, and A Preface to Paradise Lost. While he was writing Miracles, he also wrote That Hideous Strength.”
–Harry Lee Poe, The Making of C.S. Lewis: From Atheist to Apologist (1918-1945) (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 293-294.
