Taking Form- Heidi Naylor

I’ve often wondered how C.S. Lewis started writing fairy stories. He was an incredibly bright man who was well respected in the scholarly community and yet he began writing children’s stories? To answer my own question- he began writing fairy stories because it was simply the best art-form for what he had to say. In “On Stories”, Lewis explains, “just as a composer might write a Dead March not because there was a public funeral in view but became certain musical ideas that had occurred to him went best into that form” (32).

It’s amazing to me that I’ve sat through endless English classes and this idea has never seemed so clear to me as it did from reading Lewis words; It never occurred to me that maybe every creation has a “best form” that completes the creation process. And, somehow fairy stories became the best vessel for communicating what he had to say. Another example of this was with Till We Have Faces; Lewis first tried writing this in verse poetry. Regarding this, I am left with one question: how did he know that this work would be best in novel form?