C. S. Lewis: Misogynist—or Early Feminist?

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by James Denney, author of Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis and Its Name Is Legion: A Human Novel about Artificial Intelligence

Philip Hensher, a prominent (and avowedly atheist) British novelist, once began an essay on C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia with these words: “I’m certainly not in favour of banning or burning books, but—”

Hold it right there. Book burning is always a crime against civilization. The conjunction “but” doesn’t excuse what he writes next—his admission that the Narnia tales trigger in him a “twitch for a box of matches.”

Why would a novelist announce a desire to incinerate any books, let alone a beloved children’s fantasy series? Hensher justifies his fascism-adjacent leanings by labeling The Chronicles of Narnia “ghastly, priggish, half-witted, money-making drivel” and “revoltingly mean-minded books, written to corrupt the minds of the young with allegory.” (Translation: Lewis “corrupts” the minds of the young with Christian ideas.)

Hensher goes on to condemn Lewis for assorted sins including “misogyny.” It’s worth noting that another British author (and avowed atheist), fantasy novelist Philip Pullman, also accused Lewis of misogyny.

So what about this charge of misogyny? Did Lewis display a dislike or mistrust of women in his fiction? Or is the opposite true? Was Lewis ahead of his time in his portrayal of women?

Was Lewis a misogynist? Or a pioneering feminist?

Non-Stereotyped Roles

The feminine protagonists in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are Lucy and Susan Pevensie. The Lucy character was inspired by two girls in Lewis’s life. One was Lewis’s goddaughter, Lucy Barfield, who was five years old in 1949, when Lewis completed the novel. She was the daughter of Lewis’s longtime friend and fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield.

The other inspiration was June Flewett (who became an actress under the stage name Jill Raymond). June was eleven in 1944 when she was evacuated from London to Lewis’s home in Oxford during the German air raids. Lewis called June “the only bright spot” in his household and “the most selfless person” he had ever known.

When June was fourteen, Lewis paid her tuition to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She deferred her place in the Academy until she was eighteen so she could remain with Lewis and keep house for him. Did June see Lewis as a misogynist? Hardly. “I thought he was wonderful,” she said in 2005. “I suppose I must have had a schoolgirl crush on him.”

Aslan with Lucy Pevensie (Copyright 2023 by James Denney)

We learn a lot about Lewis’s attitude toward women through his portrayal of Lucy, the youngest protagonist in the first Narnia book. Lucy is the most pure-hearted and spiritually sensitive of the four lead characters. It’s Lucy who leads the way into Narnia. In Chapter 6, Lewis calls Lucy “a good leader.”

Throughout the Narnia series, Lewis’s treatment of girls is much more positive than his portrayal of boys. Edmund Pevensie and Eustace Scrubb are both introduced as extremely unlikable characters. Peter Pevensie is depicted as brave but flawed, with an aggravating streak of bossy stubbornness.

Lucy, Susan, and Mary Magdalene

Lucy and Susan repeatedly earn the Lion’s approval by breaking gender stereotypes and demonstrating an adventurous spirit that most writers of Lewis’s generation reserved for men and boys. Lewis practiced gender equality, casting women and girls in non-stereotyped roles throughout the series, including Jill Pole (who bravely conquers her fears in The Silver Chair), Aravis Tarkheena (the take-charge heroine of The Horse and His Boy), and Polly Plummer (Digory Kirke’s wise and loyal counterpart in The Magician’s Nephew).

The only protagonists to witness Aslan’s death are Lucy and Susan. It’s a devastating moment—and Lewis entrusts the emotional weight of the scene to these two courageous young women.

The death of Aslan echoes the death of Jesus in the Gospel accounts. The chief witness to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus was a woman, Mary Magdalene. While the eleven disciples hid in fear, Mary Magdalene remained with Jesus from the cross to His burial to the discovery of the empty tomb. Lewis casts Lucy and Susan in the Magdalene role.

But there’s a problem with Susan in the final Narnia tale. Philip Hensher put it this way: “What on earth is The Last Battle going on about, with that donkey and Plato and the poor girl who gets sent to hell for wearing nylons and lipstick?” The “poor girl” he speaks of is Susan.

Is it true? Was Susan “sent to hell for wearing nylons and lipstick”?

The Trappings of Being “Grown-Up”

In The Last Battle, we learn that Susan has lost her faith. She no longer believes in Aslan and Narnia. She has ceased to be a “friend of Narnia.” As a result, Susan doesn’t appear in the novel at all, and is only referred to as an offstage character.

Susan Pevensie. (Copyright 2023 by James Denney)

Notably, Lewis has two female characters explain Susan’s motivation for defecting from Narnia. In so doing, he makes it clear that he’s not criticizing women in general. He is—through the voices of Jill and Polly—specifically bemoaning Susan’s tragic spiritual downfall:

“Oh Susan!” said Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.”

“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”

Nowhere in The Last Battle does Lewis say that Susan was “sent to hell.” Yes, Susan has defected from Narnia. Because of her defection, Lewis’s critics have jumped to several unwarranted conclusions.

For example, Lewis’s critics accuse him of hating women in general. They specifically accuse him of despising Susan’s transition to from girlhood to young womanhood. These critics have completely missed the incandescently obvious reasons for Susan’s defection.

The phrase “nylons and lipstick and invitations” represents superficiality, not womanhood. It represents Susan’s overwhelming eagerness to appear “grown up” (as Jill and Polly make clear in the dialogue). The desire to appear “grown up” is a misguided impulse Lewis rebukes even in himself. He once wrote, “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

Lewis wants us to feel heartbroken for Susan, and to hear echoes of the words of Jesus: “Unless you change your whole outlook and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Susan is a beloved character, so her defection from Narnia is painful for the reader to experience—and Lewis intended it to be so.

He could have selected Peter instead of Susan as the tragic defector. Had he done so, he might have said that Peter was no longer interested in anything except playing rugby and impressing girls. Superficiality, spiritual defection, and “acting grown-up” are gender-neutral concepts, even when portrayed in gender-specific ways.

Susan’s defection illustrates Jesus’s Parable of the Sower and the Seeds, in which He compares the gospel to seeds scattered by the wayside—on stony ground, among thorns, and on good ground. In Mark 4:18-19, Jesus says that the seeds scattered among thorns represent those who “hear the message, but the worries of this world and the false glamour of riches and all sorts of other ambitions creep in and choke the life out of what they have heard, and it produces no crop in their lives.” Lewis illustrates this principle in Susan’s life with “nylons and lipstick and invitations.”

Lewis warns us to guard against spiritual defection, against wanting superficial trappings more than the spiritual reality that Narnia represents. As Jesus said, “The narrow gate and the hard road lead out into life and only a few are finding it” (Matthew 7:14).

Susan’s Fate

In early 1955, before The Last Battle was published, Lewis wrote to a fan named Marcia Billiard:

Peter gets back to Narnia in it. I am afraid Susan does not. Haven’t you noticed in the two you have read that she is rather fond of being too grownup? I am sorry to say that side of her got stronger and she forgot about Narnia.

In Lewis’s thinking, however, Susan’s fate was still an open question. In January 1957, Lewis wrote to another fan, Martin Kilmer:

The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having been turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end—in her own way.

Lewis never planned to write the ending to Susan’s story, but left her fate to the readers’ imagination. In a February 1960 letter to Pauline Bannister, he explained:

I could not write that story myself. Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country, but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write.

Clearly, Susan Pevensie is not “the poor girl who gets sent to hell for wearing nylons and lipstick.” She’s a foolish girl who turned her back on Aslan’s country.

And there is still time for her to mend.

The White Witch of Narnia. (Copyright 2023 by James Denney)

“The Shoddy Lands”

While Lewis was completing the last two Narnia novels, he received an invitation from American science fiction writer-editor Anthony Boucher to write for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). Lewis was delighted at the invitation, and he wrote two stories for F&SF.

My discussion of these stories includes spoilers, so if you haven’t read them, you can find them in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, or you can read them online as they originally appeared in the magazine: “The Shoddy Lands” (page 68) and “Ministering Angels” (page 5).

In “The Shoddy Lands,” (published in the February 1956 issue) the first-person narrator—an Oxford professor like Lewis himself—is involuntarily drawn into the mind of a young woman named Peggy, the fiancée of one of the professor’s former students. The professor finds her thoughts self-centered and shallow. Like Susan Pevensie, she is obsessed with beauty, adornments, and pampering herself. The voice of God calls to her, yet she is deaf to Him.

Here again, Lewis’s critics accuse him of misogyny. They reason that if Lewis writes about one shallow, self-absorbed woman, he must think that all women are shallow and self-absorbed, right? Such thinking hardly deserves refutation, but I’ll refute it anyway.

Every character an author creates is an individual—not a stereotype meant to represent an entire class or gender. What about all the other women and girl protagonists Lewis has written who exemplify selflessness, faith, courage, and loyalty? Lewis’s detractors conveniently omit them from the equation.

Here’s the key to understanding “The Shoddy Lands”: the story is not really about Peggy. It’s about the narrator. Lewis concludes the tale with these words: “Suppose this sort of thing were to become common? And how if, some other time, I were not the explorer but the explored?” Lewis is not attacking women. He is condemning shallowness and self-centeredness not only in Peggy but in himself.

In the opening paragraphs, the narrator reveals himself to be a cranky, petty, and self-centered curmudgeon. He says he “loathes” what Durward did in bringing his fiancée unannounced, adding, “One ought to be warned.” Peggy’s presence “ruined the conversation,” the narrator complains, because they were forced to engage in “social patter about the weather and the news.”

Lewis undoubtedly based “The Shoddy Lands” on a visit from a former student and his fiancée. The real-life incident probably unfolded exactly as Lewis describes. Lewis felt the same self-righteous pique toward his guests that the narrator describes in the story.

At some point, Lewis felt guilty about his self-centered reaction—and repented of it. Recognizing his folly, he decided to write a fantasy story based on the experience—a story in which he criticizes himself, not womankind.

“Ministering Angels”

His next story, “Ministering Angels,” was published in the January 1958 issue of F&SF. The first character we meet is the meteorologist of an exploration team that has been on Mars for two and a half years. A devout Christian nicknamed “the Monk,” he came to Mars, in part, to meditate, pray, and escape worldly temptation.

A spaceship arrives carrying two aging, unattractive women who offer themselves as prostitutes. Once again, Lewis’s critics charge him with “misogyny.” Why? Because Lewis supposedly depersonalizes the two women by not giving them names. Lewis labels them “the Thin Woman” and “the Fat Woman.”

The Thin Woman is an intellectual who spouts jargon-laden rationales for the biological necessity of prostitution. The Fat Woman is an aging prostitute who has volunteered to “play doxy” to the sex-starved spacemen on Mars.

The two “ministering angels” of Lewis’s short story, upon their arrival on Mars. (Copyright 2023 by James Denney)

A careless reader might think the story is merely about prostitutes for spacemen. In reality, the story is shown in the closing sentences to be about God’s grace and redemption. The fact that the Thin Woman and the Fat Woman do not have names is beside the point. They are fully human characters. The Fat Woman is especially well-delineated and sympathetic as she tells her story to the Monk.

By the end of the tale, the Monk sees the Fat Woman not as a mere prostitute, but as a child of God, a woman who might take her place in Heaven alongside Mary Magdalene. He realizes that God has sent him on a journey of 40 million miles not for his own spiritual benefit, but that he might become a “ministering angel” to her soul. Far from being an exercise in misogyny, “Ministering Angels” is a story of Christian grace.

A Feminist Ahead of His Time

The most telling proof of Lewis’s advanced views on gender equality can be found in his final novel, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, published in 1956. When he was eighteen, Lewis read Metamorphoses by Apuleius and was captivated by the myth of Psyche, a mortal woman who weds the god Cupid and becomes a goddess. Lewis decided to write his own version, told from the point of view of Psyche’s sister, Orual.

By the early 1920s, Lewis had made several attempts to write the story—but he abandoned each one. In 1955, with the encouragement of Joy Davidman, he made one more attempt. The result was a powerful novel written in a woman’s voice and point of view.

This is a rare achievement. Here is a male writer telling a deeply emotional story from a woman’s first-person perspective—and he writes with skill and sensitivity. The list of male writers who have successfully written in a woman’s voice is pitifully short. Charles Dickens writes in the voice of heroine Esther Summerson in parts of Bleak House. Philip K. Dick’s The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is narrated in first person by a woman, Angel Archer. But neither Dick nor Dickens peers as deeply into the soul of a woman as Lewis does in Till We Have Faces.

Lewis’s warrior queen Orual from Till We Have Faces. (Copyright 2023 by James Denney)

Lewis portrays Orual as a highly intelligent woman who considers herself “ugly.” She is the daughter of a king in a patriarchal society that treats most women as either objects of desire or as slaves. To compensate for her self-image of unattractiveness, Orual trains to outperform men as both a leader and a sword-wielding soldier, breaking gender norms in the process. Through her inner monologue, Lewis explores her tormented feelings and her unfulfilled longings.

Through most of the novel, Orual is the consummate unreliable narrator. Late in the novel, she realizes that the process of writing her story has forced her to see herself clearly—and to understand how wrong she has been about her own life. When she finally submits herself to the gods, she undergoes a conversion that is parallel to a Christian conversion. She is transformed as a human being, as a spiritual being, and as a woman.

Till We Have Faces is a stunning achievement. The novel would not exist if not for Lewis’s profound respect for women as equals. He welcomed advice and encouragement from Joy Davidman, a fellow writer and a forceful, quick-witted debater (he delighted in verbally jousting with her and he eventually married her). When the novel was completed, he asked another woman writer—detective novelist Katherine Farrer—to critique it. He wanted to make sure he had captured a woman’s voice and point of view.

A misogynist could not have pulled off Till We Have Faces. Only a writer with Lewis’s profound respect for women could have written it.

Though Lewis was born in 1898, though his personality was shaped during the antefeminist and antifeminist era of the early 1900s, he emerged as a true feminist writer. In this, as in so many other ways, Lewis was decades ahead of his time.

Jim Denney has written more than 150 books, both fiction and nonfiction, for adult readers and young readers, as a collaborative writer and as a sole author. His latest nonfiction book is Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis. His latest novel is Its Name Is Legion: A Human Novel about Artificial Intelligence.

All text and images in this blog post are copyright 2023 by James Denney.

Free Speech, Censorship Petitions, and Book Burning

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Above: The original 1787 manuscript of the United States Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791.

by Jim Denney
author of Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis

I recently learned of a petition, signed by hundreds of people calling themselves “members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community” who “care deeply about freedom of speech.” So far, so good. I’m a big advocate of First Amendment freedoms myself. I’m sure you are, too.

But then the petition goes on to call for a certain book and author to be cancelled. The petitioners claim, “We cannot stand idly by while our industry misuses free speech to destroy our rights.”

Hold it right there! How can you say you “care deeply” about free speech—then complain that someone “misuses” free speech by speaking or publishing a viewpoint you dislike? The word free in “free speech” means that no one else gets to decide how I use (or “misuse”) my speech. How I use my speech is 100 percent my call.

The publication of the book in question would not destroy anyone’s rights. That’s a specious rationalization. Fact is, none of the petition signers have any idea what’s in the book, because it hasn’t been written yet.

The petitioners state, “We are not calling for censorship.” Yet the point of their petition is to demand that a publisher cancel a book deal and deplatform an author. If that’s not censorship, what is?

I’m not going to say who the author is or what the book is supposedly about. If you want to know, I’m sure you can google it easily enough. I don’t care about the politics of the author or the politics of the petitioners. What’s at stake here is a vital and transcendent principle—the principle of free speech.

I’ve seen attacks on our First Amendment freedoms from both the Left and Right. To me, viewpoint censorship is always wrong, no matter who is doing it. All attempts to silence political, religious, and philosophical viewpoints are wrong-headed and a violation of our American freedoms.

Many people mistakenly think that only governments can censor. But censorship is the suppression of speech or public communication, whether it is conducted by governments or private institutions or an Internet petition. It’s the next-worst thing to book-burning.

The suppression and destruction of authors and their books has always been a weapon of repression. In 213 BC, the newly crowned Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the torching of books so that he would not be compared to rulers of the past. The Great Library of Alexandria and its manuscripts were burned several times, including a partial destruction when Julius Caesar laid siege to Alexandria in 48 BC and a complete destruction when Caliph Omar invaded the city in AD 642. British troops vengefully torched the United States Library of Congress during the War of 1812. Book-burning was a major feature of Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people and their contributions to society. Book-burning was also a central strategy employed by Mao in the murderous “Cultural Revolution” of 1966 through 1976.

Book-burning is always a detestable act. But I submit to you that suppressing a book before it’s published may, in fact, be far worse than burning it after it’s published. It would be impossible in today’s world for book-burners to incinerate every copy of a book once it’s published. But a censorship petition seeks to suppress ideas before they reach the printing press.

No matter what our politics, we should resist the censorship of information and ideas in any form. Anyone who tries to suppress speech, deplatform an author, or pressure a publisher into canceling a book is like a villain straight out of Fahrenheit 451.

Are there forms of speech that are not and should not be protected? Yes, absolutely! Speech that threatens violence or incites people to lawlessness is indefensible. Speech that defames and unjustly destroys reputations is indefensible. Speech that harms or undermines the innocence of children is indefensible.

You may ask, “What about the people who signed that petition? Do they have a First Amendment right to try to cancel an author?” My answer: Yes, absolutely! And I will defend their right to do so, even as I disagree with them and criticize them for it. A petition is free speech, and the signers of the petition should be free to post their wrong-headed notions on the Internet.

In a free society, we need more speech, not less. We need arguments. We need counterarguments. We need bad ideas that will lead to better ideas. We need to hear ideas we don’t want to hear. We need information and history lessons and discussions and understanding. We need to listen and we need to speak. We need freedom, not censorship.

The petitioners call themselves “members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community.” I saw a lot of booksellers, publicists, and librarians—and yes, a few who listed themselves as authors. But I didn’t see any signers of the stature of, say, Stephen King or Margaret Atwood on that petition. There’s good reason for that. Professional writers know how dangerous censorship is to their own creative freedom.

The First Amendment was written specifically to protect unpopular speech, speech that is in danger of being suppressed. It’s precisely the speech that sparks anger and controversy that must be defended. Speech that offends no one needs no protection. 

The freedom to write and publish our ideas is part of our uniquely American heritage. We all have a duty to protect freedom of speech, including the speech of people with whom we disagree.

Here are a few lines from “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” New York Times Editorial Board, March 18, 2022:

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

“This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.”

America does have a free speech problem. The freedom to write and publish is fragile, and it is under assault. Use it. Value it. And above all, defend it.

What C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien Thought of Walt Disney

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By Jim Denney, author of Walt’s Disneyland and Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis

Above image: C. S. Lewis (top row, right, highlighted) with his class of undergraduate students, University College, Oxford University, in the Trinity Term 1917.

Late 2021 through early 2022 was a busy time in my life. I had books under contract, and I had an eye surgery in October and back surgery in February (both surgeries were life-changingly successful). During that time I worked on two exciting projects. One was the revised and updated edition of Walt’s Disneyland: It’s Still There if You Know Where to Look (a much-expanded edition of the hugely successful 2017 original). The other was a new book called Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis.

The Walt Disney birthplace in Chicago, Illinois.

As I studied the lives of both Walt Disney and C. S. Lewis, I was struck by the parallels between these two creative, influential men. C. S. Lewis (known to his friends as Jack) and Walt Disney lived lives that were almost exactly contemporaneous with each other. Lewis was born in November 1898, Walt in December 1901. Lewis died in 1963 at age sixty-four; Walt died in 1966 at age sixty-five. Walt and Jack both had very close and loving mothers (coincidentally, both mothers were named Flora). Walt and Jack both had emotionally distant fathers who didn’t give them understanding or approval.

Illustration from The Tale of Two Bad Mice by Beatrix Potter (1904)

Walt and Jack both grew up living in fantasy worlds of their own creation. As children, Walt and Jack both enjoyed drawing pictures of animals and making up stories about them. Both grew up reading fairy tales and fantasy stories, and were influenced by the charming “talking animal” stories of Beatrix Potter. Both enjoyed science fiction (and both were fans of Jules Verne and, later, Ray Bradbury).

Walt and Jack both had happy early childhoods, followed by miserable later childhoods. Both were nostalgic for the lost joys of their early childhood days. Walt’s happy childhood ended when his family moved from Marceline to Kansas City. Jack’s happy childhood ended at age nine when his mother died and his father bundled him off to an abusive boarding school in England.

Walt Disney and C. S. Lewis both created enduring works of children’s fantasy. And each created a famous talking mouse—Walt invented Mickey Mouse and Lewis created Reepicheep, the sword-fighting mouse of Narnia.

Walt Disney in Paris, 1935

Walt and Jack both relied on their older brothers’ help for their success. Lewis’s brother Warnie was an ace two-fingered typist and typed all of Jack’s handwritten manuscripts. And Walt’s older brother Roy became Walt’s indispensable financier and business partner.

Both Walt and Jack were deeply patriotic men. Lewis volunteered to fight for King and Country in World War I. Walt altered his ID in an attempt to join the fight in World War I. (Walt’s transport ship arrived just after the war ended, but he served as a Red Cross ambulance driver in post-war France.)

You might think that, with all that C. S. Lewis and Walt Disney had in common, they might have been mutual admirers—but that was not the case.

J. R. R. Tolkien in 1925.

Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs debuted in the United States in 1937 and in the United Kingdom in 1938. Lewis and his brother Warren went to see it soon after its U.K. release. A few months later, Lewis went to see it again, this time with his good friend (and fellow Oxford professor) J. R. R. Tolkien.

Coincidentally, Tolkien’s first novel The Hobbit had been published in September 1937, just three months before the American debut of Snow White. Both The Hobbit and Snow White dealt extensively with creatures from Germanic folklore known as dwarves (or, in Disney parlance, dwarfs). According to Germanic mythology, dwarves are short, stout human-like creatures who live and work in mountain caves. Dwarves have a talent for mining and fabricating objects out of precious metals and jewels.

Dwarves from Germanic folklore, as depicted in the poem Völuspá by Lorenz Frølich (1895). Germanic dwarves are the only true dwarves, according to J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

Until Tolkien introduced dwarves in The Hobbit and Disney introduced dwarfs in Snow White, these creatures from Germanic folklore were almost unknown in popular culture. Suddenly in 1937, both the literary world and the movie-going world became intensely aware of these stout, gruff little men who spent their lives mining for gems and gold—and occasionally battling dragons and witches.

C. S. Lewis would also use dwarves in the supporting cast of his Narnia tales, and he (like Tolkien) based his dwarves on ancient Germanic sources. In the tales of Tolkien and Lewis, dwarves were fierce, grim, and stoic—though they occasionally displayed a hint of whimsy. Disney’s dwarfs, by contrast, are anything but grim. They are jolly (with the exception of Grumpy) and play a largely comic role in Snow White. When Lewis and Tolkien watched the Disney version of Snow White, it was primarily the dwarfs themselves they hated. In their view, Disney had failed to capture the mythic nobility of the dwarves from Germanic folklore.

On January 11, 1939, Lewis wrote a letter to A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, a friend from his undergrad days at Oxford. In that letter, Lewis offered his impressions of Disney’s Snow White:

What did you think of Snowwhite and the vii Dwarfs? I saw it at Malvern last week. . . . Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad—I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?

Dopey and Sneezy in a screenshot from the public domain trailer for Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

Note that one of Lewis’s prime objections was to what he called “the dwarfs’ jazz party.” He was referring to the sequence where the dwarfs sing “The Yodel Song” (also known as “The Silly Song”), written for the film by Frank Churchill. During the song, the dwarfs take turns dancing with Snow White.

Is the song really “jazz”? No. The music has more of a Bavarian “oompah” sound, occasionally interrupted by a drum-and-cymbals crash from Dopey’s drum kit or a silly riff from Grumpy’s pump organ. I’ve listened to a lot of jazz, but never any jazz with yodeling. Lewis undoubtedly based his mistaken “jazz” impression on Dopey’s drumming.

Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis by Jim Denney

In October 1954, Jane Douglass, a woman from America, visited Lewis at Magdalen College, Oxford. She asked Lewis about the possibility of adapting his Narnia novels to other media, such as radio, television, and film. Lewis found the idea objectionable, saying, “Plays should be plays, poems, poems, novels, novels, stories, stories.” He considered the possibility of his Narnia tales receiving the Disney treatment absolutely horrifying, adding, “Too bad we didn’t know Walt Disney before he was spoiled, isn’t it?”

Walt’s Disneyland by Jim Denney

Though C. S. Lewis didn’t have a very high opinion of Walt, he was an avid fan of Walt’s friend, Ray Bradbury. In 1953, after reading Bradbury’s first two novels, The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, Lewis praised Bradbury as a writer of “real invention.”

If Lewis and Tolkien could have sat down with Walt for a long talk, I think they might have found they had a lot more in common than they realized.

A Friend I’ve Never Met

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by Jim Denney, author of Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis

A few years ago, I was reading an autobiographical book by J. B. Phillips called Ring of Truth. In that book, Phillips recounted a startling conversation between himself and C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. What makes this conversation so remarkable is that Phillips claimed it took place after Lewis’s death.

Ring of Truth by J. B. Phillips

Phillips began his account of this strange conversation by stating that he was skeptical of all paranormal claims, adding that he was “as unsuperstitious as they come.”[i] Phillips went on to say:

A few days after [Lewis’s] death, while I was watching television, he “appeared” sitting in a chair within a few feet of me, and spoke a few words which were particularly relevant to the difficult circumstances through which I was passing. He was ruddier in complexion than ever, grinning all over his face and, as the old-fashioned saying has it, positively glowing with health. The interesting thing to me was that I had not been thinking about him at all. I was neither alarmed nor surprised. . . .

 A week later, this time when I was in bed reading before going to sleep, he appeared again, even more rosily radiant than before, and [he] repeated the same message, which was very important to me at the time.[ii]

In Ring of Truth, Phillips did not elaborate on the matter that was troubling him. But he later related this incident to London journalist Dennis Bardens. Phillips told Bardens he had been dreading the process of dying. It seems that Lewis wanted Phillips to know that, as a Christian, he had nothing to fear from death or even the passage through death.[iii] Lewis’s message to Phillips: “It’s not as hard as you think, you know.”[iv]

I can’t say whether Lewis appeared to J. B. Phillips as a spirit, a hallucination, or a dream. But I trust Phillips’s truthfulness. I’m convinced that he gave an accurate account of his perception of these encounters with Lewis.

This account by J. B. Phillips makes me wish that I, too, could have a personal encounter with C. S. Lewis. I would like to be mentored by Lewis the thinker, Lewis the man of reason and faith, and Lewis the writer. I would like to take my questions to him, spread them out before him, and hear him say, “It’s not as hard as you think, you know.”

Adapted from a photo by The Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Public domain.

Out of a desire to hear C. S. Lewis speak to me and mentor me, I wrote a book called Your Writing Mentor C.S. Lewis.

Lewis never wrote a book on writing, yet he did describe his creative process in a number of speeches, essays, and letters to is fans. He has left us a treasury of writing wisdom. I have spent countless hours combing through his writings and the many books and articles written about him. Out of that research I’ve distilled his writerly insights and habits into this new book, Your Writing Mentor C.S. Lewis. In the process of researching and writing the book, I feel I’ve heard him teaching and mentoring me.

C. S. Lewis wrote at least twenty-two nonfiction books, fourteen novels, two science fiction short stories, several collections of essays, and enough letters to fill multiple volumes. He produced all of this literature and these letters while maintaining a full-time career as a professor of English literature, first at Oxford University (Magdalen College, 1925-1954), then at Cambridge University (Magdalene College, 1954-1963). The key to Lewis’s amazing literary output is that he was a “writer in overdrive.” That is, he wrote with amazing speed in a state of unconscious creative flow. In the process, he wrote intuitively and brilliantly.

J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, once called his friend C. S. Lewis a man of “great generosity and capacity for friendship,” adding:

The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not “influence” as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my “stuff” could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more, I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.[v]

It’s true. Tolkien began showing Lewis passages of his sprawling myth of Middle Earth early in their friendship. For years, Lewis was Tolkien’s sole encourager, the only person helping to motivate Tolkien to push his epic tale to completion. If not for Lewis, the world might never have heard of The Lord of the Rings.

On April 15, 1918, the world nearly lost C. S. Lewis. On that day, nineteen-year-old Second Lieutenant Clive Staples Lewis of the Somerset Light Infantry took part in an assault on German positions in the French village of Riez du Vinage. An artillery shell exploded near Lewis, killing one of his close friends and nearly killing Lewis. He carried shrapnel from that shell in his chest for the rest of his life. Had Lewis died that day, there would have been no Screwtape Letters, no Space Trilogy, no Chronicles of Narnia—and probably no Lord of the Rings.

Imagine a world without the writings of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Now imagine a world without your ideas, your insights, your stories. The world needs your vision, insight, and imagination. That’s why I wrote Your Writing Mentor C.S. Lewis. My goal in that book is to energize you with the same principles that empowered Lewis and urged Tolkien onward. Here’s the Table of Contents from the book:

Available Now from Amazon.com

1. C. S. Lewis, Writer in Overdrive
On Lewis’s amazing ability to write quickly and brilliantly.

2. A Childlike Approach to Writing
How to shed the inhibitions and self-defeating habits that hold us back.

3. Keeping Up with Lewis
A step-by-step explanation of how to get into “flow” so we can write quickly and freely “in overdrive”—as Lewis did.

4. Why We Write
An examination of Lewis’s motivation for writing—and developing our own sense of mission as writers.

5. The Discipline of Writing
How to write consistently and productively every day, as Lewis did.

6. The Craft of Writing
How to write effectively and brilliantly, as Lewis did.

7. Escapism, Art, or Allegory?
Should we write merely to entertain—or should we strive for higher art and deeper meaning?

8. Writing for Children
Lewis’s insights into the special needs of young readers.

9. Other Worlds, Other Realities
Writing fantasy and science fiction.

10. Five Thousand Words or Less
The special rules (which Lewis exemplified) for writing short stories.

In my study of C. S. Lewis, I discovered that he wrote with amazing speed in a state of creative flow. This book will show you how you can write quickly, freely, and brilliantly as Lewis did. So let me introduce you to this wonderful friend I’ve never met—my writing mentor, and yours, C. S. Lewis.

[i] J. B. Phillips, Ring of Truth: A Translator’s Testimony (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967), 88.

[ii] J. B. Phillips, Ring of Truth, 89-90.

[iii] Dennis Bardens, Mysterious Worlds (New York: W. H. Allen, 1970), 126.

[iv] Marie A. Conn, C. S. Lewis and Human Suffering: Light Among the Shadows (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2008), 1.

[v] Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000), 362.

Writing in Overdrive

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WELCOME!

LionCover-FrontOnly-SizedI wrote Writing In Overdrive and Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis to help writers like YOU discover how to write faster, write freely, and write brilliantly. In my books, and on this website, I’ll introduce you to a writer’s greatest superpower—the ability to tap into the creative unconscious mind and unleash the ability to write with amazing speed and uninhibited imagination. 

I have written or co-written more than 150 books for many publishers—fiction and nonfiction, books for adults and for children—and I’m a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

See what other writers are saying about Writing In Overdrive: Here’s the Goodreads page for Writing in Overdrive. And here are the customer reviews for Writing in Overdrive at Amazon.com.

Follow me on Twitter: @WriterJimDenney.

Explore the articles linked below, leave a comment, ask a question, and come back often. Thanks for stopping by—and keep writing every day!

—Jim Denney

ARTICLES ON THIS SITE:

What C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien Thought of Walt Disney

Excerpt from YOUR WRITING MENTOR C. S. LEWIS

Jim Denney’s Advice to Young Writers

Walt Disney Made Me a Better Writer

Conquer Your Fear of Failure

Write Better. Write Faster. Be Unconscious

Ray Bradbury and Groucho Marx

To Write Better, Write Faster

Dangerous Visions, Excellent Advice

How to Write a Novel in Three Days

Invent Your Confidence

(Photo at the top of the page by Fabio Santaniello Bruun on Unsplash.)

Just in Time for the End of the World—ITS NAME IS LEGION: A Human Novel About Artificial Intelligence

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by James Denney, author of Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis

My new novel, ITS NAME IS LEGION: A Human Novel about Artificial Intelligence reflects my growing concern about the risk that super-smart AI poses to the human race. Here’s how I came to write it:

I was discussing my concerns about AI with some novelist friends. One of them said she thought I had the a strong premise for a novel. At first, I didn’t think it was a novel-length idea. But the more I pondered the possibilities, the more it seized my imagination.

I began waking up before dawn, morning after morning, my mind churning with images, characters, and entire scenes. That’s a good sign. It means my unconscious mind (the part of us that Stephen King calls “the boys in the basement”) was already hard at work on the story.

On February 19, 2023, I woke up at 5:40 am and knew it was time to begin. I wrote 2,000 words that first day. From then on, the book just seemed to flow, day after day. I completed the first draft on March 25, 2023, exactly five weeks after I began.

I used to be an outliner. In other words, I liked everything plotted out in advance before I began that actual writing. But in recent years, I’ve been following the wise advice of Ray Bradbury: “I’ve never been in charge of my stories, they’ve always been in charge of me. . . . Jump off a cliff and build your wings on the way down.” 

So with nothing but a few scenes and images in my imagination, I jumped off a cliff. I had no road map of the plot. I didn’t know how the book would end or who would be left alive when it was over.

Yet I was remarkably free of worry. I was confident that everything I needed would be there at the right time. And I wasn’t disappointed. I was “writing in overdrive,” so scenes and story ideas flowed freely. My enthusiasm never wavered. And when I was done, I was very happy with the result.

I don’t consider myself an expert on artificial intelligence by any means, but I started with a good layman’s understanding of the subject. I didn’t pause to do research, but plunged headlong into the story. I figured that, as long as I was laying down a good tale, I’d be able to fix any factual problems in rewrite. As it turned out, the research I did after completing the first draft generally confirmed the mechanics of the story.

For example, I discovered that the technology I had invented, which I called “the Dream Chamber” (a chamber that projects realistic three-dimensional illusions into the viewers’ eyes) is actually being developed right now. I intuitively believed that such a technology was possible—and my intuition was confirmed.

ITS NAME IS LEGION is a horror story and, I hope, a preventative novel. As Ray Bradbury once observed, “The function of science fiction is not only to predict the future, but also to prevent it.” This novel depicts a plausible future that I truly hope we can prevent.

It was an intense journey for me as the author—and I trust it will be an unsettling yet rewarding journey for you, the reader. When you’ve read it, let me know what you think. Or better yet, leave a rating or a review at Amazon.com.

Here are some excerpts from recent editorial reviews:

“ITS NAME IS LEGION by James Denney presents a thought-provoking and creatively woven cautionary narrative that addresses the perils associated with AI. … Denney undertakes a formidable endeavor in crafting a gripping novel . . . featuring a mere trio of characters. … Rapid pacing sustains a heightened sense of urgency. Denney’s implementation of real-time progression—the duration of events mirroring the time it takes to read the book—imparts a dynamic energy to the narrative. . . . Readers will find themselves captivated by the interplay of characters and ideas, making this work a notable addition to the realm of speculative fiction.”
—Literary Titan

“The descriptions of Legion’s demonic avatar are delightfully rude. . . . Genuine scenes of heart pounding tension. . . . Recommended.”
—Reedsy

“Inspired by his own interactions with an artificial intelligence system, Denney offers a disturbing vision of what we could expect if AI outgrew humanity. The novel is an exploration of the worst case scenario, a cautionary tale. . . . ITS NAME IS LEGION is a riveting reading experience.”
—Independent Book Review

“A gripping story . . . replete with high-octane action, drama, and [plot] twists. . . . More thought-provoking encounters, psychological depth, and moral and ethical considerations than most thrillers. . . .  ITS NAME IS LEGION is a cautionary horror story that belongs in any library [of those who are] interested in themes of artificial intelligence in humanity’s future. Book clubs will find it holds fascinating debate material perfect for vigorous discussions. . . . Timely and riveting . . . a hypnotic story!”
—D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

ITS NAME IS LEGION: A Human Novel About Artificial Intelligence by James Denney

Paperback (with black-and-white illustrations)

Hardcover (with full-color illustrations)

Ebook (with full-color illustrations)

FREE downloadable PDF Discussion Guide for Book Clubs and Library Groups:

Book Club Discussion Guide – Its Name Is LegionDownload

An Excerpt From YOUR WRITING MENTOR C.S. LEWIS

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An excerpt from Chapter 1 of Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis:

In the summer of 1932, C. S. Lewis astonished himself.

It had been a busy and stressful year, with a heavy schedule of lecturing, tutoring, and student examinations. Yet Lewis had a book inside him that desperately wanted out—an allegory of his 1931 conversion to the Christian faith. As he told his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves in a July 1932 letter, he hadn’t had time to read a book during the past eighteen-week term, much less write one.

In August, Lewis took a cross-channel boat to Ireland for a two-week visit with Greeves. He arrived at the Greeves family home in Belfast on August 15, and stayed until August 29. He hadn’t planned to write during his visit with Greeves, but somehow, amid the afternoon walks and late-night conversations with his closest friend, something wonderful happened:

Lewis wrote a book.

When he boarded the boat to return to England, he had in his luggage a nearly-complete handwritten draft of what would be his first published novel, The Pilgrim’s Regress. It totaled more than 60,000 words. During those two weeks, he had averaged about 4,300 words per day.

In the fall of 1932, Lewis made revisions and edits. His brother Warren, recently retired from the army, typed up the revised manuscript with a carbon copy. Lewis mailed a copy of The Pilgrim’s Regress to Arthur Greeves, who read it and sent back a list of suggestions. By late January 1933, J. M. Dent & Sons of London, publisher of the Everyman’s Library series, accepted The Pilgrim’s Regress for publication. Upon its release later that year, literary critic Bertrand L. Conway (Catholic World) called it “a caustic, devastating critique of modern philosophy, religion, politics, and art.”

Though it is not Lewis’s best-known or best-loved book, The Pilgrim’s Regress has endured and is widely considered a classic work of philosophical fiction. It’s all the more remarkable that Lewis composed the book in a mere two weeks.

[This excerpt is from Chapter 1: C. S. Lewis, Writer in Overdrive]

To discover how Lewis learned to write quickly—and how you can write quickly and brilliantly as he did—read Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis, available now in trade paperback on Amazon.

Images: Bronze sculptures of Aslan (top) and Tumnus the Faun (right) at C. S. Lewis Square in Belfast, a public space commemorating Belfast-born author C. S. Lewis and his creations from the first Narnia novel, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Photos by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash.

Jim Denney’s Advice for Young Writers

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Battle Before Time Ebook CoverI knew I wanted to be a writer when I was about nine years old. How about you? Do you have stories to tell? Would you like to spend your days thinking up adventures and writing them down, like I do? Excellent! Writing is a lot of fun. If you’d like to be a writer, too, then I have some ideas that may help you reach your goals.

Tip #1: Write About What You Really Care About

I’ve heard people say, “Write what you know.” Well, I say, “Write what you really care about.”

The problem with “Write what you know” is that there are a lot of things that are fun to write about that nobody has ever done. For example, my Timebenders books are about time travel—but I’ve never traveled in time. I’ve never been scared out of my socks by a Tyrannosaurus rex. I’ve never been to an old English castle. I’ve never gone to the future and been chased by robots. If I could only write what I know from my own experience, I couldn’t have written Timebenders.

If you write a story about a different time or place, you may need to do some research. For example, if you want to write a story about the American Civil War, you’ll need to read books on American history in the 1860s. One of the most famous novels ever written about the Civil War is The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. Yet Stephen Crane was never a soldier and was never in the Civil War. He didn’t write what he knew; he did research. And he did his research so well that his book convinced many people that he had actually been a soldier in the war.

So write whatever you really want to write about, whatever you think would make an interesting story, whatever you really care and feel intensely about. Write about the things you love, the things that make you angry, or the things that make you afraid. 

Doorway to Doom Ebook CoverTip #2: Read.

A writer is a reader first of all, so read every day. And when you read, don’t just read your favorite kind of book. Read all kinds of books. Whether you like scary books or fantasy or adventure stories or romance, you should read other kinds of books as well. Read fiction and nonfiction. Read books about the lives of famous people. Read books about science, history, literature, and art. Read poetry. Read the Bible. If you want to be a good writer, become a well-rounded reader.

Tip #3: Write All the Time.

Some people only like to write when they feel “inspired.” But I’ve found that the best way to be inspired is to sit down and start writing—even when I don’t feel like writing. I write every day, and I don’t always feel “inspired” when I begin. But soon after I start writing, ideas and sentences start to flow. I start having fun. And I keep writing for an hour, two hours, or three hours at a stretch.

Keep a journal or diary. Write down observations about interesting events and interesting people. Write down things that happen to you. Write about things that make you feel happy, angry, scared, sad, or embarrassed. Someday, you may use those observations as bits and pieces of a story or book.

When you write, remember it’s okay to imitate writers you admire. I don’t mean you should “steal” story ideas or actual sentences from other writers. But study your favorite writers and see how they create characters, how they write believable dialogue, how they create realistic settings and descriptions, and how they use metaphors to create word pictures in the reader’s mind. It’s okay to study and imitate other writers—that’s how we learn. Over time, you’ll develop your own style and a writing “voice” that is uniquely your own.

Invasion of Time Troopers Ebook CoverTip #4: Relax and Daydream

My best ideas come when I am relaxed, not when I’m super-concentrating. If you concentrate real hard and tell yourself, “Think. Think. Come up with an idea.,” your imagination will freeze up. But when you relax, you loosen up your mind, you let your thoughts drift, and ideas start to flow.

Here are some relaxation ideas: Step away from your desk or computer for a moment, lie down on the couch or your bed, and just daydream about your story. You can listen to music, but keep the TV, phone, and video games turned off.  Take a walk, get some exercise, or do some yardwork—sweeping the patio or raking the leaves in the yard.

As you let your thoughts drift, daydream about the characters in your story. What do they look like? What are their personalities like? How are your characters different from each other? Why do they like or dislike each other? What makes them get mad at each other? What common goals do they have to unite them? Are your characters messy or neat? Are they lazy or hard-working? Are they kind or are they mean? How do they talk? How can you give each character a unique-sounding voice?

Daydream about your setting. How can you describe the setting of your story and make it feel real? Let’s say your story takes place in a garden. As you daydream, ask yourself: What grows in this garden? What plants and flowers do you see? What are the unique smells and sounds in this garden? What kinds of insects and birds do you see and hear in this garden? Help your reader see, smell, and hear the garden. Get inside the skin of your characters and feel what they feel. Let the reader feel it, too: The warm, golden sunshine on a character’s face, or the fragrance of orange blossoms on the breeze. Help your reader to be there, right alongside your characters.

Daydream about your plot. Ask yourself: How can I start the story in an exciting way? What unexpected thing can I do to surprise the reader? What can I do at the end of the chapter to make the reader want to turn the page and keep reading? How can I keep the reader asking, “What happens next?”

CydoniaEbookCoverSizedForKindleTip #5: Don’t Try to be Perfect.

Don’t try to be perfect when you write. Tell yourself, “It’s okay to write badly. The important thing is to just write.” Get the words down, even if you’re not sure of the spelling, even if you think it’s the worst piece of writing anyone has ever done. That’s okay. Just write. Jodi Picoult, who has written bestselling novels and Wonder Woman comic books, said, “You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

I make my living writing books—yet I write badly all the time. And that’s okay. It doesn’t bother me one bit to write badly. You know why? Because it’s just a first draft. First drafts are supposed to be bad. That’s why they call them “first drafts.” I don’t worry about a bad first draft, because I know I’m going to do a second draft, and a third draft, and by the time my third draft is done, it’s going to be a very good piece of writing.

When you write your first draft, write it as fast as you can. Don’t criticize it. Don’t go back over the sentence you just wrote and keep fiddling with it. Write one sentence and move quickly to the next sentence, and keep going, going, going, without looking back. The faster you write, the better you write. When you write quickly, you write with the creative side of your brain; when you write slowly and try to make it perfect, you write with the critical side of your brain.

The best writing is done by the creative side of your brain, because that is writing that flows, that soars, that inspires. Then, after you create your first draft, you let the critical side of your brain go over it, tidy it up, and make it sparkle. Both sides of your brain are important, but when you do your first draft, write it quickly, write it creatively. Don’t let the critical side of your brain interrupt your creative flow.

Tip #6: Welcome Criticism

Never fear criticism. I always have people criticize my books before they’re published, because I want my books to be as good as they can be. If there are mistakes or boring places or dumb ideas in my books, I hope someone helps me catch them before the book is printed.

Remember that writing is a matter of taste—and what one person finds interesting, another person will find dull. So don’t expect to please everybody, and don’t be surprised if you get conflicting advice from different people. That’s okay. Listen to the criticism and see if it makes sense to you. If the advice makes sense, follow it. If the advice doesn’t ring true, ignore it and write it the way it seems best to you.

Show your writing to your friends and teachers. Start a writing club and share your stories with each other. Criticize each other’s stories—not in a mean or hurtful way, but in a helpful way: “I think this dialogue could be improved if you did such and such,” or, “What if your character decided to do this instead of that?” Encourage each other and help each other to do your finest work.

Above all, keep writing!

_____________________________________________________________

The four Timebenders books have just been revised, updated, and re-released. Order Timebenders No. 1: Battle Before Time from Amazon.com today.

Walt Disney Made Me A Better Writer

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by Jim Denney,
author of Walt’s Disneyland and Writing in Overdrive

“Walt Disney was more important than all the politicians we’ve ever had. They pretended optimism. He was optimism. He has done more to change the world for the good than almost any politician who ever lived.” —Ray Bradbury

WaltAndWernher1954Most people think of Walt Disney as a businessman who founded a company and hired other people to do all the creative work. Not true.

1 HTBLW-outlineI have written three books on Walt Disney — How to Be like Walt and Lead Like Walt, both co-written with Orlando Magic exec Pat Williams, and my own book Walt’s Disneyland. While researching these books, I discovered that the most creative person in the Disney organization was Walt himself. He was a fountain of ideas and imagination — yet he rarely gets the credit he deserves for his creativity.

The reason Walt is thought of as a businessman rather than a creative genius is that he expressed his creativity through the medium of people — writers, artists, songwriters, directors, and Imagineers. Most of the cartoons and feature films produced by the Disney studio began in the mind and soul of Walt himself — then he communicated his creative vision to his artists, and they carried it out.

The same is true of Disneyland. All the original attractions, as well as the hub-and-spoke layout of Disneyland, were fully formed in Walt’s imagination long before he told anyone about his dream.

PAPERBACK_6x9_Cover_WD-7-4-2022-FrontDuring the weekend of September 26 and 27, 1953, Walt huddled with artist Herb Ryman at the Burbank studio. The two men worked for forty-eight hours without sleep. Walt described his vision of Disneyland, and Ryman translated Walt’s words into a map, three feet tall and five feet wide, that the Disney Company used to pitch the Disneyland TV show to the networks. (To learn more about the history of that map, read “Walt, a Man Named Grenade, and the First Map of Disneyland.”)

The map Herb Ryman drew under Walt’s direction was amazingly close to the actual design of Disneyland when it opened on July 17, 1955. The only major difference was that the map showed Adventureland to the east of Main Street instead of the west. Disneyland was a fully-formed kingdom in Walt’s imagination long before Herb Ryman inked a single pen-stroke.

LeadLikeWalt-MedThe most popular attractions in the Park were all conceived by Walt —the Disneyland Railroad, the Mark Twain riverboat, the Jungle Cruise, Sleeping Beauty Castle, all of Fantasyland, the Monorail, the Matterhorn Bobsleds, Pirates of the Caribbean, and so much more. Walt was a creative genius — and as I studied his creative process, I uncovered insights that have made me a better writer. I think they’ll change the way you write as well:

Insight No. 1: Mine Your Life Experiences

Walt owed much of his creativity to his warm childhood memories — and his bitter memories as well. Walt had two very different childhoods, one idyllic and happy, the other painful and harsh. He spent his first childhood — his happy childhood — on a farm outside of Marceline, Missouri, from ages four through nine.

He once told The Marceline News, “More things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened since — or are likely to in the future. Things, I mean, like seeing my first circus parade, attending my first school, seeing my first motion picture.”

Castle-DeepDuskVignetteAs a filmmaker and theme park creator, Walt drew upon his Marceline years for inspiration. His early cartoons, his feature films, and Disneyland itself are rich in idealized images of life in rural and small-town America. Many scenes from Walt’s early life appear in his films. For example, the enraged bull that chases Bobby Driscoll in Song of the South reenacts the time young Walt and his sister Ruth were chased across a field by a bull.

Walt’s happy childhood ended when his father, Elias Disney, became ill and was forced to sell the Marceline farm. Walt thought of the farm animals as his friends, and he wept as they were auctioned off. That’s when his unhappy childhood began.

LaughOGramStudioKC
Site of Walt’s first animation studio in Kansas City, at the corner of E. 31st Street and Forest Avenue, just two miles from Electric Park. Below: Walt’s boyhood home in Kansas City.

WaltKansasCityHome

The Disneys moved to Kansas City, where Elias bought a newspaper distributorship. He put Walt and his brother Roy to work delivering papers without pay. Walt and Roy arose at 3:30 in the morning, and sometimes waded through waist-high snowdrifts to make their deliveries. Walt arrived at school completely exhausted, and often slept in class. After school, he worked at a candy store.

You won’t find references in Walt’s movies to his unhappy Kansas City boyhood — yet Disneyland represents one of the few bright spots in Walt’s Kansas City years. He grew up fifteen minutes away (by streetcar) from Electric Park, a huge amusement park that featured band concerts, a carousel, boat rides on a lagoon, a wooden roller coaster and other thrill rides. A steam train ran around the park, and a fireworks show lit up the nights. 

If that sounds a lot like Disneyland, there’s good reason for that. Walt later said that Disneyland “has that thing — the imagination and the feeling of happy excitement — I knew when I was a kid.”

MainStreetNight

Disneyland’s Main Street USA at night. Below: Electric Park, circa 1915.

ElectricPark

Walt couldn’t afford the price of admission (ten cents), but he and his sister Ruth often sneaked into the park. Walt also visited Electric Park in the early 1920s (this time as a paying customer), when he owned the Laugh-O-gram animation studio in Kansas City. His studio was just two miles from Electric Park, and he and his animators often went there to unwind.

Disneyland not only re-creates the world of Walt’s nostalgic memories. It captures Walt’s boyhood obsessions. Fantasyland transforms the fairy tales of Walt’s childhood into a fully immersive fantasy experience. Tom Sawyer Island and the riverboat bring to life the fondly-remembered Mark Twain tales he loved. Tomorrowland is the realization of Walt’s boyhood fascination with the futuristic novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

Walt teaches us that our lives are a gold mine to be dredged for memories, emotions, and ideas. The lesson of his life is that we, as writers, should regularly ask ourselves:

What were the turning points in my life?

What are the most important lessons my life has taught me?

What am I nostalgic about? What are the experiences that hurt me? Frightened me? Thrilled me? Comforted me?

What were the stories, ideas, and places that captured my young imagination?

These are the things we must write about.

These experiences make us unique and creative: joys and sorrows, fears and fascinations, hard realities and flights of imagination. Walt didn’t merely tap into his memories and experiences. He plunged into his youthful obsessions: the Peter Pan stage show he saw as a boy, and the books he loved, from Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island.

So peer deeply into the gold mine of your life. Pick up and examine every shiny nugget of your past. Remember all the stories you read and objects you collected and places you explored in childhood. Remember the joys — and the pain. Seize the inspiration that’s there for the taking — then start building your own Disneyland out of words and memories.

Insight No. 2: Become an Actor

Walt Disney had the soul of an actor.

As a boy, he amused his classmates with impressions of Charlie Chaplin. He once came to school in a shawl, stovepipe hat, and fake beard, and delivered the Gettysburg Address as President Lincoln. He also donned his mother’s dress, hat, and wig, then rang the doorbell and carried on a conversation with his mother, pretending to be a neighbor lady. They talked for several minutes before his mother realized the “lady” was her own prankster son.

Walt loved to perform. One night in early 1934, Walt assembled his artists in a darkened soundstage at the Burbank studio. He stepped into the spotlight and told them they were going to make a fully animated feature-length film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Then he proceeded to act out the entire film. He performed each character, from Snow White to the evil Queen to each of the seven dwarfs. He became the characters, speaking in their voices, gesturing with their mannerisms. It was a three-hour bravura performance.

Walt1937PromoTrailerSnowWhite-Brighter

As Walt finished, his animators broke out in applause. Years later, one of the animators who was there that night told interviewer Robert De Roos, “That one performance lasted us three years. Whenever we’d get stuck, we’d remember how Walt did it on that night.”

To be creative like Walt, become an actor. When you write, act out your character’s voice and gestures. This works best, of course, when you write using voice dictation instead of a keyboard. But if you write by typing, then simply act out your scene before you type.

Get out of your chair, walk around the room, and become your characters. Act out the scene and experience the emotions of your characters. Then sit down and immediately write the scene. You’ll find added power and energy in your writing, and it will transform your creative process.

Insight No. 3: Write Your Obsessions

In Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket sings that when we wish upon a star, our dreams come true. That’s a pretty sentiment — but wishing on a star didn’t build the Disney studio in Burbank or Disneyland in Anaheim. Walt Disney’s legacy of success was built on a foundation of courageous vision, bold risk-taking, intense focus, and an unwavering obsession with his goals. And, of course, it was built on hard work.

Walt was never content with the status quo. He was determined to keep challenging himself and leading his studio in new directions. He was always eager to attempt what had never been done before. He followed Snow White with Pinocchio, then Fantasia, then Dumbo, then Bambi — each film a radical departure from anything he had ever done before. That’s why Salvador Dali declared him one of the great Surrealist artists of the time.

When Pat Williams and I were writing How to Be like Walt, director Ken Annakin (Swiss Family Robinson) told us that the key to Walt’s creativity was his obsession with his dreams. Annakin said, “I doubt whether one person in fifty million is capable of the obsessive focus with which Walt lived each day of his life. His grand obsession was simply to bring happiness to others. It made him who he was.”

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Walt shows his Disneyland blueprints to Orange County officials in December 1954. Photo: Orange County Archives

And media critic Neal Gabler told us, “Walt Disney was an obsessive man. That obsessive quality made him passionate and kept him focused on his dreams. Of all the successful people I have ever studied, Walt was the most intensely focused on his goals. His ideas possessed him.”

One of Walt’s obsessions was a magically eccentric governess named Mary Poppins. But Walt had a problem: The creator of the Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers, refused to sell him the movie rights. In fact, Walt spent more than two decades, from 1938 to 1961, trying to convince her to part with the rights. He made overtures, sent her gifts, and engaged in on-again-off-again negotiations —but she was convinced that no film studio could do justice to Mary Poppins.

Finally, persistence paid off and Walt persuaded Ms. Travers to grant him the rights. But once the film went into production, she battled Walt over every detail. She fought him over the script, the music, the dialogue, the casting, the animation, and on and on. She was tough — but Walt was determined. Ultimately, he got the film made his way.

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Walt once explained the importance of maintaining an obsessive focus on your goals in order to achieve success: “A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding. But in the end, no matter what the outcome, he will know he has been alive.”

Writing is challenging work. It takes time and focus — and you’ll face opposition and even ridicule from the very people who ought to be in your corner. Learn from Walt. Never give up. Write your obsessions, and be obsessed with your dreams — and one day, your books and stories will bring happiness to the world.

Insight No. 4: Synergize with Fellow Writers

I define synergy as a process by which people work creatively together so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Synergy is a way to get more energy out of a system than you put into it. I think Walt Disney must have invented synergy. He assembled teams of talented people to turn his dreams into reality, and the result was always greater than the sum of the parts. Walt carefully selected the best people for every project. He’d mix skills, talents, and personalities like paints on an artist’s palette.

When I co-wrote How to Be like Walt with Pat Williams, artist and songwriter X Atencio told us, “Walt had an uncanny knack for discovering talent. He’d see talent in people that they didn’t even see in themselves. I had been an animator all those years. One day Walt said, ‘I want you to write the script for Pirates of the Caribbean. There’ll be scenes with pirates and townspeople and so forth, and I want you to write all the dialogue.’”

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X Atencio and friends at the Haunted Mansion in February 2008. Photo by Steve.

Walt even assigned X to write the Pirates theme song — and the result was the unforgettable tune, “Yo Ho, Yo Ho, A Pirate’s Life for Me.” It’s hard to believe X had never written a song before.

The essence of synergy is valuing the differences of other people. You and I don’t think alike, and we don’t have the same interests, talents, or experiences. This means you can supply what I lack, and I can supply what you lack, and together we can be far more creative than we could ever be alone. This means setting aside our own egos. It means opening ourselves to new ideas and different perspectives. It means accepting criticism and advice from editors and fellow writers.

A friend of mine is part of a group of professional novelists who regularly gather for a weekend of mutual encouragement and inspiration. They write in different genres — romance, thriller, mystery, fantasy — yet they always find that their differences turn out to be strengths. They critique each other’s work, they provide solutions for each other’s writing problems, and they motivate each other to keep reaching for their goals.

WaltSingsWithDinahHow do you find a writers group? Here are some suggestions:

Google your city and the search term “writers group” (in quotes) and some groups or meetings in your area should pop up.

Attend a regional writers conference and talk to the people you meet (for a list of writers conferences, consult the Guide to Writers Conferences & Writing Workshops).

Professional writers’ associations often have local chapters where you can meet fellow writers: Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Horror Writers Association, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, and so forth. Some of these associations have member directories so that you can find fellow writers in your area.

National Novel Writing Month also supports local and online writers groups.

Meetup.com is a website that connects people with common interests; the Meetup page for writers is at https://www.meetup.com/topics/writing/.

You can also find local and online writers groups via Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

So follow Walt’s example. Mine your life. Act out your creations. Pursue your obsessions. Value differences and draw upon the synergistic strengths of other writers.

Then go build your castles and make some magic.

Author’s note: This column was originally posted, in a substantially different form, at Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn website.

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Conquer Your Fear of Failure

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“You fail only if you stop writing.” —Ray Bradbury

In 1983, Margaret Atwood rented a fisherman’s cottage in the English seacoast village of Blakeney, Norfolk. She planned to spend the next six months writing her most ambitious novel yet — a complex and richly detailed dystopian tale.

Atwood soon realized she was unable to write. The sheer scope of her novel intimidated her. She spent her days bird-watching and her nights reading bad historical novels and nursing chilblains caused by the cold damp weather. She later referred to that time as “six months of futile striving.”

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Margaret Atwood at Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, Ontario, Canada, September 2006. Photo: Vanwaffle, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

What was wrong? Why didn’t she write? Answer: She was blocked by fear of failure. Her vision of the novel loomed so large in her mind that she felt overwhelmed and paralyzed. She didn’t know where to begin.

Frustrated with herself for wasting months of valuable writing time, Atwood finally did what every successful writer must do in order to overcome the fear of failure: She wrote. She began producing bits and pieces of the story. She sketched in characters and wrote patches of dialogue. It didn’t all hang together at first, but that didn’t matter. After six months, she was finally writing again.

“I grasped the nettle I had been avoiding,” she later said, “and began to write The Handmaid’s Tale.” That novel later became her most successful and acclaimed work. Her advice to anyone who is paralyzed by the fear of failure: “Get back on the horse that threw you, as they used to say. They also used to say: you learn as much from failure as you learn from success.”1

This was hardly Margaret Atwood’s first novel. She had already enjoyed a fifteen-year, five-novel career when she found herself blocked during The Handmaid’s Tale. So the fear of failure is not restricted to beginning and aspiring writers. Successful novelists often experience this fear as well. Like Margaret Atwood, you can conquer your fear of failure and go on to achieve your greatest work.

Embrace the Sense of Failure

The conquest of this fear begins with acceptance of the inevitability of failure. To write is to know failure. Most writers experience more failure than success, and we all strive to achieve a level of perfection that is probably unattainable.

Irish novelist Anne Enright describes a frustration most writers have felt — that of always aspiring to an artistic goal that is just beyond our reach: “I still have this big, stupid idea that if you are good enough and lucky enough, you can make an object that insists on its own subjective truth, a personal thing, a book that shifts between its covers and will not stay easy on the page, a real novel, one that lives, talks, breathes, and refuses to die. And in this, I am doomed to fail.”2

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Will Self at the Humber Mouth literary festival in Hull, England, 2007. Photo: Walnut Whippet, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

And English novelist Will Self said, “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail. The disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. . . . I prize this sense of failure — embrace it even. . . . To continue writing is to accept failure as simply a part of the experience.”3 As writers, we accept the inevitability of commercial failure, artistic failure, and even failed relationships.

One True Sentence

The fear of failure afflicts many writers soon after the publication of their first book. The writer thinks, “I fooled ’em once, but can I fool ’em again? What if I only have one book in me? What if I have no encore?”

Suspense writer James L. Rubart, author of Rooms and Book of Days, recalls that after his first book was well-received by critics and readers, he worried that it was a fluke — and that his second novel might not measure up. “The response to Rooms was so strong that I was definitely nervous when Book of Days came out. That whole ‘I only have one book in me’ thing. But a lot of people liked Book of Days better.”

In fact, Rubart says, his mastery of the writing craft increased in demonstrable ways with each new novel. “It took me six years to write Rooms,” he recalls, “two years to write Book of Days, five months to write The Chair, ten weeks to write Soul’s Gate . . . and I’m on pace to finish the novel I’m working on right now in six weeks.”4

Wendell Berry is a farmer, antiwar activist, novelist, and poet. He remembers the sense of unease he felt after his first book was published. He has learned to embrace that uneasy feeling and to anticipate the unknown adventures ahead. “I am discomforted,” he says, “by the knowledge that I don’t know how to write the books that I have not yet written. But that discomfort has an excitement about it, and it is the necessary antecedent of one of the best kinds of happiness.”5

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Ernest Hemingway, 1939

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway recalled the twinge of self-doubt he felt as he contemplated a new story:

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that you knew or had seen or had heard someone say.6

Don’t fear that you have no more stories or books in you. You have barely scratched the surface of all the stories your soul contains. Over time, you have learned and grown as a writer. Relax in the confidence and mastery you have gained from that achievement — and prepare to conquer even greater challenges in the future. Trust your  unconscious mind, your talent, your training, and your experience. Then sit down in front of your screen or your blank page and write the truest sentence you know.

Fail Early, Fail Often

Web writer Diogenes Brito says that he wrestles with a number of fears every time he sets out to write — fear of the blank page, fear of the unknown, fear of being judged, and fear of losing control. But one fear that no longer troubles him is the fear of failure. Brito says he overcame that fear thanks to one of his university professors:

When I was in Stanford’s design program, a professor named Dave Beach had everyone raise jazz hands to the sky. He then instructed us to jump and cheer, “I failed!” I have never forgotten that moment. “Fail early, fail often” was the mantra. The goal was to build up an immunity to failure, so that fear of it would never hold you back. Like [computer scientist] Dick Karpinski says, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly — at first.” I remember that, and it keeps me from freezing up. The enemy of creativity is fear, so I keep going, no matter what.7

If you live by the maxim, “Fail early, fail often,” you can write without fear of failure. Train yourself to view failure not as an objective reality but as a false label people impose on a learning experience. Instead of telling yourself, “How horrible — I’ve failed,” simply shrug and say, “Well, that didn’t work. Lesson learned. What should I try next?” Make up your mind to learn from your failures and you’ll stop being afraid.

_________________

  1. Margaret Atwood, “Falling Short: Seven Writers Reflect on Failure,” The Guardian, June 22, 2013, http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writers-reflect-failure.
  2. Anne Enright, “Falling Short: Seven Writers Reflect on Failure,” The Guardian, June 22, 2013, http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writers-reflect-failure.
  3. Will Self, “Falling Short: Seven Writers Reflect on Failure,” The Guardian, June 22, 2013, http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writers-reflect-failure.
  4. James Rubert, “Focus On Freedom: Q&A with Author James Rubert,” SimplyFaithful.com, July 30, 2012, http://simplyfaithful.com/2012/07/30/focus-on-freedom-qa-with-author-james-rubart/.
  5. Lawrence Block, Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1985), 3.
  6. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (New York: Scribner, 2009), 22.
  7. Diogenes Brito, “Fear of the Blank Page,” Uxdiogenes.com, March 10, 2013, http://uxdiogenes.com/blog/fear-of-the-blank-page.

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Write Better. Write Faster. Be Unconscious

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“Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way.” 
—Paulo Coelho

Steinbeck-1963-PublicDomain
John Steinbeck, 1963

Writing faster and writing better is not a matter of techniques or shortcuts or writing secrets. Sure, there are a few tricks you can learn that will increase your writing speed at the margins: You can eliminate time-wasting habits, use voice dictation software instead of typing, and so forth. I talk about these tricks in my books, and they can help you become a faster writer. But these tricks won’t make you more a more brilliant writer.

There’s only one writing insight you can learn that will make you a faster and more brilliant writer: You must learn to write unconsciously. 

In other words, you must learn to write in flow or in the zone. Great writing does not involve thinking. Great writing comes from a deeper part of us than the conscious intellect. It comes from the unconscious mind.

John Steinbeck, in a 1962 letter to an aspiring writer, said, “Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.” Steinbeck warned the young writer not to stop and edit or rewrite while in the creative process. “Rewrite in process,” he said, “is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.”

When you are first drafting (or “fast drafting,” as I prefer to call it), always move forward, never look back. By writing freely and quickly and without inhibitions, you tap into the writer’s most powerful engine of imagination, the unconscious mind.

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Ursula LeGuin, 2008. Photo: Gorthian

Ursula K. Le Guin has described her writing process as “a pure trance state. … All I seek when writing is to allow my unconscious mind to control the course of the story, using rational thought only to reality check when revising.”

In Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande talks about a creative faculty we all possess, though few of us are aware of it — ”The higher imagination, you may call it; your own endowment of genius, great or small; the creative aspect of your mind, which is lodged almost entirely in the unconscious.”

Brande underscores the fact that this faculty is the UN-conscious mind, not the SUB-conscious mind, because “sub-” suggests that which is low and inferior. Far from being inferior to the conscious mind, Brande says, the unconscious “has a reach as far above our average intellect as it has depths below. . . . The unconscious must be trusted to bring you aid from a higher level than that on which you ordinarily function.” In fact, she says, “the root of genius is in the unconscious, not the conscious, mind.”

One of Dorothea Brande’s most famous disciples, Ray Bradbury, often said that conscious thought is poisonous to the creative process, and that true creativity springs from the unconscious mind. In a 1975 speech, he said, “I have had a sign by my typewriter for the better part of twenty years, now, which says, ‘Don’t think.’ I hate all those signs that say ‘Think.’ That’s the enemy of creativity. . . . Intellect can help correct. But emotion, first, surprises creativity out in the open where it can be pinned down!”

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Ray Bradbury receiving the Commander of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 2009. Photo: Caleb Sconosciuto.

What is the unconscious mind? Where in the brain is it located? Is it in the right brain or the murky region of the limbic system? Is the unconscious, creative mind the result of the synergistic functioning of many regions of the brain working together? Or does the function of the unconscious mind extend beyond the boundaries of the brain? Is it a creative activity of the immortal human spirit — a human reflection of the creativity of God?

I don’t know. No one knows. The term unconscious mind is a convenient label for a phenomenon we can’t explain. We don’t need to know where the unconscious mind is located or how it works, but I can tell you this from my own personal experience:

The unconscious mind is the key to unlocking our incredible creative powers.

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