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.