If you're interested in writing, you may find the Aerogramme Writers' Studio Blog to be as helpful and enjoyable as I do. One recent post on that blog included some advice for writing from C. S. Lewis.
It was Lewis' daily practice to spend an hour each morning reading his mail and crafting thoughtful replies. The following short list of suggestions for writers was excerpted from a letter Lewis penned to one of his correspondents named Joan Lancaster, a young American woman who aspired to be a writer.
1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please will you do my job for me.”
5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
Read More Here
This volume collects C.S. Lewis’s correspondence with family, friends, and fans, and spans from his youth as a student to just a few weeks before his death. Witness his conversion from atheism to Christianity, as well as his thoughts on books, nature, humanity, and God.
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