# “C.S. Lewis had an amazing ability to write under the most trying of circumstances” by Harry Lee Poe

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2025/03/08/c-s-lewis-had-an-amazing-ability-to-write-under-the-most-trying-of-circumstances-by-harry-lee-poe/
- Published: 2025-03-08T12:00:00-06:00
- Author: tollelege

“C.S. Lewis had an amazing ability to write under the most trying of circumstances.
His brother noted how Minto constantly interrupted his writing with little chores
at the Kilns. Various of his pupils and friends observed his ability to pick up 
his pen immediately after an interruption and begin writing again as if nothing 
had intervened to shake his train of thought.

Alastair Fowler thought that Lewis’s writing ability had to do with the way he composed
in his head before he ever began writing. We have observed how he first had developed
ideas for books that he did not begin writing until later. Fowler speculated that
he could do this because of his remarkable memory, which allowed him to quote long
passages or to recall the substance of a page. Fowler told the story of how Lewis
challenged Kenneth Tynan:

> “_to choose a number from one to forty, for the shelf in Lewis’s library; a number
> from one to twenty, for the place in this shelf; from one to a hundred, for the
> page; and from one to twenty-five for the line, which he read aloud. Lewis had
> then to identify the book and say what the page was about_.”

George Watson said that Lewis had the opposite of writer’s block. The words always
seemed to flow from his pen. Watson once asked him if he ever found it difficult
to write. Lewis replied, sometimes “_when I come back in the evening after dinner,
I tell myself I am too tired and shouldn’t write anything. But I always do_.”

Yet Lewis started many writing projects that he never completed. Sometimes he tired
of them. Sometimes he did not know what would happen next. This would seem to be
writer’s block, except it never kept him from writing.

Most remarkably, he worked on multiple projects at the same time in a grand literary
juggling act. It had been that way for years. While writing [_The Allegory of Love_](https://amzn.to/41IOhMd),
he wrote [_The Pilgrim’s Regress_](https://amzn.to/3Dv6cwD) and several important
academic articles. It had been that way with [_The Screwtape Letters_](https://amzn.to/4i93yfb),
[_Perelandra_](https://amzn.to/4bv2EqO), and [_A Preface to Paradise Lost_](https://amzn.to/41JS3Fa).
While he was writing [_Miracles_](https://amzn.to/41tEPLt), he also wrote [_That Hideous Strength_](https://amzn.to/3F9Pm75).”

–Harry Lee Poe, [_The Making of C.S. Lewis: From Atheist to Apologist_ (1918-1945)](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1433567830?tag=toletaupanre-20)(
Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 293-294.

More on [Writing](https://tollelege.net/category/writing/)