C.S. Lewis must have known that nearly every child dreams about getting away from parents and traveling to some place extraordinary. He tapped into just that fantasy in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the first book he wrote in the "Chronicles of Narnia." Children love the books...
Last fall, I asked you to tell me what topics you’d most like to see featured here on the site. One that was repeatedly mentioned was that of genre tips. I haven’t written much about genre before, in part because most of the tips and techniques I teach here are not genre-specific...
Restuccio, Daniel
In the first chapter, ‘The Wrong Door’, Lewis introduces the reader to two children living in London who discover a portal to Narnia. At the start of this fantasy, we read broad information about the world of Narnia and its relation to earth: This is a story about something that happen...
the other Narnia books. (Well, it’s a bigger motif than in The Silver Chair, I’ll grant that.) Pretty much ever Narnia book has a king or queen as a major character. I’d say that The Last Battle, because its main character is a king from start to finish rather than...
Whether you’re building an elaborate world from scratch or simply want to be as accurate as possible when representing a real place, a map of your setting could help (you might evencommission an illustratorto draw one for you). This will give you a more concrete sense of your setting whi...
The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are two of J.R.R. Tolkien's most popular works. The Hobbit is the precursor to The Lord of the Rings, a high fantasy trilogy set in the fictional land of Middle Earth. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins discovers a ring while on a quest. In The ...
Similarly, rape is often used as the background for rare interbreeding, as though that requires an explanation. In the novel Spinning Silver, the character Irina can do magic with fairy silver because a fairy raped her great-grandmother. In the Narnia books, CS Lewis explains that existence ...
“Here’s how you have a popcorn reading party: a) You make popcorn. b) You gather a pile of your best kids’ books. c) You yell, “popcorn reading party!” d) You try to work it out so that the kids books end at about the same time the popcorn does.” This idea makes my ...