English teachers are more familiar with writing than just about anyone in any other profession. Words are their lives. Every now and then a student poses a perplexing question that inquires about the writing process and the creating of something new. Certainly they can advise on grammar usage, proper tenses, correct sentence structure, identify fragments, instruct on comma usage and the like; they can even urge students to look at the world in wondrous and different ways, but as for writing and the question of how to write creatively, that answer must come from within.

This paper will examine the process of creative writing through the works of fantasy by C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll in the context of their interior dialogue as it pertains to structuring plot driven storylines in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I will investigate the writing process in relation to the manufacture of myth and fantasy worlds. The precise facet of the process that intrigues me most is the interior dialogue these authors labored under and the influences that shaped their plot development in support of their main themes.

Through examination of the texts I hope to unearth the common ground that perpetuates the formation of each author’s whimsical worlds, their motivations, and the notions that each embraced in order to develop two very concrete lands of enchantment. I chose to examine Lewis and Carroll as they are authors that engender empathy, we see part of ourselves in their characters, because they were able to see part of the human condition in themselves and reveal it to us. More>>

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