I’ve been reading Lewis lately — finally making time for some of his works that I should’ve made time for a long time ago. Thus far in my life, I’ve conquered his fictional works and Mere Christianity, and snippets of others. I’m now in the midst of his autobiography Surprised by Joy. Its made me realize that some people just have a way with words. Whether Lewis is writing fiction, faith, or semi-auto-biography, his sentences are just brilliant. I find myself chuckling about the various things he records — schoolmasters and dances, his father’s mood swings (his father had a common Scottish/Irish tendency toward extremes… extreme happiness sometimes, extreme anger others). He also writes beautifully about sad things and insightfully about terrible things. In general, you get a pretty good idea of who the man is.

It leaves me to wonder how much of writing is raw talent and how much is refinement. We can work on the refinement part, but the talent part simply is what it is. Reading about Lewis’s imagination, it’s clear that there was a prodigious talent there.