The Voyage of the Dawn Treader starts with three pages of exposition, which is technically a kind of telling: Here are some things you need to know before we really get into the story. Lewis might have simply told us on the first page, “There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it because he was selfish, prideful, mean-spirited, unreflective, insecure, ignoble, annoying, cruel, cowardly, and pusillanimous.” That would have been a bad case of telling it would have short-circuited the reader’s judgment altogether. Our answer is closely related to the well-worn distinction between showing and telling. So how exactly does Lewis engage and direct the reader’s judgment?

(Nor, I imagine, will you find many of the other adjectives you might have put on your list.) When you read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, you judge Eustace to be selfish, mean-spirited, insecure, ignoble, etc., even though C.S. Your list of adjectives probably included some of the following (or synonyms thereof):īut if you search The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (on a Kindle, for instance), you won’t find these adjectives applied to Eustace. If you’ve read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, think of a few adjectives you would use to describe the Eustace Scrubb we meet at the beginning of the book (not the new and improved Eustace Scrubb in second half of the book, after the dragon episode). Then, in weekly exercises, writers will apply Lewis’s techniques to their own storytelling.įind out more and register at /Voyage! Lewis achieves his particular kind of magic. In Writing on The Dawn Treader, Jonathan will walk writers through The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, examining the specific tools and methods by which C.S. NOTE: TOMORROW, JanuJonathan Rogers is returning to Narnia for the next installment of his “ Writing with…” series of online classes.

Saint Patrick by Jonathan Rogers