McDermott The Importance of Digestability

For me, at least, it feels incredibly difficult to create a second world. When writing my Narnia story, I spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what to write about. With seven books, you’d think I’d have a lot to choose from, but that was not the case. I truly struggled with finding a direction, and it was only once my first couple of sentences were down did the writing process became easier. If creating a very minor, not well-thought-out second world was that hard, I can’t imagine creating on the level that Lewis or that one guest speaker did. (I mean, writing a literal Bible for your own second world is an insane thing to do, and I’d probably end up pulling all my hair out before finishing it.)

That made me start consciously thinking about the little things in Narnia that helped shape the second world. By adding a couple of fantastical elements to the mundane things seen all around in the primary world, it is much easier for the reader to get pulled into and immersed within Elfland than it would be if the primary world was not the foundation. In this way, the mythmaker can use his audience’s imaginations to build on things they can already conceptualize.

I read the first chapter of the guest speaker’s book and, despite his obvious passion for his project, I had a very difficult time getting into it (though I will acknowledge that it was only one chapter). That was because I lack a background in science fiction and he used terms and concepts that were new and very confusing right from the first page. I have a theory that if I was more into science fiction, I would have been able to understand better, but because I had to build up the secondary world from scratch in my head rather than elaborate on foundational knowledge already in there with imagination it was increasingly difficult for me.

Lewis uses this strategy in Narnia well. He uses animals, in particular, as bases for ideas before tweaking them just enough so that they will have a fantastical “second-world” element to them while maintaining enough of their “primary-worldness” to still be digestible. The talking beavers are a perfect example of this – everyone knows what beavers are and that they live in dams. Making the beavers able to talk and decorating the dam with human-esque furniture draws them just enough out of the primary world to the point where they belong in the secondary world without erasing all primary-worldness from them.

I also think that Mr. Tumnus is a direct representation of this line between the two worlds – he is half-human and half-goat. Both parts (human and goat) are primary world elements, but by smashing them together, you get an entirely different creature that is just fantastical enough to believe without losing all idea of what it is.