Advice on Writing from Two Great Authors

Emory University recently unsealed a set of 300 letters between O'Connor and her friend Betty Hester, who donated the letters to the Emory in 1987 with the stipulation that they not be released for 20 years. Read more about it here.

Here's a bit of advice O'Connor wrote in one of the letters:

"You would probably do just as well to get that plot business out of your head and start simply with a character or anything that you can make come alive. Wouldn't it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write rather than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you."

Reading this reminded me of some other advice on writing I recently read. This is from C. S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children.

Let the pictures tell you their own moral. For the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life. But if they don't show you any moral, don't put one in. For the moral you put in is likely to be a platitude, or even a falsehood, skimmed from the surface of your consciousness...The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.