When his friends criticized the first draft of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis trashed everything and started over
Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is another work that may have been composed in this way, although its veracity is in doubt. However, in the case of Lewis, it would appear that this mythologizing of the writing process, what we might refer to as the "burn-and-return" approach is accurate. Or, at the least, he burned a children's book, however, it is unclear if this was the original manuscript for the Chronicles of Narnia. In a 1947 letter, he discussed his effort at writing a children's book, saying, "I have tried one myself but, by the unanimous opinion of my friends, it was so horrible that I burned it."
Lewis compared the feeling of reading poetry to entering a wardrobe into another world in his 1946 article titled "Different Tastes in Literature": "I did not in the least sense that I was enjoying in more quantity or higher quality a pleasure I had previously enjoyed." It was more like discovering one day that the entrance to a cabinet you had previously appreciated as a place to put jackets led to the Garden of the Hesperides. Lewis derived the name Narnia from a historical map of Narni, Italy, which was written as "Narnia" in Latin.
