Posted by: @narnian78

I guess Lewis thought of the magic rings in Uncle Andrew’s study later since the Lefay Fragment does not have them.

The Lefay Fragment doesn't have Uncle Andrew either (only Aunt Gertrude, who is a thoroughly unpleasant character, but definitely not the sort who would meddle around with magic). I don't think we have any clear indication of when Lewis thought up the magic rings, or the Wood between the Worlds, but as they're unique elements of The Magician's Nephew and there aren't even any hints of them in the books that he wrote earlier, I would guess Lewis didn't come up with those concepts until about the time when he started writing MN, which, as far as we know from Hooper, he finished writing some time in 1952.

Since Narnia is not mentioned in the fragment it may not have occurred to him at that time to make it into an another Narnia story.

I really do now think that's the case, absolutely.

Indeed, that blog by Brenton Dickieson ("A Pilgrim in Narnia") that I linked to earlier may also be somewhat off the mark, with the author's assertion that once Lewis had written LWW, "Aslan pulled the whole story together — and then the whole series", which, Dickieson concludes, must mean that Lewis, from there on in, never had any serious thoughts of writing any other stories for children except ones set in Narnia. Hence Dickieson's assertion that the Lefay Fragment was almost certainly written before LWW and before Lewis had any concepts of Narnia and Aslan in his head.

But being reminded of the "Plots List" (thanks to re-reading the part of Past Watchful Dragons that deals with it and with the Lefay Fragment) has made it stand out all the more that the first plot in that list, the "Ship" one, was actually — as it stands — a non-Narnia story that Lewis was toying with AFTER he'd written LWW. As I said before, of course he eventually returned to that basic idea of a ship sailing to islands and recycled it for the third Narnia adventure. But in its original form, that plot really could not have been for a Narnia book, much though Hooper mistakes it for one by assuming that the four "plots" that Lewis jotted down hastily in that notebook — just because they conclude with "Sequel to L.W.W." — are all in fact one plot for one future Narnia story.

The "Ship" story, of two children travelling back in time to islands that "have not existed for millennia", implicitly occurs within our world. Lewis suggests "Various islands (of Odyssey and St Brendan) can be thrown in" — those are islands from our own world's mythologies, the journey of Odysseus in ancient Greek legend and the myth of St Brendan's Island in the Atlantic (which was supposedly discovered by the Irish missionary St Brendan and included on a number of medieval maps, including the Mappa Mundi of Hereford, from which Lewis almost certainly got the idea of the Dufflepuds!). There's absolutely no sense in that sketch of a story that this journey back in time has any connection with Narnia; Lewis imagined the quest as being to save a sick king who can only be healed by the blood of a boy from the far future, not the blood of a boy from another world, as would need to be the case if Lewis was intending this to be another Narnia story. The king must be a king from somewhere in the (mythical) past of this world, not Narnia. There's no other way that story could work.

I'm harping on about this simply because it's solid evidence that Lewis WAS thinking up ideas for stories unrelated to Narnia even after he'd finished writing the first Narnia book and started considering the second. Which means he very well could have written the Lefay Fragment directly after he completed LWW (as Lancelyn Green and Hooper assume), with absolutely no intention of this story being a Narnia story. And that really does explain everything about the Lefay Fragment perfectly well, as far as I can see.

 The next book Prince Caspian seem more like it was intended to be a second Narnia book since it has a portal into that world, the train station.  He may have realized that he couldn’t do without something to transport his characters into another world so he didn’t use the fragment and created a different story.

Prince Caspian was always definitely meant to be the second Narnia story — we can unarguably see its basis in the last item on the Plots List, where it's headed "Sequel to L.W.W." (I've already quoted most of it above). That must have been the idea from that list that Lewis decided to go with fully, and since it was specifically a sequel to the book he'd already written about Narnia, it's natural that he started it with the same four child characters (the same opening sentence, actually!) as the first book. And since he'd already had the Professor assert that they wouldn't get back into Narnia by the wardrobe (convenient plot twist to forestall any readers asking "So couldn't they have tried to go back to Narnia through the wardrobe again before they went home from the Professor's house??"), there needed to be a different way of getting them there this time. Perhaps it occurred to Lewis that he'd barely used Susan's magic horn as a plot element in LWW — she does blow it once, but only to call Peter, who is within earshot anyway, so there's nothing particularly magical about that. But if she'd left it behind somewhere in Narnia, and if somebody in Narnia's future found it and blew it at a time of great need...

Anyway, it does seem that once Lewis had got stuck into writing that second Narnia book, then he never entertained serious thoughts of writing any other children's stories, apart from more Narnia Chronicles, from there on in. But in those months between finishing LWW and beginning PC, he clearly did have a few intriguing ideas floating around in his head for fantasy stories set in our world, rather than in Narnia. I do agree with Dickieson's hypothesis that the reason he didn't get anywhere with those other plots was because something about Narnia — I, and most of us here, would say Aslan himself — took hold of him and pulled his creative thoughts deeper into Narnia and away from any other directions. That explains why he never got further with either the Lefay plot (a boy in England who can talk to animals and trees) or the original Ship plot (a boy whose blood somehow has the power to heal a king in the mythical past). The real magic was in Narnia, and in Aslan, and Lewis must have realised increasingly that that's what he needed to stick with — though he did salvage a few good ideas from those discarded earlier stories and weave them into Narnia along the way.

The creation idea probably came later, although he may have had it long before writing the sixth book. 

True, we still don't know exactly when Lewis had the idea of writing the story of Narnia's creation, although I think it's now safe to say for sure that it wasn't while he was writing the Lefay Fragment. Unfortunately we have so few surviving drafts and notes from his entire creative process, and even people who knew him could only guess about these things, not always accurately, so I doubt we'll ever know for sure. But it probably doesn't matter. I'm just glad he wrote the stories he did, and that all seven of the Chronicles, as we now know them, are as good as they are!  

I wrote a small piece about the writing of MN on a different medium, and I thought I would share some of it here.

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I see Roger Lancelyn Green (in the Lewis-biography he wrote with Walter Hooper) as a reliable source for the development of the Chronicles. He read all the books in manuscript and gave his comments before they were sent to the publishers [...]. 

He describes the order they were written in, and it seems to me that Lewis at most planned three or four books forwards.

MN was written in three main textual and time-wise sections. The first is preserved as the Lefay-fragment, but never used other than a few details (important names).

The second attempt was discussed with Green, who spoke against Digory meeting a farmer in Charn, and Lewis left the manuscript aside while he did other things (and wrote The Last Battle).

In his third attempt, Lewis got the London cabby in instead of the Charn farmer. He told Green that the tale now "owes more than half its merit" to Green's pointing out "the fatal 'sag' in the original draft".

@varna That's fascinating! So the Deplorable Word didn't destroy everyone besides Jadis in the original? I have a hard time imagining that. It's such a defining moment for Jadis's character. 

@varna That's really interesting — I wish we knew more about what was in that earlier draft of MN!

It does sound like Lewis didn't originally conceive of Jadis as destroying her whole world, although one wonders if she had partly done so — maybe just through conventional warfare — and perhaps there were only small numbers of people left, trying to eke out an existence while Jadis hid away in her palace? Obviously this farmer, if he was to take the role later filled by Frank, must have been an essentially good person, presumably in contrast to Charn's ruler. Maybe Lewis's original idea was that this humble man would make a worthy ruler for the new land of Narnia because he'd lived under tyranny himself and wouldn't make the same mistakes Jadis did?

But the final version, as we have it, is so much tighter thematically than this earlier draft sounds like it must have been. Making Jadis the sole survivor and destroyer of her own world shows her complete and utter evilness, and gives her all the more motivation for wanting to find another world to rule over. And then it allows Lewis to tie in the warning at the end that, thanks to nuclear weapons — not yet invented in Polly and Digory's time, but very much on everyone's mind in the 1950s, when he was writing this — our own world could go the same way as Charn.

Plus, if the farmer from Charn was indeed going to be the first ruler of Narnia, then changing him to a man from our world makes far more sense in the context of the entire series. It's already well established (from the first two books) that Narnia, despite being a land of talking animals and magical creatures, needs to be ruled by "Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve" — human beings with their origins in our world — in order for everything to be right. And MN in its final version shows us why: because "Adam's race" brought evil into Narnia, "Adam's race shall help to heal it", which is how Aslan establishes a good-hearted working-class couple from London as Narnia's first King and Queen. It's one of several "Oh, now that makes sense!" moments in MN that explain things in the earlier books, particularly LWW.

It does look like MN in its final form owes a greal deal to Green's input, so it's just as well Lewis obviously trusted and valued him as a critic! 

Posted by: @varna

I see Roger Lancelyn Green (in the Lewis-biography he wrote with Walter Hooper) as a reliable source for the development of the Chronicles. He read all the books in manuscript and gave his comments before they were sent to the publishers [...]. 

He describes the order they were written in, and it seems to me that Lewis at most planned three or four books forwards. 

MN was written in three main textual and time-wise sections. The first is preserved as the Lefay-fragment, but never used other than a few details (important names). 

The second attempt was discussed with Green, who spoke against Digory meeting a farmer in Charn, and Lewis left the manuscript aside while he did other things (and wrote The Last Battle). 

In his third attempt, Lewis got the London cabby in instead of the Charn farmer. He told Green that the tale now "owes more than half its merit" to Green's pointing out "the fatal 'sag' in the original draft".

I understand that Magician's Nephew was actually the last to be written of the Narnia Chronicles. That is to say, after he'd written the Last Battle. Seeing that MN was written in 3 sections helps us to understand that he might have been using MN to tie up the series, not necessarily LB. That also explains why MN has to have a creation story, when in LB he wraps up the series with Narnia's destruction. The Professor is in LWW and if one listens to the BBC audios, he is the narrator right the way through. But Polly Plummer, featured in LB, is scarcely noted at all, until one reads MN. And one can't really have a destruction without something created in the first place.

@Courtenay Prince Caspian was always definitely meant to be the second Narnia story.... since he'd already had the Professor assert that they wouldn't get back into Narnia by the wardrobe (convenient plot twist to forestall any readers asking "So couldn't they have tried to go back to Narnia through the wardrobe again before they went home from the Professor's house??")

Interesting thought. But if the Professor had asserted they wouldn't get back into Narnia by the wardrobe, how was it that Lucy had been to Narnia twice beforehand through the wardrobe, the second time being the occasion when Edmund who had also come along, met the White Witch? I'd mostly assumed that at that point in LWW Professor Kirke had already explained to them how he'd already been to Narnia, & all about the tree and the wardrobe, after their return. 

And though they had a longish stay in Narnia, enough to convince even Peter & Susan that Narnia existed, how was it that Peter thought up that scheme, in LB to try to locate Digory's & Polly's magical rings, after they'd seen Tirian appear at one of their meetings? 

About the train station as a portal, it is also re-used in LB when though they recover the rings, all seven Friends of Narnia are killed in a very real train crash. The other two portals are: Picture frame in VDT and Garden door in SC. 

MN makes much of in-between places, but in-between train carriages is one big no-no in real life. Schoolboys of 12 or over, need to go home safely. They shouldn't be wanting to get to Narnia THAT way. Or at least I hope not, when we can do without such train incidents.