by Maria Popova
“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at
the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.”
Literary legend Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, would have been 109 today. Though he remains best
remembered for authoring the cult-classics Animal Farm andNineteen
Eighty-Four, he was also
a formidable, masterful essayist. Among his finest short-form feats is the 1946
essay Why
I Write (public
library) — a fine
addition to other timeless insights on writing, including Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips,Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and various invaluable insight from other great writers.
Orwell begins
with some details about his less than idyllic childhood — complete with
absentee father, school mockery and bullying, and a profound sense of
loneliness — and traces how those experiences steered him towards writing,
proposing that such early micro-traumas are essential for any writer’s drive.
He then lays out what he believes to be the four main motives for writing, most
of which extrapolate to just about any domain of creative output.
I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess
a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His
subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is
true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins
to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never
completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and
avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he
escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse
to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great
motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different
degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from
time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be
remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you
in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a
strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists,
politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the
whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely
selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being
individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under
drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are
determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this
class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and
self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on
the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of
one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good
story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not
to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even
a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which
appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about
typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book
is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true
facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible
sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’
idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book
is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing
to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another,
and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.
After a
further discussion of how these motives permeated his own work at different
times and in different ways, Orwell offers a final and rather dystopian
disclaimer:
Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it
appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t
want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and
lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a
book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful
illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by
some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that
demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And
yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly
struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I
cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know
which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see
that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless
books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning,
decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
This, of
course is to be taken with a grain of salt — the granularity of individual
disposition, outlook, and existential choice, that is. I myself subscribe to
theRay Bradbury
model:
Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You
should be having fun with it. Ignore the authors who say ‘Oh, my God, what
word? Oh, Jesus Christ…’, you know. Now, to hell with that. It’s not work. If
it’s work, stop and do something else.
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