Why I Write

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Why I Write (1946) is an essay by George Orwell detailing his personal journey to becoming a writer. It offers a type of mini-biography as he writes of having first completed poems and trying his hand at short-stories before finally becoming a full-fledged writer, but also examines the motivation of writing itself through the four reasons Orwell felt people write.

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[edit] Four motives for writing

Orwell lists "four great motives for writing" which he feels exist in every writer. He explains that all are present, but in different proportions, and also that these proportions vary from time to time. They are as follows:

1. Sheer egoism- Orwell argues that many people write simply to feel clever, to "be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups in childhood, etc." He says that this is a great motive, although most of humanity is not "acutely selfish", and that this motive exists mainly in younger writers. He also says that it exists more in serious writers than journalists, though serious writers are "less interested in money".

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm- Orwell explains that present in writing is the desire to make one's writing look and sound good, having "pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story." He says that this motive is "very feeble in a lot of writers" but still present in all works of writing.

3. Historical impulse- He sums this up by simply stating this motive is the "desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity."

4. Political purpose- Orwell writes that "no book is genuinely free from political bias", and further explains that this motive is used very commonly in all forms of writing in the broadest sense, citing a "desire to push the world in a certain direction" in every person. He concludes by saying that "the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."

In the essay, Orwell charts his own development towards a political writer. He also cites the Spanish civil war as the defining event that shaped the political slant of his writing:

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The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

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Orwell, who is considered to be a very political writer, says that he is "a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth", only that he is "a sort of pamphleteer" due to the political tension at the time (the book was written shortly after World War II), and concludes the essay by explaining 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."