Starting this blog is ostensibly a means of compelling me to write. To write on a daily basis about anything and everything. I used to write almost every day but in the last years I’ve sunk into a kind of lethargy. Now, almost a year after submitting my dissertation, I’ve had complete writer’s block. If regularly updating this thing can keep me exercising my writing, I’ll be happy. Hopefully, this won’t sink into the graveyard of half-assed blogs, barely started before being slowly abandoned.
George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” is perhaps the best piece I’ve ever read on the impetus to write. Self-critical to the point of self-flagellation, Orwell sets out four main purposes for writing: sheer egoism (“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.”), aesthetic enthusiasm (“Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed”), historical impulse, and political purpose. The rationale behind writing out of historical impulse (“Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”) feels a little dated in its insistence on finding out “true facts” but the rest of the essay is perceptive, especially in his analysis of the writer’s ego (see below). He argues that he was initially motivated by the first three impulses, but came to realize that only having a clear political intent pushed his work beyond “purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”
Does this passage not describe most writers (as well as the writing process)?
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.
