Four great motives for writing
I am reading Why I Write by George Orwell, and in the essay with the same title, he identifies four great motives for writing that he thinks exist in every writer in differing degrees, according to the atmosphere in which they live:
- Sheer egoism
- Aesthetic enthusiasm
- Historical impulse
- Political purpose
Orwell adds that he is using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense:
Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
I was questioning my own motives while reading this. My initial impulse for writing is to explore how ideas I have noticed in different places and times can come together to form a bigger picture, but I often struggle to give this process of stringing ideas together a clear purpose. For that reason, Orwell’s idea of a political purpose — a desire to push the world in a different direction — feels closest to me.
Orwell adds that:
no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
This feels especially relevant today, in a time of geopolitical tension, AI-driven job insecurity, value extraction, economic hardship, and ecological crisis. Orwell writes that his own writing changed after Hitler and the Spanish Civil War, events that formed the political climate of his time.
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. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows.
Another motivation for my writing is to explore human consciousness through narratives. Inspired by blank slate theory, I am fascinated by how, when you begin reading, your mind is empty, and the specific arrangement of words can evoke meaning and emotion.
I think I can combine these two motives: weaving together notes on one subject to form a broader understanding of it, and then turning that understanding toward a related subject in the present moment.
