George Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’ is a short personal reflection essay on the beginnings of his writing life, and then the later years. Orwell writes like he is giving a lecture on the subject and throughout, the reader is almost compelled to picture him in front of a blackboard with a chalk pointer.

On the very first page, Orwell talks of the loneliness of being a writer, and it brings to attention that many creative people have this emotional range that is incredibly expansive and often misunderstood by others.

“… I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.”

This misunderstanding creates a void which their creative projects cannot fill, although they help, and often leaves the creative in a state of loneliness. Orwell soon progresses to a writer’s mind of describing life as it happens, Orwell calls this “… a sort of diary existing only in my mind”, where he describes what he was doing and seeing as it happened.

“For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on the table, where a matchbox, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf,’ etc. etc”

As a writer, I relate to this deeply, my belief is that while we cannot write, and for Orwell, this lasted several years, we still have an insatiable need to have a creative outlet, and as writers, this comes to us as an inner dialogue and description. Just because we are not writing it down or typing it up, doesn’t mean it isn’t a creative process that helps us engage with this creative outlet requisite.

Often in the shower, I will think my way through entire stories and ideas and daydream myself through the scenes, but I don’t often write these down after. The reason for this is because they usually do not fit into any of my current works, they need more thinking time, or I had my joy with it during the daydream, and I can think of no further need for it.

There is a section of Orwell’s essay that I do disagree with. Orwell writes that aside from money, there are only four motives for writing, in particular prose, and that these motives can come and go during the writer’s work. The four motives that Orwell describes are:

• Sheer Egotism
• Aesthetic Enthusiasm
• Historical Impulse
• Political Purpose

However, none of these motives describe the need and sometimes the annoyance of having a story and/or characters inside you that you cannot extinguish as a writer. A writer may have any or all of the above-listed motives, but there is also this fundamental need, for a writer to tell stories. Where do they come from? Where do writers get their ideas? These questions are always asked of writers, and often we have no idea. They just are. They bloom from somewhere, or something small and insignificant like washing the dishes, and poof, a character, scene, entire plot, an idea forms from nothing or everything. Then when we ignore our creative impulses, the stories inside of us, we often end up going a bit stir-crazy.

“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 by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

Orwell talks a great deal about the political side of writing, and in a sense, it is correct of him to propose and assume that most writers have a desire to put forward their own views and morals throughout their works. That is why people create things, to share their worldview, their experiences, and to help others navigate things they have already been through. However, Orwell then describes his writing before it had a political purpose as ‘Purple Passages’ – which are elaborate or ornate passages in writing, which Orwell describes as “sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives…” which I generally disagree with, since prose and fiction, even if politically entwined, often have various descriptions of the scenes, which other than to give the reader something to imagine, have ‘no purpose’, but are highly regarded as important and beautiful.

Would I recommend reading this to other writers? Absolutely I do, but as always, a reminder you do not have to agree with everything said, nor do you have to have an extensively long history of knowing you needed or wanted to be a writer, to be a writer.