Why Write?

Other than the egotism, of course…

Giorgio de Chirico, Le Muse Inquietanti (The Disquieting Muses), 1959, oil on canvas

Writing a blog is objectively strange. Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people: 99% of people consume passively the content created by 1% of people. Why produce, rather than just consume?

George Orwell published an essay in 1946, Why I Write, that suggested four motives:

(i) Sheer Egoism: Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on 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 business men – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.

(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.

(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 people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

An investigative journalist may have a stronger taste of historical impulse than the propagandist, and the diarist may emphasize aesthetic enthusiasm where the blogger goes heavy on political purpose, but hints of all four ingredients compose a stew of every writer’s motivation.

Orwell himself realized his writing took on new life once he embraced political purpose.

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.

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.

Why do I write, then?

Other than the egotism, of course…

Recently, the “desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed” has motivated a series of more abstract, emotional, and aesthetic writings. This kind of writing is quite different from what I read online and more like what I read in books. It has also been deeply enjoyable to write, and easier than the more information-seeking or persuasive pieces I have written in the past.

I often think my best writing is written for the benefit of one person. If you can sincerely write something for one person, that sincerity will make it art and it will appeal to an audience broader than that individual. Writing to please a group has to be doomed to failure because you can’t please a group: you can only please individuals.

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In his essay The Sense of Self, Galen Strawson examines the experience of continuity of the self:

I have an adequate grasp of the similarities that characterize me from day to day. And yet, when I consider the fundamental experience of myself as a mental self, my feeling is that I am continually new.

I feel continually new every day. I can see threads of experience connecting me to past versions of myself, sure. But I think differently than I did ten years ago. The memories that were foundational to my sense of self at sixteen have blurred and blended together, or have been partially superseded in importance by the experiences that have gotten me from sixteen to twenty-six. I’m not exactly the same person now as I was then, just as I’m not quite the same person today as I was yesterday.

A few weeks ago, I spent an hour on the phone with a friend, Walker, who is a musician. We analyzed creativity for a while, and examined the phenomenon we’ve both experienced where, when you hold onto an idea for too long—refining, editing, recomposing—it oftentimes fizzles out: you either lose the motivation to complete it, or it sits as a draft post or demo song on a hard drive and you decide you don’t like it enough to publish it after all.

If I had to answer the question of “Why write?” I’d have to go with what Walker and I agreed on about the creative process: you create to communicate yourself in a moment in time. A blog post or a song is a distillation of the creator at the moment of publication.

That’s why if you don’t act quickly enough—publish the post, drop the album—you lose your emotional connection that motivated you to create the thing in the first place. You aren’t that person anymore, so the idea isn’t as relatable. As long as I feel continually new each day, I imagine I’ll have to keep writing.

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Thanks for reading. In case you’re interested, a couple years ago I wrote about Walker’s first album, Love Your Neighbors, and how it relates to art and communicating emotion. I wouldn’t write that post the same way today. Looking back, though, I can see it is a reflection of myself at that moment in my life. I’m happy to have it.