Why I Write {essay}

This is a short autobiographical essay, first published in the magazine, Gangrel, as one of a number of writers' responses to the question Why do you write? It has also been used as the title of at least one collection of essays by George Orwell.

He says he knew he "should be a writer" from 5 or 6, and details some of his early writing experiences, distinguishing between "seriously intended" writing and other "literary activities". He says that his seriously intended output was very small, but includes patriotic poems published in the local newspaper during WWI and "disastrous" short story attempts. He dismisses most of his other work, including occasional verse, a rhyming play and school magazines as written/edited at speed and with show more little trouble. However, at the same young Eric Blair was imagining himself as a character in a novel and constructing detailed narrative descriptions in his head.

He moves on to the kind of books he wanted to write, "enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound". He suggests that Burmese Days is "rather that kind of book". Actually, I can see this influence in some of his later better known work, both fiction and constructed non-fiction work like Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia.

He then outlines 4 motives for being a writer; egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose, and suggests that in a different time he might have been a different kind of writer, but his personal experiences and the politics of the time pushed him into being "a sort of pamphleteer", a political writer, from being an unhappy imperial police officer in Burma, living in "poverty", then the rise of fascism and Nazism.

He then reproduces a poem he had written a few years before about the kind of writer he might have been - the verse is of dubious quality but his imaginings are fascinating. He then asserts that he has written "every line of serious work" since 1936 "against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism".

This essay combines some mockery of his younger self with taking his role as a political writer very seriously indeed. I think it explains a lot about his later work too, and would recommend reading/rereading this in conjunction with any of his books. show less