The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen-in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Desire 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.
They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in-at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own-but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. He then lays out what he believes to be the four main motives for writing, most of which extrapolate to just about any domain of creative output. Orwell begins with some details about his less-than-idyllic childhood-complete with absentee father, school mockery and bullying, and a profound sense of loneliness-and traces how those experiences steered him towards writing, proposing that such early micro-traumas are essential for any writer's drive. Among his finest short-form feats is the 1946 essay " Why I Write" ( public library), a fine addition to other timeless insights on writing, including Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules for a great story, David Ogilvy's 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller's 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac's 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck's six pointers, and various invaluable insights from other great writers.
Though he remains best remembered for authoring the cult-classics Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he was also a formidable, masterful essayist. Literary legend Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, would have been 109 today.
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