Why I Write

In his essay “Why I Write,” written in 1946, George Orwell outlined the progression of his creativity and the motivations behind his novels. He described his childhood: He began writing poetry at the age of four or five (with the help of his mother taking down his dictation) and continued this habit into his early teens. World War I prompted him to compose several patriotic poems that were published in local newspapers.

It was during this time that he began a constant, internal narration of his life, “a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind” (2). Even though Orwell stopped writing in his late teens until age 25, he continued this habit of mental narration, which he credits to an unstoppable creative “compulsion.”

Orwell believed that a writer’s motivations cannot be understood without considering their emotional nature alongside their social, historical, and cultural context. He listed what he believed to be the four motives driving all writers to work: egoism, aesthetics, historical impulse, and political purpose. Orwell believed his creative nature to be naturally inclined toward the first three, as shown in his first novel Burmese Days. However, his politically tumultuous historical context drove him to primarily write with a political purpose.

Orwell considered it impossible for a man living in his time to write about anything other than the political issues of the day, as the threat from totalitarianism (seen in Germany, Italy, and Spain) was too great. To align this political purpose with his creative nature, Orwell strove to make his political writing aesthetically pleasing and to “reconcile […] ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us” (9).

Orwell compared two examples of his writing. He described his first novel, Burmese Days, as wholly aesthetic. “Purple passages” show his love of emotion, phonetics, and aesthetics without touching upon larger moral subjects. He compared this to his novel Homage to Catalonia, in which aesthetics are disregarded in favor of exposing the political truth of falsely accused Trotskyists.

Homage to Catalonia received mixed reviews due to its inclusion of journalistic writings. Orwell believed that chapter to have been necessary; without it, the novel would have lost political integrity and been “lifeless.” For Orwell, it was necessary that a writer review their emotional attachment to the four motivations, then choose the one that deserves to be pursued.