why i write

[…] putting aside the need to earn a living, i think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. 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. they are:

(1) sheer egoism. desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grownups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. it is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. the great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. after the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition—in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. but there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. serious writers, i should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

(2) esthetic 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. the esthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or a writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from esthetic considerations.

(3) historical impulse. desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(4) 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. once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

it can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. by nature—taking your “nature” to be the state you have attained when you are first adult—i am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. in a peaceful age i might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. as it is i have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. first i spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the indian imperial police, in burma), and then i underwent poverty and the sense of failure. this increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. then came hitler, the spanish civil war, etc. by the end of 1935 i had still failed to reach a firm decision.

[…] looking back through the last page or two, i see that i have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. i don’t want to leave that as the final impression. all writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. 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 on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. for all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. and yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. good prose is like a window pane. i cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but i know which of them deserve to be followed. 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.

george orwell [1946]