Why I Write

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.

~ George Orwell

In 1949, George Orwell sat in a room in London and wrote his famous essay, “Why I Write.” It’s short, to the point, and timeless.

Hardened by his time fighting for the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) militia of the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War and the unrelenting horrors of World War II, in “Why I Write” Orwell examines his motives behind his choice to become a writer. In doing so, he touches on four universals he felt characteristic of most writers:

1. Sheer egoism.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.

3. Historical impulse.

4. Political purpose.

Orwell offers an explanation for choosing each of these points. He acknowledges that at any given time in history one motive might surmount the others. Writers are products of their times.

For Orwell, his times and experiences led him to warn of the dangers of totalitarianism, not just Fascism but Soviet Communism as well. Like me, anyone who read Animal Farm in high school or 1984 in a university literature class will likely be nodding their heads in agreement right now. And don’t forget Homage to Catalonia, his paean to Spain and the Spanish Civil War.

Over the years, Orwell’s essay spawned a deluge of similarly titled pieces. Joan Didion, Chuck Palahniuk, Terry Tempest Williams, Eileen Myles, Patti Smith, Karl Ove Knausgaard all chimed in, too, among many others.

Terry Tempest Williams’s lists 71 reasons for why she writes. It reads like a prose poem:

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. I write against power and for democracy. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams. …

I often ask myself the very same question, “Why do I write?” Usually once a week. Sometimes once a day. Why do I subject myself to this “exhausting struggle,” which reminds me of endless homework hanging over my head? Why can’t I be like everybody else, lying back on the couch, watching football or the Emmys?

So, why do I write?

The tools were all there, lined up like stuffed pandas in a shooting gallery at a state fair. I’d read the books, those by Brenda Ueland, Dorothea Brande, Ralph Keyes, as well as similar books by several different authors. Taken numerous Writer’s Digest classes. Written dozens of book reviews and op-eds. And submitted weekly cooking columns for The Cedar Key Beacon, too. But I still couldn’t quite make the leap to thinking of myself as a serious writer.

Then it happened.

Like many others have said, it took something catastrophic to yank me out of my on-again, off-again approach to writing.

The big C. Cancer. I became a statistic.

“One in eight women will develop breast cancer in their lifetimes.”

Lying on a cold steel table the first day of radiation, beams of radioactive material streaming into my chest, the future unknown, I told myself, “It’s now or never.” Faced with my mortality, unwilling to let my childhood writing dreams die, I signed up for a WordPress blog site.

And I wrote.

Many of my reasons for writing jibe with George Orwell’s and with Terry Tempest Williams’s as well. But my brush with Death sealed the deal with the demon Orwell describes.

Now I can’t not write.

Why do you write?

__________

This post is the last of four about books that encouraged me to take myself seriously as a writer.