George Orwell means a lot to me. I don’t know more than the basics about him, and I haven’t read all that much of his work. But I credit him, in part, with helping me realize I am a writer.
Writing for me isn’t everything, but it’s extremely high on the list of the things that define me. The things that make me feel like a worthwhile person. The things that I think about and mean to do each day.
I suspected I was a writer for a long time, but it wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that it felt like a confirmed fact. That was the year my English teacher assigned Orwell’s 1984. Even though I was an avid reader, I often didn’t finish the books teachers assigned (A Tale of Two Cities). I was a big fan of the mystery novels I regularly took out of the library at the time, especially Mary Higgins Clark. Fast-paced intrigue and sex and crime. I think I might have actually read too much as a teenager. Often I stayed holed up in my bedroom instead of making efforts to lead a fulfilling social life. I guess I’m not much different today…
Anyway, I did read all of 1984. And at the end of the semester, my teacher gave our class options for the final project. We could either write a regular essay about some of the themes in the book, or, we could opt to do a creative project. It was 2004 at the time, so the creative project would be a twenty-years later epilogue to 1984. Which is kind of brilliant and makes me think my teacher actually enjoyed being one.
I was one of the only ones who chose to write the epilogue, I think. But my excitement toward the assignment made up for the rest of the lack of enthusiasm. I got really into it. It was the first time I’d ever sat down and composed a legitimate short story. The assignment required only 8 pages, font size 12, double spaced. In the end, I wrote 20. There was intrigue and sex and crime. I read it over and over again I loved it so much. And I titled it: “2004: The Love Child.” (Because Julia has a baby. And Winston is the baby daddy. Sex! Crime! Intrigue!)
I don’t think I still have a copy of that piece. It probably disappeared along with an old hard drive. But I remember the feeling it gave me. If I had to pick one word to describe that feeling, it’d be empowered.
I’m reminded of all this because I recently took a copy of George Orwell’s Why I Write out of the library. Held in the hand it feels like a chapbook, which I guess is what it is. A chapbook of essays. I haven’t gotten very far. I’m on page 9 out of the 120. But Orwell writes something in these early pages that struck me. He writes about the “four great motives for writing.” Reading it felt like getting a long awaited diagnosis from a doctor and finally, finally knowing what’s wrong. Only in this case, just what is.
I don’t know if I’m allowed to reprint this much of the text, but I’m going to do it anyway in light of how much I love it and want to share it. He writes:
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:
- Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups 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 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-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
- Aesthetic 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 not to be missed. The aesthetic 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 aesthetic considerations.
- Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
- 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’s like the Myers-Briggs personality test for writers. At this point, I think I’m mainly motivated by aesthetic enthusiasm, secondarily by ego, a pinch of politics, and history lastly. I’m curious what other identified writers feel about this. If they think there’s truth to it and what motives they identify with.
I know this post is already long, but writing this reminded me of something else I recently read. It made me feel better about the periods in my life when I haven’t been productive or creative. It made me feel glad that there are people out there who understand the solitude and introspection and idleness that often accompany the days of a writer.
It comes from Emily Fox Gordon’s new book of personal essays, Book of Days:
What I am is a writer, and during the twenty years when I was producing nothing, covering my existential nudity with an inadequate garment composed of patches of housewife/graduate student/mother, I was serving the writer’s apprenticeship, letting the world trickle through me to leave behind sedimented layers of impression. All through my protracted apprenticeship I felt anomalous and apologetic, subject to fits of self-loathing and panicky self-consciousness, inclined to take refuge in the comfort of grandiose fantasies.
I confess, sometimes imagining that I’ll truly live the life of a writer (my version of it) feels itself like a grandiose fantasy. But it is comforting. And it’s one I badly want to be my reality.
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