Why I Write

"Why I Write" (1946) is an essay by George Orwell detailing his personal journey to becoming a writer. It was first published in the Summer 1946 edition of Gangrel. The editors of this magazine, J.B.Pick and Charles Neil, had asked a selection of writers to explain why they wrote.

The essay offers a type of mini-autobiography in which he writes of having first completed poems and tried his hand at short-stories, and carried on a continuous "story" about himself in his head, before finally becoming a full-fledged writer. It goes on to set out some important motives for writing.

Orwell lists "four great motives for writing" which he feels exist in every writer. He explains that all are present, but in different proportions, and also that these proportions vary from time to time. They are as follows;

In the essay, Orwell charts his own development towards a political writer. He cites the Spanish Civil War as the defining event that shaped the political slant of his writing:

Orwell, who is considered to be a very political writer, says that by nature, he is "a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth", and that he "might have remained almost unaware of [his] political loyalties", - but that he had been "forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer" because his era was not a peaceful one. In the decade since 1936-37 his desire had been to "make political writing into an art". He concludes the essay explaining 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."

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