The Writer’s Life: Why Do We Write?

Many of us feel as if we are driven to write, we have no other choice. Some of us write out of pure pleasure, some from a financial need. George Orwell says that every writer has four great motivations for writing: sheer egotism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. Me? I write because… it’s what I do.

Orwell referred to his upbringing as a guiding factor in his style and purpose of writing; he claimed that a writer’s “subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in” and that early experiences and influences help give the writer a voice and to eliminate those early inspirations “will have killed his impulse to write”. George is not the only one that feels it is the early tragedies, hardships and obstacles that give a writer substance and prevent the writing of “empty” works. So that explains why some writers write.

I had a very pleasant childhood and a fairly satisfying adult life to date and I still feel this absolute need to write. I write prose for enjoyment, I write to express myself, I write to fantasize, I write to communicate thoughts. Yes, I have some writing assignments that are not for pure enjoyment, assignments that I do just for the money (although there never seems to be enough of that) and sometimes the subject matter seems, on the surface, boring and tedious, but I still enjoy the process of writing. I live for my fiction. I always have introduced myself as “a freelance writer selling anything someone will buy” and “I want to grow up to be a novelist”.

It has often been said that if you enjoy your job you are not really working. Well we writers work hard even if we totally enjoy our craft. Journaling and personal writings are fun and terrific forms of escapism, but once your writing goes out into the world it becomes a becomes a business. You, the writer must also become a business manager and a salesman. You may be writing for education, to teach someone how to do something, you may be writing for persuasion, either political or advertising, you may blog or write essays just to open doors of communication – but in the end, you are fulfilling the urge to put pen to paper, figuratively at least, and write.

Some fiction writers compare their need to write to the childlike play of pretend. Many say it helps to express otherwise repressed thoughts and dreams. Most of us do tend to assign traits and habits to our characters from the people we know; of course it is always such fun to imagine your story villain as the person who has been most unkind to you and cause them some dastardly fate. In deference to Orwell’s list of motivating factors, our egos do get stroked nicely when one of works is commended publicly or our name is recognized by a stranger. There is a definite excitement that comes with the creation of a character, the setting of a scene and the spinning of a tale.

Writers can understand the enthusiasm to sit at a keyboard for hours and type non-stop and fellow writers can understand the thrill of seeing a printed book with our name on it in the local book store or a cover image online. It is an overwhelming sense of being in someone’s brain to know that your words are being read. We are an exclusive class of artists and words are our medium, the keyboard is our palette and brush. And when you have achieved that goal of getting someone “thinking”, really thinking, your power seems almost supreme. We are faced with a seemingly impossible quandary when we can’t immediately deposit the words on paper that run through our minds with every scene we witness, every smell, every sound and every emotion.

Freelance editor and writer Smoky Trudeau explains it best with an inscription she recently signed in one of her books, “Write to live, live to write. We’re writers, we have no choice.”