Why I Write

In his essay “Why I Write,” written in 1946, George Orwell outlined the progression of his creativity and the motivations behind his novels. He described his childhood: He began writing poetry at the age of four or five (with the help of his mother taking down his dictation) and continued this habit into his early teens. World War I prompted him to compose several patriotic poems that were published in local newspapers.

It was during this time that he began a constant, internal narration of his life, “a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind” (2). Even though Orwell stopped writing in his late teens until age 25, he continued this habit of mental narration, which he credits to an unstoppable creative “compulsion.”

Orwell believed that a writer’s motivations cannot be understood without considering their emotional nature alongside their social, historical, and cultural context. He listed what he believed to be the four motives driving all writers to work: egoism, aesthetics, historical impulse, and political purpose. Orwell believed his creative nature to be naturally inclined toward the first three, as shown in his first novel Burmese Days.